Ana María had been happy living in the US. She had an asylum case going through the US immigration system and was working, becoming part of the community, living with her boyfriend and was grateful for safe harbor.

But after she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), she had such a horrendous experience that, in desperation, she agreed to be deported back to her native country in South America, back to danger and thousands of miles away from the life she had been building.

She was shuttled around to at least six places of detention in three months, shackled each time she was transferred and packed in with other women suffering the same indignities, despite having no criminal record in the US or her home country, she told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.

“They treated us worse than criminals, like dogs – well, a dog lives better than that in the US,” she said, in phone calls from South America, conducted in Spanish.

The Guardian is protecting the woman’s real identity and has agreed to refer to her as Ana María, while also not revealing her place of origin in South America and certain other locations and dates in her story, as she fears retaliation by the authorities or criminal gangs.

Despite life going well in the US initially, Ana María had become so scared of the anti-immigration crackdowns unfolding in the months after Donald Trump returned to the White House that she and her boyfriend decided they would move from their home in the north-eastern US to Canada. He had family there and they figured they could start again, she said, especially as Trump was pursuing people with papers and ongoing court cases, not just the undocumented.

Meanwhile, ICE and the US border patrol were descending on Democratic-run cities, and the pair had watched TikToks of people being arrested, sent to detention and deported – and feared it could happen to them any day.

“In Canada, the situation is better, we will live more peacefully there,” she recalled her boyfriend saying.

In the dead of winter this January, the couple took a bus to the US-Canada border, turned themselves in to the Canadian police and asked for asylum.

Ana María, 23, was horrified, however, when the Canadian authorities accused her boyfriend of being a gangster trying to traffic her, chiefly because of his tattoos, it seemed. Nothing she said convinced them otherwise, she recalled. They arrested and held him, while they sent her back to the US, straight to ICE – and the nightmare began.

She recalled that she spent one day in the nearest detention center, then the next day was moved just over 50 miles to another center for almost two weeks. One of her first shocks was being painfully handcuffed at the wrists and shackled at the ankles while she was being transferred, which then happened every time she was moved across the state or the country.

“The treatment is humiliating. They put you in chains – and they tighten them – to the point where they leave marks on your arms and legs, making it impossible to walk. They would grab you by the arm to force you to walk faster, and I would plead with them, ‘Miss, it hurts! Please! I can’t walk.’ We couldn’t even pull back our hair because our hands were shackled to our waists. And the chains were heavy,” she said.

Her first flight with ICE was from the northern state where she was arrested to Louisiana. After landing and being taken to jail with others, she didn’t even know where she was – just somewhere in Louisiana, in another detention center.

“I asked why they were taking me away, what was going on, but they wouldn’t tell us anything, not even where we were going, or what was happening. They just said ‘we can’t give you that information’ to any question,” she said.

Many of the conditions reported by people in ICE detention have already been well documented. The lights on 24 hours, the stale and sometimes rotten food – or lack of it. Guards yelling often, including at night, so detainees didn’t get much sleep. Ana María recounted experiencing similar conditions.

From Louisiana, Ana María was moved to several places in Arizona, then Texas, each time with the chains. Those memories, especially, haunt her.

“They were cinched tight to your specific contours. I mean, if they tightened the chain while I was standing up, when you sit down, you naturally get a bit of a tummy bulge. So, just imagine – you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t lie down, couldn’t really move at all because the more you moved, the tighter the chains would constrict. Or if you made a wrong move, they would suddenly cinch even tighter,” she said.

She vividly remembers on one occasion asking guards in a facility in the south-west to loosen her handcuffs slightly because they hurt so much. “Only to have one of them laugh and another start to dance” in front of her, mocking her, she recalled.

As well as awful food, sometimes there was not enough food, she said.

In one facility, she recalled that every time she begged for something to eat, saying she was very hungry, she was told “No, you will eat later.” But she said then the staff took out their lunch boxes and ate “very yummy” food right in front of the detainees.

“Tears were rolling down my face because my stomach hurt. I begged for water just to fill it, and they were, like ‘later, later,’” she said.

