Dreaming of Pelicans
Susana Arrieta's creative-non fiction essay on being detained at the Miami airport
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Today, we’re exceptionally grateful to be sharing Dreaming of Pelicans.
Dreaming of Pelicans is a creative non-fiction piece in which Susana Arrieta shares the experience of being detained by ICE at the Miami airport and transferred to a detention centre for a month in the fall of 2010.
Many of us have watched helplessly in recent months as world powers, and particularly the new US administration, weaponize immigration as a political tool. Stories like this remind us that speaking up and sharing our stories helps us reclaim power. Writing is political and and we must never forget that.
Please be aware of the following content warnings: this story centres on a personal carceral experience, and there are mentions of violence/death.
Dreaming of Pelicans
During the Summer of 2010, millions around the world were following the story of the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped at a copper-gold mine underneath the Atacama Desert.
Their nightmare began as I packed my life’s essentials to leave Venezuela for the third and last time. Two months later, while eating a chocolate pudding cup, I watched from an old TV how the miners, one by one, were returned to the surface. To this day I am sure that I could not have made it through the next few weeks without constantly reminding myself that freedom is attainable even under the most excruciating circumstances; that freedom is attainable even when you are hopelessly trapped 700 meters underground. If they are free, so am I. If they survived, so will I.
I dried my tears with the back of my hand and gave the airport guard the empty pudding cup. He turned the TV off and directed me to a windowless office that had nothing in it but an old reclining chair.
“This is where you’ll sleep for tonight, we’ll transfer you tomorrow, meanwhile there’ll be an officer outside your door.”
There were no blankets, no pillows, no release… but I was supposed to be grateful that I was given a place to sleep whereas the men who were in my situation spent the night overcrowded, on hard plastic chairs, surrounded by policemen and their loaded guns that more often than not were pointed at them.
There were no dreams for me the night that ICE decided to take away my liberty at the Miami Airport. My body wanted to run but my mind was blank. This is what deprivation felt like. As soon as morning came there was a brief knock, I blinked and two Latino policemen were before me. They spoke Spanish and told me “No te vamos a esposar, camina con nosotros.” They expected me to be grateful because of my unchained wrists.
But how could I be grateful when my life was pending by a thread controlled by strangers as I sat in the back of a police car? They asked me - “How come you do not want to go back to Venezuela?”
My tears - which had stopped the night before, resumed. I said “There is no future and no life for me there” and they seemed puzzled.
They did not understand when I spoke of dictatorship, they shrugged when I spoke of violence - they were cops, after all. It is violence and not peace that pays their bills, so I left the rest to silence. I did not tell them about my friend Fania and the six gunshots that extinguished her life during a peaceful protest at our Alma Mater. I did not tell them how I felt when her killer was gunned down years later. I did not tell them about sweet Augusto, who died during a violent kidnapping, or Miguel who was killed during a robbery gone wrong. I did not tell them about countless other lost loved ones because I hadn’t had the space to mourn my dead. I did not tell them how it could have been me, I did not tell them anything else because now it was me, in the back of a police car, prey of the system. Where does strength come from? I had so much of it back then.
They drove me to a detention centre near Pompano Beach. It is a contractor-led prison. It is an atrocity. It is inhumane. And in the USA, it is perfectly legal. They dropped me off at a small office. I was asked many health-related questions, and by now it was obvious that telling the truth would not be helpful, so I kept my brief answers neutral. I forced myself to smile for my mugshot because I wanted a beautiful one, like David Bowie’s. In case of fame, break a smile.
An office worker opened my suitcases and began a painful inventory of every item I had brought with me. His gloved hands touched all of my most cherished possessions. He wrote down my river pearls and 14K gold necklace as white beads, yellow beads. I told him that his notation was wrong, that those items were pearls and gold. He refused to make the change, my eyes burnt him. He failed to understand the name of the item I called a fur stole so he wrote down “scarf”. He failed to show humanity while going through the lovingly curated contents of the suitcases I had brought to restart my life in Canada.
I must surrender everything to them, they said, including what I was wearing. Before giving me three pairs of underwear and two blue jumpsuits, a nurse put a led apron vest on me to take x-rays - “just to make sure you do not have tuberculosis”, she said. Every single event was a new humiliation. Once I got dressed, a policewoman took me to my cell.
For the first time since my detention at the Miami Airport - where American authorities did not allow me to board my flight to Toronto - I was truly scared. Everything up to this point: the angry TSA agent, the multi-hour police interrogation, my night in a reclining chair as a guard stood outside the door, the ride in the police car, an ignoramus taking all of my belongings, none of that had been as scary as the second the policewoman had me enter the women’s section and locked the door behind me.
