stories

‘The guards didn’t like people cooking frogs’: A Russian woman tells Meduza about the year and a half she spent in U.S. immigration jail

Source: Meduza

From October 2024 to September 2025, Russians received a record number of asylum denials in the United States, and on January 14, 2026, the Trump administration suspended the issuance of immigrant visas to Russians altogether. Under President Donald Trump, the process of crossing the U.S.–Mexico border became significantly more difficult. People have waited for months for permission to enter U.S. territory before spending long periods in immigration detention facilities — sometimes more than a year. One of those people is 30-year-old Russian national Polina Guseva. Before receiving political asylum and reaching Los Angeles, she spent a year and a half in two U.S. detention centers. Meduza spoke with her about what life was like in jail, how she managed to win her court cases, and how she started a handwritten Russian-language newspaper for inmates called Vestnik Yebatoria (roughly “The Fuckatorium Herald) in one of the detention centers.

— Why did you decide to leave Russia?

— I worked at a design studio [in Moscow] and really loved my job. At the same time, I was always politically active and still am: I took part in protests and volunteered at Navalny’s campaign offices. Starting in early 2019, I noticed officers from the Center for Combating Extremism following me around with cameras. They never touched me, but they always made sure I knew they were nearby, especially ahead of protest rallies.

From 2021 on, I lived in constant fear that the police would grab me and I wouldn’t manage to leave in time. In 2022, the [full-scale] war began, and in 2023 the police finally came for me — after which I left the country. I think the last straw for them was in 2023, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Russian authorities had “used violence against me” — that is, that they had unlawfully detained me [during the July 27, 2019, rally for fair elections to the Moscow City Duma]. I shared the process of filing the complaint on social media.

Before that, it was just plainclothes security officers tailing me, harassing me and my neighbors, and telling one neighbor that I was a “traitor to the motherland.” After that ruling, the police showed up at my apartment and at my workplace. That’s when I realized it was time to pack my bags. The police kept coming to my registered address even after I was gone.

— Why did you choose the U.S. rather than Europe?

— I needed to leave as quickly as possible. I didn’t have a European visa, but my friends — who by that point had already been through immigration detention — explained how to get to the U.S. via Mexico. It seemed like the simplest and most legal option: fly to Mexico and apply for political asylum in the U.S. through the [Biden-era] CBP One app.

From the moment I left Russia, I followed developments at the U.S.–Mexico border closely and understood that the wait for a crossing date could be long. At the time, I thought “long” meant three months; in reality, the wait stretched to nine. I knew I could end up in detention, but when I first arrived in Mexico, Russians were hardly being detained at the border at all.

At first, my chances of being sent to detention were close to zero, but the rules were changing every month. By June 2024, when I crossed the border, I knew I would be detained, but I thought I’d spend three months in jail at most. Instead, it dragged on for 15. After six months behind bars, I started to think that I might have been better off staying in Mexico from the start. But by then, there was nothing left to change.

— How did you cross the U.S.–Mexico border?

After nine months living in Mexico, I arrived at the border with an official appointment through the app. But as soon as I reached the port of entry, I was detained and then sent to immigration detention. At the time, there was an unwritten practice that many called a “ban on Russian passports”: virtually all Russian citizens, regardless of their circumstances, were sent to detention.

— What was your first impression of detention, and how did it change over time?

At first I was taken to a detention center in Otay Mesa [a neighborhood in San Diego, California], and it was okay. Overall, I stayed very optimistic, set up a routine for myself, and waited for my court hearings. The officers — basically just regular guards — treated us more or less properly.

We lived in one of the immigration pods: a large space for 128 people, with eight-person rooms without doors, shared areas, and rows of shower stalls and toilets along the wall. We were even allowed to use pencils and go to the library. Three times a day they opened the door for us to go “outside” — meaning a concrete box with no roof.

After some time, almost all of the women, including me, were transferred to Louisiana [to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center], and that was a real blow. Everything there was much worse than in California: rough guards, discrimination against Russian speakers, and no stable daily routine. Louisiana is considered one of the harshest states when it comes to immigration courts. Courts there often deny asylum without explanation, and the state also has some of the toughest immigration laws. Judges frequently side with whatever the prosecutor says. Trump has repeatedly described Louisiana as the “gold standard” for law enforcement across America.

In retrospect, the time in California sometimes even seemed pleasant to me and to other refugees. In Louisiana, there was nothing but despair — because of the courts, the conditions, and the guards’ inhumane treatment of us.

