America's prisons for refugees: we have drug dealers coming across, we have rapists, we have killers, we have murderers.".

• Author: Craver, Jack

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This is the slander against Latin American immigrants made famous by Donald Trump. Unfortunately, it is only a couple of words away from the truth. Murder and rape are indeed major drivers of immigration to this country. But those flooding over the borders are almost all victims, not perpetrators.

The majority are women. Almost all have been beaten, many have been raped, and many have seen friends and family murdered. They come to the United States out of desperation, hoping the Land of Opportunity will let them live, work, and raise a family in peace.

"My father taught me that we need to risk to gain," says Rosa, a nineteen-year-old who fled El Salvador after her father was murdered trying to protect her from the gang leader who raped her. "In this case, we need to risk not to die."

Rosa is one of seven former detainees I interviewed in recent months, all now living in Austin, Texas, some still awaiting decisions on their status. All but one agreed to talk only if I didn't use real names. Some fear exposing themselves or their families to reprisals; others worry that speaking frankly about the poor treatment they endured as detainees could jeopardize pending legal proceedings in the United States. Both concerns are well founded.

These refugees, all once housed in one of several detention centers in Texas, cannot be blamed for lacking faith in the U.S. legal system. Many have played by the rules and still been treated like criminals--not just by Trump, but by leaders typically regarded as sympathetic to immigrants, most notably President Obama.

While the President has championed bringing undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for years out of the shadows, his administration has also responded to the uptick in Central American refugees by seeking to quickly detain and deport thousands of women and children.

Not only are they unwelcome in our country, their time here is often spent behind bars, a cruel irony, since they are the victims, not the perpetrators, of crimes.

Tina, a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican woman, has a typical story. A restaurant owner in a small town, she was kidnapped one night by a group of police officers looking for money. They demanded a ransom of half-a-million pesos (roughly $28,000), which she insisted she didn't have. To make sure she was telling the truth, they tortured her for a week, holding her head under water and shocking her with electric cords. When they were through, they delivered her to a judge on trumped-up charges of drug trafficking.

All of those details she recounts matter-of-factly, in Spanish. It is only later in the conversation, when she mentions that she was raped by guards during the nine months she subsequently spent in prison, that tears spring from her eyes.

"I knew that at least here that would not happen," she says, explaining her decision to come to the United States.

Tina had spent time in this country years ago as an undocumented worker, cleaning houses and sending money back home, a situation prompted by her ailing father's medical bills. This time, her decision to come to Texas had nothing to do with making money, only with saving her life. When she arrived at the border with her husband...