I first met Oscar and Darwin in 2019. Donald Trump was president and had recently come under fire for separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. While the infamous “Zero Tolerance” policy was quickly scrapped, few acknowledged the way that his policies — and the policies of presidents before him — continued to separate couples and families hoping to reach safety in the United States. Oscar and Darwin, a queer couple from Honduras, are one of many couples whose lives were thrown into chaos when they were separated at the border.
As I got to know them and their story, I was struck by how few ways they had to communicate with one another. Despite living in a world where they were used to being in constant communication on WhatsApp and Instagram, Oscar and Darwin had to turn to love letters, sent from one ICE detention center to another, first just to find one another, and then to find a way to feel connected to one another, even when they were physically apart. It is as romantic as it is tragic.
Lately, I find myself wondering what Oscar and Darwin’s journey would look like today. Even though President Biden scrapped many of Trump’s most notorious immigration policies, he prolonged just as many — such as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forces people to wait for their asylum appointments in Mexico, and Title 42, which used public health as an excuse to deport people during the pandemic, and long after the pandemic was over. Would they have been forced to wait in a cramped shelter in Mexico, while the pandemic raged outside? If they arrived at the border now, they might even be subject to a new policy, forcing people to apply for asylum in the first “safe” country that they set foot in. Many experts worry this policy will destroy the asylum system as we know it.
To me, Oscar and Darwin — along with many of the other couples who told me their stories for my new book Love Across Borders — are a testament to the love, strength, and tenacity that it takes to overcome borders with the hope of living happily ever after.
“I was afraid of the journey,” Oscar Juárez Hernandez, who was only nineteen years old at the time, told me, when I asked him what it was like to make the decision to come to the United States as a couple. “It was technically my idea,” Darwin Garcia Portillo interjected—he is a little bit older, and Oscar clearly looks up to him. “Unfortunately, in our country, you can be killed for being gay,” he continued. “It is very sad.”
Homosexuality is technically legal in Honduras, but homophobia and discrimination are everywhere, and it is not easy to live together as an openly gay couple, especially in a city like San Pedro Sula. Oscar tried to apply for jobs, only to have potential employers look down on him, asking him why he shaved his eyebrows and wore such tight-fitting clothes. He had tried to come out to his mother when he first met Darwin, but she couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that he was falling in love with a man, so he moved out. Once they were living together, they tried to include their families in their relationship—but were frequently met with snide remarks and cold shoulders. “Often, they told us our relation ship was a sin,” Darwin remembered.
And then, there were the gang members who started harassing them, every time they left the house. “Maricón,” they shouted after them, even during the day when they were just going to the grocery store. “Fucking faggots.” Gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha, commonly known as MS-13, and their rivals, Calle 18, are notorious in Honduras, particularly in areas where the government is weak, slipping into power vacuums to recruit new members and intimidate anyone who is not with them. As a queer couple, Oscar and Darwin were easy targets.
“We can’t keep living in this country,” Darwin groaned to Oscar one night, when it felt as if the harassment might never end. Ever since more people started joining the caravans going to the United States in 2018, he had been pushing for the two of them to leave. As the oldest son in a family without a father, Darwin felt enormous pressure to provide for his younger brother. After his mother passed away when he was young, he no longer felt like it made sense to do it from Honduras. Besides, he wanted to live somewhere where he could be himself for a change.
But Oscar had heard stories of people dying after tumbling from trains, falling victim to corrupt police officers who shook them down for bribes. Stories of exploited and extorted migrants hung vividly in his imagination. Besides, he didn’t want to leave his mother and sister behind. But staying in San Pedro Sula was becoming a little bit more dangerous every day. Oscar was just growing accustomed to the way that armed men shouted at them from a distance when they started sending him threatening messages on Facebook, making him feel like he was being personally targeted. One night, he was leaving a party with Darwin when they turned the corner to see a group of men waiting for them outside, guns cocked in the air. “RUN,” Darwin shouted. Oscar took off in one direction, Darwin in the other, his feet pounding the ground so quickly that he hardly noticed his heart racing inside of his chest. He peeled around one corner, and then the next, trying to lose the gang members and failing every time. Gunshots crackled behind him, as a bullet whizzed past his ear. Somehow, around the next corner, he found Darwin, who was clutching his arm, as blood poured on the street.
“We have to leave,” Darwin said, tightening his grip on the blood soaked T-shirt. “As soon as we possibly can.”
So, their journey began—first, across the border to Guatemala, and then through Mexico, where they would make their way to Tijuana and wait to turn themselves in at the border. “So many people showed us kindness,” Oscar told me, as he recalled the journey, which was peppered with as many people offering them a free meal or lodging as it was with intimidating police officers and nights spent sleeping in the street. But that kindness stopped the moment they crossed the border into California and were escorted by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer to a detention center that felt like a prison. “It was a cell just for LGBT people,” Oscar said, remembering the first few hours when they were detained with another couple, who were equally confused about what was going on. A few hours later, another CBP officer came, and took one of the men away, leaving his partner alone, hysterically sobbing. “I could feel his pain,” Oscar said, remembering the moment that he realized that they were separating people from their partners. “I just knew at that moment that they were going to take Darwin away, and that was going to be me, too.”
A few hours later, his worst nightmare came to life: a CBP officer came and took Darwin away, leaving Oscar completely alone. “I just watched them taking him away,” he told me. “They didn’t even let us hug goodbye.”
