"Free My Mom": The Destructive Impact of Immigration Detention on Families
- Indivisible Boca Raton
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Two Sisters Whose Mother Has Lived in the United States For Over 20 Years Share How Their Lives Have Been Impacted By Her Detention.
On the morning of July 18, 2026, roughly one hundred people stood on the sidewalk across from George Zoley's house in the Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club, holding signs and saying his name where he could hear it. Zoley is the founder and chief executive of The GEO Group, the largest private prison and immigration detention company in the country, and he lives roughly nine minutes from the Boca Raton headquarters where his company decides how many more beds to fill.
Two sisters came to that protest with a story that made the abstraction of "detention" impossible to ignore. Their mother had been taken from a routine check-in appointment 67 days earlier. At the time of the interview, she was more than a thousand miles from home, in Louisiana, at a GEO Group facility, and her daughters were raising their younger brothers in her absence.
“She Has Zero Criminal Record”
Their mother has lived in the United States for more than 20 years. She has five children, four of them born in this country and one naturalized. Her husband is a U.S. citizen currently in cancer treatment. Her youngest son is 11 years old.
She has also spent the last 13 years trying to become a legal permanent resident, with an approved I-130 petition working its way through the system. That is not a fast process. It is also not a secret one. According to her daughters, immigration authorities had every detail of her case on file, including her pending petition, before they detained her.
"Despite her compliance, just have perfect compliance while trying to get legalized with an approved I-130," one sister said. "They had knowledge of all of this. They had her show up one morning, while I was there with her, and just took her out of the building."
She was, by her daughters' account, under an ICE supervision arrangement administered through a GEO Group subsidiary at the time. She had no criminal history. She had done everything asked of her. None of it mattered on the morning they walked her out.
A Thousand Miles From Her Children, In Shackles
From there, she was flown to Louisiana. She had never been to the state before. Her feet were shackled. Her hands were shackled. According to her daughters, she developed fresh sores from the restraints during the transfer.
GEO Group runs several ICE detention centers across Louisiana, including facilities in Basile and Jena that have drawn years of documented complaints from detainees, attorneys, and members of Congress: mold, inadequate medical care, and long stretches of isolation from family and legal counsel. The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center, which has sued GEO Group and ICE over conditions at Louisiana facilities, has described five-point shackles fastened over open wounds and expired food contaminated with mold, insects, and rodent waste at facilities in the state.
The sisters' description of their mother's facility tracks with that pattern. She has asthma, and she told her daughters the air conditioning filters were caked with mold. Other women in her unit woke up one morning covered in rashes. When she tried to get medical attention for it, staff told her it was normal.
"They gaslighted and told her that's normal," one sister said. "They told all the girls that you wouldn't even have, like, a convicted pedophile under these conditions." Sometimes, she said, her mother could not even get a pillow. Sometimes there were no clean towels, and she had to use towels other detainees had already used.
Contact with the outside world comes at a price. A five-minute phone call costs roughly $10. Sending a written message costs $0.50, and so does receiving one. The facility periodically cuts off communication entirely, leaving the family with no way to reach her and no way to know why.
Forced To Parent Their Own Siblings
Before she was detained, their mother ran a small business organizing people's homes, work she often did for free for families going through hard times. She is also, by her daughters' description, a pillar of her church community here in Boca Raton.
Since she was taken, her four children still at home have had to restructure their entire lives around her absence. Her husband works constantly to cover a household that now runs on a single income, all while undergoing cancer treatment. Her older daughters have effectively become parents to their 17, 15, and 11-year-old siblings, all of whom are now home for the summer with no one else to look after them.
"It really does fall on us," one sister said. "And then we also have to help financially, because her being in there, there's only one income now."
The younger children feel it even when the family tries to shield them from it. "We do everything to try so my younger brothers can not feel the burden of what's going on," she said. "But they do feel it. They're always asking where my mom is."
Both sisters described a persistent guilt that trails ordinary life now, guilt over a full breakfast, a made bed, a shower with a clean towel. "Everything feels like a privilege now," one said. "I'm disgusted to eat because I know my mother, who once provided for me, doesn't have access to that. She's not cared for. Even having a pillow, those are privileges that we see."
“That’s When You Have To Fight”
Asked what they think should happen to ICE, one sister did not hesitate. "I support abolishing it," she said. "Nobody wants criminals walking free, but the people getting detained are not criminals. At the very least, it needs to be reformed. Just because somebody has a badge and a gun doesn't mean they can go around shamelessly taking civilians who aren't doing any harm, who are just helping build up our communities."
She returned to the same word their mother had given them before all of this happened: family. “What’s giving me the most strength is the biggest gift that my mom gave me, and it was to establish our family,” she said. “Being next to my sister, as hard as this is, gives me a lot.” “And don’t lose hope,” her sister added, “because that’s what they want. They want to make the situation so hard that everybody gives up. But that’s when you have to fight. It’s hard to get up in the mornings, but that’s when you have to get up even more.”
The Company Behind Suffering
The GEO Group generated more than $300 million a year in potential revenue just from the roughly 6,000 additional detention beds it had available as of earlier this year, on top of the beds already filled. About a third of everyone currently held in immigration detention nationwide is in a facility the company runs. George Zoley, the man these two sisters stood outside the home of on July 18, built that company and still leads it.
Their mother is not a data point in a securities filing. She is a woman with an 11-year-old son who still asks where she is, a husband fighting cancer on one income, and two older daughters who have spent 67 days and counting learning what a five-minute phone call costs when the person on the other end of it is your mother.
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