In the new detention center, we lived in a unit for 72 people with four metal tables, one toilet, and one shower for every five people. The toilets and showers were separated only by plastic sheeting. Recreation time was irregular, too; we were supposed to be taken out once a day, but often it was during the worst heat, and sometimes we weren’t taken out at all. Living like that, you learn to sleep and use the bathroom under any conditions.

The only things better than in California were the food and the fact that there was grass in the yard. Even so, there wasn’t enough meat or fresh fruit and vegetables (we got an apple just once a week). We were fed processed food and overcooked beans, and it’s very hard to live on such a monotonous diet. But food in Otay Mesa was much worse: a typical lunch was a lump of clumped-together rice, two green jalapeño peppers, a very spicy bean slurry, bread soaked in something like gravy, a biscuit, and cornbread. We were given chicken just once every five weeks.

— You said that Russian speakers faced discrimination from detention staff. Was the same true for the inmates from other countries?

There were many women from post-Soviet countries, and the unofficial ban on granting asylum applies to Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. We made up about two-fifths of the total number of women asylum seekers; another two-fifths were from Latin America, and the remaining fifth were from various other places.

In California, officers treated Latin American women more leniently: the detention center is near the Mexican border, and most staff speak Spanish. In Louisiana, by contrast, many of the guards were Black, and they treated Black detainees better. Everyone else was treated badly for the most part.

— How often are you allowed to communicate with family while in detention?

There are several ways to contact people from detention, and all of them cost money. You can make phone calls, but the connection is very poor. Calls within the U.S. cost about $6 an hour; international calls cost $10 for 10 minutes. There are also video calls on tablets through a special app: $6 for 30 minutes, regardless of where you’re calling. The tablets are mounted on wall brackets in common areas. They don’t work anywhere else, so it’s impossible to show what things are like inside the cells. The camera quality is terrible, and during video calls everything except you is blurred.

You can also message people through an app called “GettingOut” on the same tablets: you write to someone on the outside, and they write back. But everyone needs the tablet, so you can’t hold on to it for long. One message costs 35 cents. You can also send regular paper letters.

We also had access to a paid commissary, where we could buy bowls for food, forks and spoons, cotton swabs, instant coffee, instant noodles, sugar substitutes, tortillas, gummy candy, and other items. Most of what they sold was expired and overpriced, but you have no choice. Once I bought packets of porridge, and some of them turned out to be empty. In addition to paid services like phone calls, we could communicate with our immigration officers and submit requests through them if we had a health problem.

— Did you have any access to the media? Did you understand how the situation with Russian asylum seekers in the U.S. was developing?

— I had access to the media through a paid app on that same tablet, but there was virtually no information there about immigration issues. So for the most part, I got news by phone from a friend — thanks to her, I was able to put together a full picture of what was happening.

We, the asylum seekers, found ourselves in a situation where it wasn’t us calling lawyers to ask for updates; it was the lawyers asking us what was going on — how hearings were being conducted, how a particular judge was behaving. Immigration policy and practice were changing so rapidly that we were often the first to see how new rules actually worked. For example, new rules might be introduced, and a lawyer could tell us about them, but how the system actually reacted to those rules was something we learned first, in practice. Court hearings were taking place right there in detention, and we shared with each other what questions the prosecutor and the judge asked. Then, together with our attorneys, we worked out a strategy for how to proceed.

— When did you get a lawyer, and how much did their services cost?

— My first lawyer came on board even before I crossed the border. She was optimistic, and at the time, we still hoped to have the case heard in California, where things move faster. But in Louisiana, ahead of the final hearing, she warned me that the outcome could go either way — because this was Louisiana, and “You know how it is.” And she was right.

Before crossing the border, I paid half of her fee — $6,500. I paid the same amount again when the date of the final hearing was set (friends and the organization Russian America for Democracy in Russia helped me raise that money). On top of that, $2,500 went toward having the lawyer present at an interview that ultimately never took place.

I also paid another lawyer $2,000 to take part in a motion to get me released from detention through a sponsor bond, which, unfortunately, we lost. I also had to pay for document translations into English.

There was a third lawyer involved as well. When the judge ruled in my favor at the final hearing, the prosecutor decided to appeal. At that point, people from Russian America for Democracy in Russia [RADR] found me a pro bono attorney. In the end, the higher appellate court called the appeal unfounded.

I tried to help those who didn’t have lawyers — for example, by sharing information about RADR throughout the detention center and explaining what kind of help they could offer. Thanks to RADR volunteers, I also received useful printouts to prepare for court, such as reports on the situation in Russia from [human rights organizations] OVD-Info or Memorial. In those reports, you can find cases of persecution back home similar to your own — and cite them in court.