For two months, Oscar didn’t hear any news from Darwin. “I didn’t think I had enough money to make a call,” Oscar remembered. Even if he did, the only way to contact anyone was through the detention center’s pay phones, which charged extortionate fees to even make local phone calls. Personal cell phones were prohibited, as was access to the internet. It was easy to feel as if he had disappeared. After keeping him one week in Arizona, ICE had transferred Oscar to a different detention center, in Colorado. One of the men that he was detained with in Arizona had given him five dollars, but he didn’t think it was enough. Nevertheless, he decided to try, and dialed Darwin’s aunt, whose number he had memorized in case of an emergency. To his surprise, she picked up. “If Darwin calls you, please give him my address,” he said spitting out the words quickly, fearing that the call could drop at any minute.
Darwin had been taken to a detention facility in Mississippi, where he was trying to reach his family, but he didn’t have any money either. “I befriended a guy who was from Peru,” he remembered. “As a gift, he offered to pay for a phone call.” Darwin immediately called the same aunt—and when he found out that not only had she heard from Oscar, but that she had also gotten an address, it felt like the clouds were parting and he could see a ray of light.
“Please let me call my boyfriend in Colorado,” he begged one of the guards. But it is against ICE’s rules for a detainee to call someone in another detention center. The only thing that he could do was write him a letter.
“Dear Oscar,” he began. While he had Oscar had texted and talked extensively while they were living apart from each other in Honduras, he realized at this moment that this was his very first love letter. "I hope you are keeping your spirits up and are in good health. I am at a detention center in Mississippi and I miss you every day. Do you know anything about your case? Please write to me and let me know. Love, Darwin
“Oscar Juárez Hernandez?”
Oscar wasn’t expecting to hear his name called. Sometimes the guards called him in for a medical check, but he wasn’t expecting a letter. As soon as he heard the name of the sender, he jumped out of bed for the first time in weeks, not quite able to believe that he wasn’t dreaming until he was pressing the envelope to his chest. “My hands couldn’t stop shaking,” he told me. “I wanted to open it, but I was crying too much.” Finally, he managed to open the envelope, not quite able to believe that the words in front of him were written by Darwin. After two months of not knowing where Darwin was, if he had been sent back to Honduras or even if he was alive, he finally had a way of being in touch with the person that he loved so much.
That night, Oscar wrote him three pages, front and back.
Oscar’s story of writing Darwin love letters from inside of a detention center sits at the far end of a timeline that started with the raids along the US–Mexico border in the 1930s, followed by the US government’s interception of love letters between the Braceros and their girlfriends and wives, before Operation Wetback normalized INS immigration raids across the country. Next, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1969, which, in an act of pure political theater, allowed warrantless searches of every car driving across the border, while increasing mini mum sentences for marijuana possession. This made it easier to deport immigrants for minor drug crimes, and it especially targeted both Black and Latinx immigrant communities.
Soon, Nixon turned his attention toward people who were attempting to cross the border via other routes—specifically those who were coming to the United States by boat from Haiti, fleeing political repression under François Duvalier’s dictatorship. Many had survived torture as political prisoners and had no other choice but to leave Haiti on makeshift boats courageously pushed into the Caribbean Sea. No one with any other safer option would undertake that journey, but Nixon refused to accept them as refugees—doing so would sour US relations with Duvalier, who was their ally in the global fight against communism.
Instead, he authorized the INS to build the first immigration detention centers, which would imprison Haitians—sometimes for years at a time—until they could prove that they were worthy of asylum in the United States. Cubans, most of whom were fleeing Fidel Castro’s Communist government, were granted asylum much more easily, even given stipends to start a new life in the United States. People’s real lives were caught in these political crosshairs.
Even though the Refugee Act of 1980 was drafted to right these political wrongs—stating that anyone, regardless of where they were from, had the right to ask for asylum in the United States—Ronald Reagan later used this to crack down on people who were fleeing Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, claiming that many were actually “economic migrants” and should not qualify for protection. Never mind that many were fleeing poverty that had caused them to be in danger, and violence that had then created poverty. Instead, they were indefinitely detained, testing the policy of incarcerating people until their hearings, all the while making flimsy, arbitrary distinctions between economic migrants and refugees that could affect the rest of their lives.
Since then, immigration detention has not only expanded but has become a three-billion-dollar industry that fuses for-profit prisons with immigration policies built around “securing” the border. Now there are more than two hundred immigration detention centers across the United States, detaining a total of more than 500,000 people. Trump became notorious for separating children from their mothers in 2018 as a part of his “zero-tolerance policy,” but even before—and after—Trump, the system separated and continues to separate couples and families by default. A straight couple is automatically separated from each other by gender—and while children are typically detained with their mothers, they are still ripped apart from their father. If a queer couple is detained together, it is purely dumb luck. For most, like Oscar and Darwin, CBP will interview and process them as two individuals, even if told that they are a couple.
Even the term “detention centers” is misleading. As immigration “violations” are a civil—not a criminal—offense, these facilities are not technically prisons, and immigrant detainees are not technically “prisoners.” However, they are prisons by another name: immigrant detainees are held together in cells, with limited access to the outside world. Unlike prisoners with criminal convictions, immigrant detainees do not have a fixed sentence, and do not know how long they will be in jail. They do not have a right to a public defender, or a fair trial. Instead, those who are seeking asylum are often expected to plead their case without representation, in a language that they do not speak and a system that they do not understand.
Nevertheless, Darwin continued to embrace pen and paper and, with it, hope. “Have faith, mi amor,” he would write. “Soon, all of our nightmares will be over, and we will be together again.”
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