“I think, ‘I will never be like them. Never.’ Though I can live here, I can work here, have a house here, but my mind is not like theirs. Because we all come here with a little war inside and it never stops.” Elvira Brodskaya and her wife fled persecution in Russia and settled in New York. But even in the U.S., they can’t escape all the fears of their past.

“After explaining who Shannon was in relation to me, we were let in to go through airport-like security around 7:40, I was handed a laminated piece of paper with ‘Applicant 1’ on it and an accompanying feeling of having won at waiting in line, and we were let up to the floor for the interview at 8.”

The issue of immigrant children being detained in immigrant detention centers is not exactly a new story. But this past week, an influx of children from Central America who were detained while trying to cross into the U.S. has drawn new attention to the extreme and inhuman treatment undocumented immigrants face from U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).