What does daily life look like while waiting to win asylum? That question was central to our latest series, Letters to America. The series, available now, features several individuals sharing their heartwarming – and often haunting – experiences coming from all over the world to seek safety, freedom and opportunity in the U.S.

For many individuals, the journey to being granted asylum is long. Even after arriving in the States, they may be held in detention centers for months or even years before being released into the community and reuniting with friends and loved ones. Many people begin to build their lives while their future remains in limbo. To better understand what daily life looks like for the asylum-seekers featured in our series, select ACLU team members who met with our storytellers share behind-the-scenes reflections to learn more.

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As our crew stepped into Carlota’s home, she gave every member of our crew a warm hug and welcomed us into her home as if we were family.

We started the morning filming Carlota reading her letter about her asylum journey. She read her letter aloud at her craft station where she makes piñatas for her kids’ birthday parties, hand-embroidered tablecloths, and other homemade crafts. In just the first few moments of meeting Carlota in person and hearing her story, it was immediately evident how important family is to her, and how every decision she has made has been for them.

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Fearful for her family’s safety, Carlota made the difficult decision to leave their home and everything they knew behind in Mexico to take her two young children on a journey to seek asylum in the U.S. Today, they’ve been in the U.S. over two years and, while she awaits a final decision on her asylum application, she and her family have worked to build their lives and community here.

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After we finished filming for the morning, all the crew members sat down for lunch with Carlota and her daughter. Carlota and her family had prepared a delicious homemade feast. We had agua de jamaica, mole, fresh homemade tortillas, and frijoles. The familiar aromas and the meal took me back to being at my abuelita’s house eating her home cooked Mexican food. It felt like the comforts of home. As we ate lunch together, Carlota and her daughter were vibrant and laughing as they openly shared stories about their family and their lives here in the U.S.

Carlota told us she can finally feel “tranquility and peace that here we are creating a better future for our children.”

— Eva Lopez, Creative Campaign Strategist

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When our crew arrived at Jessica’s home, we surveyed her living room to find a place to set up our cameras. As we scanned the walls looking for the right backdrop, we noticed a drawing hung up on the wall. “I made that during my time in detention,” Jessica told us.

We asked her if she’d kept other drawings from that time that she could show us. When we arrived at her home the next day, she handed us a stack of papers. We flipped through portraits of her children shaded in colored pencil, pieces of paper with handwritten notes and prayers from her Bible. When we asked Jessica if she had a favorite drawing, she showed us one of a rose that she’d sent to her eldest daughter to celebrate her high school graduation – one of many milestones she missed during her six years in immigration detention.

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As she held the paper in her hand, she lamented the fact that she was unable to give it to her daughter in person at the time, before turning the page to show us the note she’d written on the back: I made this little drawing for you. I love you sweetie. God bless you, your mother.

Jessica had signed her full name on the back of the drawing and, later, told me she did that so that her children knew the drawings were coming from her. “I wanted my kids to remember their mom as a fighter and someone who never gave up,” she told me.

– Gabby Arias, Communications Strategist, Immigration

Kohar Minassian

“If you have a little time,” Joseph said quietly as soon as we entered his home, “I’d like to tell you about the history of Cameroon.”

As he explained his home country’s history of colonization with a professor’s exactitude, I glanced over to my right and realized that there was a baby in a pack n’ play right next to me. She was sleeping angelically, her tiny arms raised above her head, like she drifted off while silently doing the wave. Joseph’s fourth and youngest child, the only one of her siblings who was born in their family’s new home country, was totally unbothered by the strangers in her living room threatening to disrupt her afternoon nap.

Our crew was there to hear and document Joseph’s story seeking asylum in the U.S. while honoring his choice to remain anonymous. This visual challenge led to creative solutions, like the use of filters to abstract a scene, or framing shots to obscure Joseph’s face. The resulting images are a record of everyday moments in the American dream – the shocking red vibrancy of roses after a summer shower, paper planes and real jets soaring past each other carelessly above the suburban sprawl, a dinner table prayer of thanks illuminated by the evening sun.

