A Name in the ICE Detainee Locator
Adriana Jasso at the Otay Mesa Detention Center during the Day of the Dead protest in late October 2025
Nathalie J___ was the caregiver who helped my mom, disabled and sundowning, able to keep a sweet disposition when things were difficult. “I’m your friend, Nathalie,” she told her again and again. I forgot how I figured out she was Haitian, but afterwards we had conversations in French and she taught me words in Creole. She was young, ambitious, and also quite beautiful, and I looked forward to her coming to work at my parents’ house in La Jolla, California. One night in late October 2025, she didn’t show up for her shift. Later that night, the agency she worked for said they were unable to contact her. Fearing the worst, I typed her name into the ICE online detainee locator system and her name popped up as being detained in Otay Mesa Detention Center, in San Diego. A facsimile of the facility had been used as a set piece in the film One Battle After Another, which I had seen recently. A few days after she disappeared, I drove out to the detention center to document a protest at the facility. The forty-acre detention center, much larger and less provisional than the stage-prop used in the film, was located next door to an Amazon warehouse, straddling the US-Mexico border. I knew some of the people who had organized the protest, including Adriana Jasso, the program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee for the US-Mexico border program. As the sun fell towards the horizon, she yelled repeatedly into her bullhorn, “No están solos,” letting the warehoused detainees know that they were not alone. In One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio and his fellow “French 75” revolutionaries violently liberated the detainees from their less absurd alternate universe. But, in reality—in this reality—the only recourse was the theatrics of protest. The organizers had constructed a Day of the Dead altar next to the Detention Center parking lot. It contained a candle for each of the 21 undocumented who had perished in ICE detention in 2025, each of them with a cardboard butterfly attached.
Scenes from the Day of the Dead protest at the Otay Mesa Detention Center