Ana María left her native country in 2024, even though she was about to finish her nursing studies. She was the youngest of four sisters and two of them had been shot dead by a gangster ex-boyfriend of one of them, in what became a notorious murder case in her home town. The family was receiving death threats from fellow gangsters of the perpetrator, and the sisters’ mother was terrified she would lose another daughter, Ana María said. So she decided to head for the US, to get away from drug crime and a town where everyone knew everyone. She and a friend took a plane to Mexico City and then a 40-hour bus ride to the Mexico-California border.

“That was also a nightmare,” she recalled, because every time the police stopped the bus, the driver pointed them out, and they were checked and asked for bribes. They crossed into the US and turned themselves in to border patrol, and after a week in a detention center, they were able to apply for asylum under the Biden administration and were freed.

In the US, as she established herself, Ana María worked as a house cleaner, in restaurants, in a warehouse packing products, and she also sold sweets from her native country. She was permitted to apply for asylum and had been given a court date to appear in early 2027. She was hopeful that one day she could get a visa for her mother and bring her to visit her in the US too.

One of the hardest parts of being detained was not being able to contact her family, she said. Detainees aren’t allowed to use their own mobile phones in the centers, although they are normally allowed to make a free phone call when they arrive at a new detention location so they can tell a loved one where they are, and she recalled that the length of that varied from just 30 seconds to one or five minutes, depending on the location. But, she said, if you don’t know a phone number by heart, you are out of luck. And, in a vicious cycle, if families don’t know where their detained relative is, they can’t contact them to send them phone numbers and the money to pay for calls.

Eventually, Ana María was able to contact her mother thanks to a friend she made in one of the jails. That friend’s daughters, who were in Nicaragua, were able to contact a friend of Ana’s on Facebook. “

Güeras Aliadas, a volunteer organization that was an initiative of two North Carolina mothers who wanted to help their migrant neighbors in the middle of ICE raids, has experienced how difficult locating a detainee can be for their family.

“Many times, we know that somebody has been arrested, but if they still don’t have an assigned center, we can’t locate them. And even when we can, and finally get to communicate with them, they move them to another center for some reason and we lose communication,” said Devyn Brown, one of the founders of the organization, who helped Ana María while she was detained.

The Guardian sent questions to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of ICE, about numerous aspects of this story. But after contacting the Guardian to ask the identity of the person involved and being told that identity would not be disclosed for safety reasons, ICE did not further respond. The DHS has frequently said there were “no sub-prime” conditions in ICE detention, when asked about specific facilities and in general.

Ana María remains shocked at the way she was shuttled around and the conditions in detention.

In addition to the chains and the hunger, she recalls frequent and invasive searches by the authorities.

“When they check you, they grab your whole body,” she said.

“I could only think, ‘Why am I here? Why are they so bad?’” She recalled asking God what she had done to deserve such treatment, a doubt that still constantly assails her.

Ana María recalls that amid the cruelty, there was always the odd good person, a detention center worker, for example, who told her, “Be calm, this is going to pass,” and who gave her the strength to keep going. “I can’t complain, because at least I got that,” she said.

Eventually, when she asked ICE officials what was happening with her case, she was told that a judge had ordered her to be deported to a third country, Ecuador or Honduras, she said.

On top of her exhaustion and dispiritedness with the conditions she was kept in, she became terrified of that prospect and reached a tipping point – she couldn’t take it any more and asked the volunteer organization, Güeras Aliadas, to help her cancel her asylum request and agree that she could be removed back to her native country in South America.

So that is what happened. Now, she is back with her mother, but in a state of anxiety. “Since I arrived, I don’t go out, I don’t feel good nor in peace. I think that at any moment, anything can happen to me because of the constant threats that I received before moving to the US,” she said. She is considering whether she can go to somewhere in Europe and request asylum there.

She pines for her life in the US. “Of course I miss my friends, they were like my family back there because we lived together, I miss terribly my enamored,” she said of her boyfriend – although, with him in Canada and her back in South America after her ordeal, they aren’t together romantically any more.

“I love the United States, I was already independent, my lifestyle was improving, I was working hard to achieve what I wanted, I was helping my family,” she said. Her voice trailed off.

Ana María keeps watching TikToks about conditions in ICE detention.

“Everything you see in those videos – I lived it, it is exactly as they say it. We all go through the exact same thing,” she said. Her only hope now is that telling her story may help things change.

“Please, let everyone know what it’s like to be held in detention.”