Testimonies from Ligaya, Zenar, and Jane, Lola Bebie's Daughter
- samcchattin
- 20 hours ago
- 10 min read
Jane’s Speech (Lola Bebie’s Daughter)
A fight against fear.
A fight against injustice.
A fight against a system that tears families apart.
It started as an ordinary day. My dad went to the mailbox, sorting through bills and junk mail, when he found the letter from ICE. He opened it and froze. Inside was an appointment for my mom, Flavia Cahoon, known to all of us as Bebie, to report to a deportation officer. He knew immediately what it meant. And he didn’t know how to tell her, the woman he has loved and protected for decades, that her worst nightmare had returned.
When my dad finally shared the terrible news, fear gripped my mom instantly. Not just the fear of deportation, but the fear of a death sentence if she were detained and sent back to a detention center. She had already endured a detention center once before and barely survived. She knew exactly what awaited her if she were sent back. This system, so broken and inhumane, strips women like her of everything and discards them as though they never mattered.
When my dad called to tell me, I tried to hold it together. But when I hung up the phone, I collapsed. My daughter was at her father’s house, and I was alone. I couldn’t breathe. I called my best friend, but she couldn’t find the words, because what can you say when the country you love is about to destroy your family?
This wasn’t grief like losing someone to illness. This was rage. This was injustice.
Because my mom had done everything right. She fought to be here. She loved her community, served her community, and contributed to this country in every way she could. She paid her taxes, obeyed the laws, raised her family, and gave back with everything she had. And still, here we were.
Three days before the appointment, my mom’s lawyer and my dad went to the immigration officer and begged. The officer, without saying it directly, told them it was over. That no matter how strong her case was, and it was strong, it would be denied. He admitted he barely did his job anymore, that he simply passed the paperwork up the chain, where Trump’s pawns made decisions without even reading it. And he warned them: if my mother showed up, she would be arrested.
So my mother made the most painful decision of her life. Faced with two choices, detention which with her medical condition could very well mean death, or leaving, she chose to leave.
Anya and I spent her final night in the United States helping her pack. I checked and rechecked her bags, paranoid she might forget something. I was still in denial. My mom, my best friend, was about to be gone. No longer fifteen minutes away. I hugged her and stroked her hair. I told her she was the strongest person I knew. That she was my hero. That she deserved peace, not a lifetime spent fighting an immigration error already proven wrong but never corrected by a system that refused to care.
I carry the weight of a heartbreaking truth, one that crushes the spirit of every Filipino, including my mother. Thousands of us have worked, built lives, and dreamed of a future here, only to see it all shattered by a brutal immigration system that tears families apart. And what does our government do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
My mother is a strong and loving woman. She followed the rules, worked hard, and believed in the American dream with every fiber of her being. For years, she fought in the courts, drained her savings, and pleaded for the simple chance to remain in the place that had become her home. She gave this country her loyalty, her labor, her love. Yet after decades of building a life here, it all came crashing down with one single piece of paper.
One single piece of paper, cold words typed in black ink, a notice dressed up as procedure but carrying the weight of exile, shattered everything. One single piece of paper erased decades of sacrifice as if they meant nothing. One single piece of paper told her she was no longer welcome in the only country that had ever truly felt like home.
After decades in the U.S., my mother was torn from the arms of her husband, her daughter, her granddaughter, and sent back to a country that no longer felt like home. In the Philippines, with no safety nets and a failing healthcare system, she struggles every day. Her health deteriorates because she cannot access the medical care she needs. Each time she requires a doctor, she must board a bus at midnight just to reach a clinic. This is the life she was forced to return to because of one single piece of paper.
Where is the support? Where is the Philippine government when its people need them most? Where is the help for those forced to return with shattered hopes, broken dreams, and nothing left to hold onto? Nowhere. They are abandoned.
And she is not alone. Thousands of Filipinos are scattered across the Philippines, surviving without help, without dignity. Forgotten by their own country. Forgotten by their own government.
