Austin, Texas, Jun 13 (EFE).- Hilda Ramirez is a Guatemalan Indian who has spent four months in a church that has provided her with sanctuary in this Texas city in order to prevent U.S. authorities from detaining her and complying with the deportation order issued against her and her 10-year-old son.

She has no wish to return to Guatemala, from where she fled north in 2014 without speaking a word of English and very little Spanish. The “humiliations” suffered by Ramirez, 28, for being an Indian made her take that decision, she told EFE in an interview.

In the United States she was held for 11 months in the Karnes City detention center south of San Antonio, a facility designed to discourage the arrival of Central American migrants, but which she was able to leave with a temporary exit permit for her son Ivan.

However, her applications for asylum were refused just at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, seriously stepped up their roundups of undocumented Central Americans.

It was then that St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church opened its doors to offer her refuge.

Afraid to set foot outside in the four months since then, Hilda has only felt the sun on her skin in the church’s concealed little garden.

Her fear is not unreasonable, because the U.S. government has a special interest in detaining and sending back home all undocumented Central Americans who have crossed the border since 2014 and who have already received an immigration court’s final deportation order, many of them mothers with children like Hilda and Ivan.

“There are going to be more roundups,” she said sadly.

Since May 2014 there have been 16 cases of immigrants seeking sanctuary in religious congregations, of whom 13 have now been relieved of their immigration problems. EFE