On December 24, while preparing the traditional Christmas Eve dinner at their home in Oaxaca, Mexico, Fernanda froze upon watching a TikTok video showing the arrest of migrants in Alabama by agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE). One of the detainees appeared to be her father. The video was from the day before. She ran to tell her mother and they tried to contact him, but the calls did not get through and there was no response to the messages they left him.
Fernanda’s father had emigrated to the U.S. four years before to improve the family’s finances. There was no doubt it was him. With no news, and without knowing where to look for information or who to turn to, the days that followed were harrowing. As a last resort, Fernanda asked the TikTok search engine how to locate a person detained by ICE. The social network directed her to Las Güeras Aliadas. “I thought that maybe it was a fraud, that they would scam me, ask for money. But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try and I filled out the form. And Devyn contacted me on WhatsApp.”
Devyn Brown and Kathryn Coiner-Collier are behind Las Güeras Aliadas, a project to locate migrants detained by federal agents and to put them in contact with their families. The idea arose in November, during the immigration crackdown that the Trump administration launched in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they live. About 200 Border Patrol agents were deployed to the city in a campaign that lasted until December and resulted in more than 400 arrests.
Brown, a teacher, and Coiner-Collier, a social worker, took to the streets to protest against the presence of the agents and distribute whistles and pamphlets with information on migrant rights. Outraged by the raids and keen to help, the pair made informative videos that they posted on social media. Coiner-Collier had extensive experience helping migrants in court and had worked at the infamous Dilley detention center. Brown had experience working with Latinos.
Both had lived at some point in Latin American countries. A few days later, a woman from Honduras contacted them asking for help in locating her husband, who had been detained. The request was the first of many. The two women realized the barriers foreigners faced in locating their loved ones who had been arrested by ICE, and decided to help them.
Brown and Coiner-Collier had two advantages: they are U.S. citizens and speak Spanish. Both are important factors given the barriers encountered by those who have to deal with the administration to locate their relatives: not understanding the language, the fear of identifying themselves (many are undocumented), the lack of a U.S. telephone number and no bank account in their name.
Most of the people who contact Las Güeras Aliadas live outside the U.S. “We thought we had the ability to contact ICE agencies without feeling afraid, and we could communicate in Spanish. It was obvious that people needed this service and we decided to focus on that. Without advertising ourselves, we were contacted by about 30 people asking for help,” explains Coiner-Collier. Since setting up in November, the pair have helped around 200 families locate their loved ones, providing relief to those who are consumed by the anguish of not knowing where they have been taken or what condition they are in.
The Güeras Aliadas have had to learn on the job. The first step is the location of the detainee and that means consulting the Online Detainee Locator System (ODLS) website, where it can take days for the names of those detained to appear. If that site fails to turn anything up, they try the Detention and Removal Information Line (DRIL) and, if that also fails, they contact the various ICE offices across the country, where they rarely find anyone to talk to. If they are lucky and someone answers the phone, there is a high probability that they will not solve anything, as Brown demonstrated in a video of one of those calls that went viral.