This is not just a foreign problem. This is our problem. The Philippine government has the power to protect its citizens, to fight for them when they are wronged, to help them rebuild. Instead, they stand idly by while families like mine are left to pick up the pieces.
The U.S. has taken so much from the Philippines, our land, our resources, our people. Our men and women have served in the U.S. armed forces, fighting battles far from home, while American military presence continues to dominate Philippine soil. It is time for the Philippine government to demand more, more respect, more justice, more commitment to safeguarding the rights and dignity of its citizens. We deserve leaders who will stand up and reclaim what is rightfully ours.
This is not only a failure of the U.S. government. This is a failure of Philippine leaders. We have been betrayed and abandoned by those who were elected to protect their people. And as my mother fights for her life and her dignity in a broken system back in the Philippines, we must confront a painful question. What kind of country are we? Are we a nation that abandons its own? A nation that turns its back while its people suffer?
No. We are better than this.
We will rise, demand justice, and refuse to be silenced. We are a nation built on love, on family, on support. It is time we show the world who we really are. It is time for the Philippines to become a place where people do not have to leave, but where they can stay, build, and thrive. It is time for our government to stand up for its citizens, to stop bending to the will of foreign regimes and start protecting its own.
To those with the power to make a difference, I say this: You are failing us. You are failing the very people who built this country. But you have the power to fix this. You have the power to change lives. Do not let another day pass while Filipinos suffer, because every day you delay, another family is destroyed by one single piece of paper.
Bring them home. Free them from the hell of detention centers where dignity is stripped away and hope is crushed. Help them rebuild their lives. Give them the resources to survive. Give them back the dignity they deserve, dignity that should never have been taken from them in the first place.
Enough is enough. The time for change is now.
Zenar’s Speech
I am speaking out today because my story is not just my own—it is the story of many overseas Filipino workers who have been left to struggle alone.
I endured time in detention, a period that broke me in ways I can never fully explain. Physically, emotionally, and mentally, I was pushed to my limits. I held on to hope, believing that once I returned home, I would receive the support I desperately needed to rebuild my life. But that hope quickly faded. The challenges did not end with my release—if anything, they have only grown heavier. My family is also suffering, bearing the weight of financial hardship and the emotional toll of our situation. We are struggling just to survive.
Here in the Philippines, I face daily battles to secure even the basics—food, shelter, and a stable livelihood. The truth is, the lifeline I have found has come from my community, Migrante International, and the solidarity of exposurists from the US—not from my own government. The love and support from these groups have kept me standing, but they cannot replace the duty and responsibility that the Philippine government owes to its people.
When I was still in the US, an ATN Officer in San Francisco assured me that I would receive assistance from the DSWD. That promise gave me hope. Yet today, I am still waiting. No aid has come. Each day without it is another day my family and I sink deeper into hardship.
I speak out not just to tell my story, but to demand action—not only for myself, but for every overseas Filipino worker who has sacrificed so much, only to be met with silence when we needed help the most. We deserve better. We deserve to come home to a country that cares.
Ligaya’s Speech
Hi everyone,
My name is Ligaya. I had lived in the U.S. since June 1996. I had built my family there and raised my two sons. After serving a 6-year prison term that I shortened in just 4 and 4 ½ months, I was immediately transferred into ICE custody.
First, I was locked up in Adelanto Detention Center in California from December 21, 2018 until November 22, 2023 and was transferred to South Louisiana ICE Processing Center and stayed there for a week then again to ICE Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, which is considered one of the deadliest detention centers in the U.S.
After spending more than six and a half years in ICE detention fighting to stay with my family, I was ordered removed by an entire system composed of biased immigration judges who considered me unworthy of a single chance to remain with my family in U.S. and disregarded any and all positive changes or improvements I made in my life. They do not see someone like me in a different light and unanimously have defined me by my conviction alone and to not grant any kind of mercy like how God granted to each one of us as people. We are one race, a human race.
