“A black hole of due process” in New Mexico

"In December 2016, a 24-year-old small business owner, who asked to be identified as “Boris,” joined a protest in his native Cameroon. The country’s English-speaking minority of nearly 5 million people had begun coalescing into a movement for equal rights, “to tell the government our griefs, to make them understand that we have pain in our hearts,” Boris, who was recently granted asylum after five months inside Cibola County’s immigrant detention center, tells New Mexico In Depth.

Teachers and lawyers led the first wave of dissent that October. The educators fought for their students to learn in English. The attorneys argued their clients should stand before judges who spoke their own language.

Boris was neither a teacher nor a lawyer. But he felt the economic strain of marginalization, in attempting to support his family, and was inspired to fight for democratic change under a regime that had been in power for 35 years. And so Boris took to the streets for a major demonstration in December. But he never made it home.

Halfway around the world, meanwhile, officials in New Mexico’s Cibola County were preparing for the late December arrival of the region’s first Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees..."

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