— You started a newspaper in detention. What did you write about?

— By that point, I was already in Louisiana. The detention center there is made up of five blocks, each with several rooms, so it’s hard to run into people from other units. Though sometimes it did happen — you could pass a question through a girl who worked in the kitchen or laundry, or run into someone in the infirmary.

Information was extremely valuable. Most of it was about court hearings and the specifics of immigration law, but we also exchanged everyday news. I wanted to give it some structure, and I remembered this great [Russian] project, Prison Herald. I decided to do something similar, but in reverse: to create a newspaper with news from inside the detention center, from the courts, and a bit from the outside world. I wrote the first issue by hand on an A4 sheet and passed it around my room and the neighboring ones. A team quickly formed — seven women in total over the 29 weeks the paper existed while I was in detention — who helped with gathering news, fact-checking, and distribution.

We had no way to print anything or make copies, so I produced several nearly identical A4 sheets, decorated them with drawings, folded them into a small bundle, and sent it from block to block through all the blocks of the detention center. We put out issues once a week, on Mondays. And we were read not only in our own detention center: I sent the originals to a friend on the outside, she scanned them, and volunteers distributed the issues to other detention centers. My sister also posted the scans on my Telegram channel. We even received letters from other detention centers a couple of times, thanking us and offering words of support for Vestnik. As for the name [“Fuckatorium Herald”] — it was the obvious choice. There was no other way to describe the place we were in.

The paper ran stories about arguments and fights. Once, there was even a sex scandal involving an officer and an asylum seeker. There was an older guard whose wife also worked at the detention center, and it turned out that one of the detainees was someone he had known long ago. They started talking. The officer topped up her commissary account, and one day he and this old acquaintance were caught having sex. The man was fired on the spot.

We also wrote about how people would catch frogs and crawfish in the prison yard and then cook them in the microwave. They also found and ate snake eggs. Because the food was so monotonous, many people started thinking about hunting. I never went that far myself, but I saw people cooking and eating what they’d caught. The guards didn’t like people cooking frogs, but when someone caught crawfish, they would even say, “Oh, nice catch today.”

— Weren’t you afraid that this could hurt your chances of getting asylum?

— The officers knew we were passing around some kind of paper and calling it a newspaper, but they didn’t know what we were writing about because it was in a language they didn’t understand — Russian. A couple of times, though, they recognized themselves in the drawings.

I was afraid that my little stunt could come back to haunt me, but the chance to support people who were in the same situation as I was felt far more important. When I started getting notes saying that my Vestnik Ebatoriya helped people take their minds off the constant fear, even if only for five minutes a week, I knew I couldn’t stop.

— You mentioned your Telegram channel — tell me about it.

— I started it after I left Russia and ended up in Mexico. At first it was just for friends and family — I wrote about how I was doing. When I was detained, I kept the channel going through that same paid messenger, though it took some time to set things up with my sister, who began posting on my behalf.

At some point, other detainees told their relatives about my channel, and that’s how those families started getting news about our lives in detention — through my posts. The entries that got the most views were about how a group of women and I were thrown into solitary confinement [without any explanation]. I ended up there by accident — I was literally asleep at the time I was supposedly committing “illegal actions.” The other women were locked up just as arbitrarily. Another popular post was about a false report filed against me, claiming that I was allegedly “making sexual noises” with another detainee.

I also wrote in detail about how last winter [2025], we would heat water in plastic bottles in microwave ovens because there was no heating — and no running water at all. The water froze, and we couldn’t wash or even flush the toilet, so we had to warm it up just to get by.

My lawyer was very unhappy that I was running the channel, since it could affect the decision on my asylum case. Even now, some people advise me to “keep quiet” so I won’t have problems getting a green card or citizenship in the future. But if I knew how to keep quiet, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today.

— How many hearings did it take before you were finally freed? What happened at the final one?

— In total, I had six court hearings and one appeal. The final hearing took place on May 14, 2025. The judge granted me political asylum, but, as I mentioned earlier, the prosecutor filed an appeal — without even specifying what they objected to in the ruling. The appeal was dismissed, and on September 8, the court’s decision finally went into force. But even after that, I wasn’t released for another three weeks — I was essentially being held in detention illegally.

The first thing I wanted to do once I was free was to get as far away from the detention center — and from Louisiana in general — as possible.

— If you had known how everything would turn out, would you still have chosen the United States as your destination?

— I try not to think about it, so I can focus on what comes next. But I guess it still hurts: I got out and saw how far my friends had moved ahead, how their lives were unfolding — and it feels as though my time was simply stolen from me.