While in detention, I experienced and witnessed many things. I suffered from medical neglect, inhumane treatment, and other abuses that no human being should ever go through. During the COVID-19 pandemic, ICE and GEO, the private company that runs Adelanto, failed to protect us. When the District Court ordered ICE to reduce the population to prevent the spread of the virus, ICE appealed the order three times and refused to release anyone. On top of that, they sprayed toxic chemicals, HDQ Neutral, inside the facilities. People like me developed tumors, respiratory issues, and long-term health problems from the exposure.
When I was transferred to Eloy, conditions were even worse. The food was terrible, worse than any other detention center I had been in. The cups contain blackish residue even after being washed by their dishwashing equipment. Even the food trays oftenly contained oil residue from previous food served from the prior day or so. The meals often looked like dog or cat food. We were given real chicken (leg quarter) only once every 35 day cycle. And spoiled vegetables were served multiple times and even mixed in with the rice.
After visits from family or friends, Eloy officers forced us into degrading strip searches. We as detainees were pressured to sign a waiver that gives them the full authority to a fully nude “cough and squat” search. If I refused, I would be punished by taking away my future contact visits and be only allowed to see loved ones through glass.
The grouts in showers of the C building were covered in black mold. The managing unit staff would ask porters to just paint over them, but it always came back. The very old shower curtains caused me to develop fungal infections that spread across my arms, and after being seen by a nurse for a sick call, I didn’t see the medical provider, as a matter of urgency because infections spread, but only after two weeks after.
The officers were rude and treated us as if we were less than human. The counselor Flores closed the sliding door on my face while I was still talking to her and another presiding pod officer (Garcia) did the same when I was helping another with legal matters through a connecting pod door.
ICE detains people indefinitely, violating civil rights without accountability, because private detention centers profit from keeping migrants locked up.
During the Trump administration, Eloy became even more overcrowded. More people were detained and transferred in. This is a complete waste of all hard-earned taxpayers’ money. All the hard-earned tax dollars are going toward cruelty and inhumane treatment of immigrants detained by ICE in multiple facilities across the US. Instead of funding healthcare, education, social services, and things that communities need to thrive, the money gets wastefully spent on breaking family units apart by deporting the family providers and the children become parentless and are left to suffer emotional turmoil that lead them to depend on other things. ICE enter contracts with facilities that care nothing but maximizing profit by giving the least expensive amount of human and medical care. (Food, shoes, mattress, pillows, bugs, trays, cups, etc). No business establishment should ever make profit from detained people and their families who end up suffering psychological, emotional and physical harms.
ICE is under the Department of Homeland Security under the so-called Department of Justice. It ends up being presided over by immigration judges who do not follow the rules and regulations of the drafted immigration law and they do whatever they wish to do with their decision and disregard many sorts of positive asset of many immigrants, not all, who have greatly improved and bettered themselves. Under DOJ, where is the real justice in the system if these presiding authorities do not follow the guidelines or precedents of the federal regulations of the immigration law.
Now that I’m back in the Philippines, life is very difficult. The minimum wage is about 695 pesos a day, around $11, or about $200 a month. Housing alone costs about $150 a month, leaving almost nothing left for food, clothing, or other expenses. It feels like just surviving, not really living. I don’t want to be a burden to my family, but it’s hard to find work when you are starting over after so many years. I honestly still don’t know what to do.
But I know this fight is not over. I want to continue helping others who are still inside detention. There are not enough pro bono legal services, and many migrants don’t know how to fight their cases. While I was detained, I helped other migrants with their paperwork and navigating the court system. I want to keep doing that now. I am grateful to the organizations who supported me, and I want to keep being an advocate for those still inside. I will continue to expose the reality of detention and fight for justice because none of us should be forgotten, and together I hope we find justice as we collectively fight for others.