Kohar Minassian

Joseph shared how his family’s asylum journey had led them to Ohio, where during family meetings they discussed hard topics, like adjusting to their new school system, openly as a group. The smile in his eyes as he spoke was ceaseless, unbreakable, and calm. When his teenage daughter and two elementary school-aged sons arrived home, their house was filled with the noise of family life: the chopping of vegetables for dinner, someone watching a YouTube video in the other room, the scuffle of homework on the dining table.

“My dream is to reach out to the sky,” Joseph told me. “To ensure that my children receive the quality education that they deserve.”

— Kohar Minassian, Senior Multimedia Producer

January 20th will be a pivotal day in U.S. history. On the day we honor the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a global human rights hero, we will also witness the inauguration of a president who has vowed to undermine so many of our most cherished civil rights and civil liberties. Just one day prior on January 19th, the ACLU will mark the 105th anniversary of our founding.

More than a century ago, the ACLU began its fight to ensure the promise of the Constitution and expand its reach to people historically denied its protections. Throughout our history, we have defended the rights and liberties in cases like Scopes, Loving, Griswold, Obergefell, Skokie and Skrmetti that have defined what it means to live in a nation committed to justice and equality.

Even as we celebrate 105 years of fighting the good fight, we are not resting on our laurels. Instead, we’re shifting into high gear; once again called to defend our nation’s civil rights and civil liberties during a most perilous time. At this critical inflection point for our nation, and our organization, we are more prepared than ever to rise to the occasion.

The fight we now confront will take all of us.

At the ACLU, our strength lies not only in our legal and advocacy expertise, or our affiliates in every state in the nation, but in the millions of card-carrying members who have animated our work throughout the last century. In the ongoing struggle for justice and equality, it’s the people who have continuously risen to reclaim power through dissent and struggle against government overreach.

With such high stakes before us, we cannot afford to be distracted by attempts to divide our movement. The intense scapegoating of advocacy groups and the fracturing across issues and communities we see today is unlike anything I’ve experienced in my 23 years leading the ACLU. For a multi-issue organization like ours, these dynamics can be particularly challenging since we cover the waterfront of civil rights and civil liberties issues. However, as an organization committed to free speech, we believe the airing of divergent viewpoints makes us stronger – even when the criticism is focused on us.

Since our founding, the ACLU has endured criticism from all sides – we are perennially accused of having moved “too far” to the left, as well as falling short of so-called progressive litmus tests. In an early critique of the ACLU published in 1923, a West Virginia newspaper detailed an outcry against the organization and its “propaganda” advancing free speech in West Virginia.

In response, we continue to draw on our organization’s history not only to inform our work, but also to put things into perspective. For example, the ACLU is nonpartisan and does not endorse or oppose political parties or candidates. But we have always engaged in political advocacy to advance civil rights and civil liberties, even from our first days. In fact, the original charity organization that was chartered in 1920 was our political arm, a 501(c)(4), and the largest line item in our first budget was, indeed, for “propaganda.” The tax-deductible 501(c)(3), ACLU Foundation, was not formed until decades later.

From the Palmer Raids to the Red Scare, to the House Un-American Activities Committee to the war on terror, to the first Trump administration — our history provides us with good and bad lessons for our future work. Our history reminds us that when immigrants are scapegoated, critics are silenced, or the government deploys the immensity of its resources to target its perceived political enemies, everyone ends up losing.

Drawing on our experience during the last century, we know our most fundamental rights and freedoms will soon be challenged in unprecedented ways. But we are more prepared than ever to fulfill our core mission to defend the rights and liberties granted to all of us by the Constitution. At the state and local level, ACLU affiliates will work to build a firewall for freedom, leveraging the powers of state and local governments to defend rights and liberties. We will also mobilize our members and volunteers to join the fight to uphold our rights and defend those being targeted.