My cell had three bunk beds and a bathroom. The thin plastic mattresses had a label stating “patent pending”, the bedsheets were paper thin - to prevent us from hanging ourselves, explained a fellow inmate. The windows were blocked, not a sliver of light could enter. The entire building was like this, and we were only able to see the sun if we opted to attend a 15-minute recess at the high-security courtyard. A Scottish sailor who overextended her welcome in American waters often made impromptu meditations during recess, which for three to four minutes she’d take any of us willing to close our eyes and breathe to Cabo.
Outside, outside the world went on. News came every now and then, between reality shows and prayer time. By now, every single Chilean miner had been rescued, there were cheers when that news came. A few weeks later, an Argentinian woman ran happily down the hall to let us all know “Néstor Kirchner is dead! That bastard is dead!” I understood her elation a mere three years later, once Hugo Chavez ceased to exist.
Outside, my friend Eliana hated talking on the phone, but she figured out how to deposit money for my phone bill and sent me extra money for the prison’s commissariat once I told her how truly disgusting prison food was.
In Venezuela, most of the blood vessels in my dad’s eyes exploded with stress. In Canada, a big shiny banner welcoming me home collected dust. I used some of the money Eliana sent me to buy, aside from food, a sketchbook and some pencils. Some women saw me drawing and asked for their caricatures, I drew them beautifully, “I’ll tape it on the wall!” One of them screamed joyously. Word spread that I am a writer and every morning there was a line outside my cell, and thanks to those morning visitors I spent many days occupied writing and editing their love letters.
Most of the women detained - many of them for years - had committed no crime other than hoping to find a better life in a country where they weren’t born. Yes, there was this sweet older woman who had committed murder and was now patiently teaching me how to crochet under heavy police scrutiny. And yes, there was an arsonist who loved fashion in the bunk bed opposite mine who would take my turn whenever I had to clean the bathroom. “You are just terrible at this,” she’d say, leaving unsaid that she knew I had never done house chores. A Mongolian woman taught me, with kindness and many signs, how to operate the washing and dryer machines. Carceral kindness is like no other. Crime or no crime, no one deserved to be there.
Our meals were served by inmates who’d get cents in their commissariat accounts for each shift. Most of the social time was spent in the recreation room where dozens of women watched the Kardashians in awe at the type of world which we were being actively denied. Aside from an inmate-run beauty salon I never went to, we also had access to the library. Upon my first visit, I found the memoirs of Isabel Garcia Lorca and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale stacked together inside a recycling bin.
“Ma’am, am I able to take these two?” The policewoman lifted her head, glanced at me, and said “Of course baby girl, and you can take them home with you once you leave if you want to, these were going to the garbage anyway.” Thirteen years later, I will be speaking at the Toronto International Festival of Authors with Margaret Atwood seated in the audience, listening to what I had to say. Please tell me this is not a simulation.
In spite of her disdain for phones, I called Eliana often. She had been trying her best to get me released. She got the name of a lawyer and gave my parents thousands of dollars to help pay for the legal fees. The day I met my lawyer - a real-life Barbie if I ever saw one - she confessed how humiliating it was to enter the detention centre.
“They made me change my dress, I had to change in my car! It was disturbing.” She was distressed. It was her first case in a detention centre and she did not hold back telling me all of the irregularities about my case, most of which I already knew. It felt validating. The main judge was about to go on a lengthy vacation. My lawyer worked some Barbie magic and he agreed to hear my case. I sat in a room that looked like a court but instead of people, it had three big TV screens and a camera - so they’d see me and I’d see them. My heart grew wings once the judge - in an overtly dramatic gesture - tore up the papers that had kept me imprisoned.
The following morning they told me to pack my things - and to wear my clothes. Recess had started already so I did not get to say any individual goodbyes, but the memory of the courtyard erupting with applause when they saw me walking away from the building brings tears to my eyes even fifteen years later. The love I felt in that moment was so big and so pure, the caged birds happily singing for the one that was set free. I am still not healed from that month but I am free.
During Spring of 2025, millions around the world were following the story of the 238 Venezuelans who were detained by the US government and transferred to CECOT in El Salvador. Their photographs are shocking, young men with shaved heads, overcrowded and shackled, over 90% of them - just like me - had no previous criminal record in the USA. Many of them were detained and transferred to one of the most inhumane prisons of the West simply because of their nationality, tattoos, and sartorial choices. I now obsessively look at my tattoos wondering, which one will incriminate me in this dystopia? Will it be Twin Peaks? Will it be Aladdin Sane’s lighting bolt or the end of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy that’ll get me? Silently I pray to no one: If I am free, so will they be. If I survived, so will they.
Susana Arrieta is an invisibly disabled Latine artist and poet. Susana thrives with the warmth of colour, and dreams of worlds that are kinder to all. Susana’s creative non-fiction and poetry honours memories and ancestors, aiming to thread past, present, and future in caring circles.
So relevant so poignant...well done Susana!