We will turn to the courts as we have so often done in our 105-year history. We will fight any effort to repeal birthright citizenship. We will bring Fourth and Fifth Amendment challenges to mass deportations. We will resist attempts to send federal agents or military forces to quell peaceful protests or interfere with journalists reporting on them. We will stand with the transgender community and their families, arguing that they deserve equal protection of the law against discrimination and prejudice.

Although today’s ACLU may be the largest and strongest in our 105 years, we must not forget that the resources of the Trump administration and the federal government dwarf us by comparison. We remain the David to the government’s Goliath.

In the years ahead, our wins will certainly be hard fought and far from guaranteed. We are clear-eyed about what is ahead of us and recognize that, despite our best efforts and intentions, sometimes we may fall short. If we want to create a more perfect union, we must all recommit to the struggle for justice, fairness, and equality. What better time to do this than on the ACLU’s 105th anniversary.

Shiny Lal is a nurse who came to the U.S. from India at the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic. In a new country facing an unprecedented virus, she dedicated herself to the difficult, dangerous work of front-line caregiving to create a better life for her family. But it wasn’t long before her American dream turned into a nightmare. Her employer, MedPro Healthcare Staffing, is among the growing number of companies that force employees to sign “stay-or-pay” contracts. These agreements impose exorbitant fees – routinely in the tens of thousands of dollars – under the guise of recouping training and relocation expenses if a worker leaves their job too soon. In Shiny’s case, the penalty – up to $40,000 plus MedPro’s enforcement costs – was triggered if she spent fewer than three years working for the company.

MedPro placed Shiny in a small-town hospital in Kentucky where she was underpaid and struggled with an abusive supervisor. Shiny begged MedPro for a reassignment, but nothing changed. After enduring months of unbearable working conditions, Shiny resigned, hoping for a fresh start. But MedPro came after her, as it has pursued other former employees. MedPro filed a complaint against Shiny with the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the world’s largest private dispute resolution company. Without hearing Shiny’s side of the story, the AAA arbitrator rubber-stamped MedPro’s request for almost $36,000 in damages and penalties. Shiny only learned about the ruling many months later when MedPro sued to collect the judgment.

Shiny is far from the only one who has faced the devastating impact of stay-or-pay contracts. According to one estimate, employers use these contracts in an array of fields, including health care, trucking, education, and aviation. Combined, these industries employ 52 million people, or one-third of all U.S. workers. Employers typically use arbitration, a dispute resolution process where a private third party makes a binding decision on a dispute between two parties, to enforce these agreements, which the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, and several courts have been found to violate federal and state labor statutes and human trafficking laws.

Women – particularly immigrant women – and workers of color disproportionately hold the low-wage jobs where stay-or-pay contracts are most common, and disproportionately suffer the consequences of what is both a workers’ rights issue and a civil rights issue. Indeed, it isn’t an overstatement to call stay-or-pay contracts a form of indentured servitude where workers are forced to remain in substandard working conditions unless they are willing to risk financial ruin.

Today, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and Towards Justice, along with 12 organizations called on the AAA to stop helping abusive employers enforce stay-or-pay contracts against their workers by refusing to accept such cases.

To understand just how harmful these contracts can be, the ACLU recently spoke with Shiny about her experience fighting the AAA ruling to free herself from this abusive contract and so she can return to the care-work that brought her to the states. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ACLU: What inspired you to pursue a nursing career in the U.S.? What was your experience like moving and adapting to life here?

SHINY: I first filed to come to the U.S. in 2007 and had to wait 14 years for my application to be approved. It was a long-term dream of mine to be a nurse in a foreign country that had more modern equipment and better facilities. When I did calculations to convert my salary in dollars to rupees, it looked like I would be making good money. My husband, my children and I left everything we had in India to chase the American dream.

MedPro placed me at a hospital that was very remote and had no public transportation. I didn’t have a car or a driver’s license and I had to walk two miles in either direction to work and depend on neighbors to bring us groceries. Eventually I found a better apartment and purchased a second-hand car, but those expenses took up a lot of my salary. My husband couldn’t find a job, and my daughter couldn’t attend college because no one could travel anywhere. It was isolating and scary.

I asked for a different placement where I could have more resources and community, but MedPro knew they didn’t have to accommodate me because leaving the job could ruin me.

ACLU: Before signing, what was your understanding of the “stay or pay” contracts?

SHINY: I knew there would be a penalty for leaving my MedPro job before I’d worked there for three years, but I never imagined I would leave. I thought those three years would go by fast, and that life in the U.S. would be much better than it had been in India. It was only once it was too late that I understood how the contract opened me up to being mistreated by my employer and kept me stuck in a situation that I didn’t feel like I could get out of.

ACLU: How was your job with MedPro different from your expectations?

SHINY: MedPro contracted me to the hospital as a travel nurse, who often gets the hardest assignments in exchange for higher pay, so I was expected to deal with the most difficult patients. But I was earning less than the other staff nurses, not more, and had a hard time adjusting to a new medical system without any sort of guidance.

Soon after I started working, my supervisor began to treat me worse than other nurses, refusing to train me and blaming me for mistakes I hadn’t made. MedPro kept promising that I could switch supervisors, but nothing changed.

ACLU: What ultimately led you to resign your position with MedPro?

SHINY: After several weeks of repeated complaints, I was just told to quit. For a few months, I was forced to survive on a stipend of $350 per week while I waited for another placement, which was so low that I had to start borrowing money from friends to meet my family’s most basic needs. My husband ended up getting ill and had to return to India to receive care, leaving me alone with our two children. Looking back, I can’t imagine how I got through that time. I didn’t know what to do and nobody was there to help me.

After a few months, MedPro placed me at another job, but my debts were piling up. I would be in debt whether I stayed or quit, but if I found a new job with better pay, at least I could start to work my way out of it. So I gave notice to MedPro that I was resigning.

ACLU: How did you feel when you first found out about the AAA arbitration proceedings and the amount you were being asked to pay?

SHINY: After I gave notice, MedPro demanded that I pay them $26,666.68. I was shocked by how high that amount was, especially knowing how much money they had already made off my work. They were charging the hospital $150 an hour, and I was only earning $27 of that. I tried to negotiate, offering to pay $10,000, but they refused anything less than the full amount.

After I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere, I stopped responding to their emails. I didn’t have the money to pay them and I didn’t have the money to pay a lawyer to represent me against them, so it felt like there was nothing I could do.

ACLU: What happens next with your case?

SHINY: Although I wasn’t aware that the arbitration was happening, the arbitrator entered an award against me for $36,592.87. This amount included $12,000 in damages paid to MedPro for the recruiter who I worked with in India, more than $20,000 for my orientation, and around $6,500 for something called “cost of capital,” prorated based on how much time I worked. It also included around $6,500 in interest and $3,500 to cover MedPro’s attorney fees. .

For a year after the award, I didn’t hear anything from MedPro, but in October 2024 I was served with a lawsuit they filed to get a court to confirm the arbitration award. The nonprofit Towards Justice had helped me file a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, but I’m still waiting for a resolution, and I can’t afford a lawyer to defend me against MedPro’s case in court. I am scared that MedPro will get a judgment against me, and I feel hopeless about defending myself.

ACLU: How has this contract and lawsuit impacted your life?

SHINY: I’ve found a new job in a totally different environment that’s much more relaxed and supportive, and I’m finally able to live the life I came here for. My husband’s health improved and he was able to move back to the United States, so my family has been reunited. But I still have the lawsuit hanging over my head, and paying the debt is still impossible. I don’t want all of the work I’ve done towards the American Dream to fall apart. I didn’t understand how easy it was to take away my rights, and how powerless I would be to provide for my family.