The difficult journey: Eva Orrego de Zavalo's story

Salvadoran immigrant Eva Orrego de Zavalo could earn privileges during the 45 days she and her daughter were locked up two years ago in what became known as the American deportation mill.

If she cleaned floors, washed dishes and scrubbed toilets, guards gave her two minutes on the phone.

The treatment she and other Central American women and children received at the remote Artesia, New Mexico, family detention center surprised Orrego de Zavalo, now 36.

Guards allowed her daughter, Pauola Zavalo-Orrego, to stay with her mother because the girl was just 11. At 13, mothers and children were separated. Guards woke them up early for breakfast. Lines were long. People at the end sometimes got nothing or little to eat.

"Only a few of the people there spoke Spanish," the woman said of the guards. "They looked at us like we were animals. They would laugh at us and shout at us."

In El Salvador, Orrego de Zavalo had run a small general store out of one of the three rooms of the house in which she lived in Soyapango, a suburban city of 300,000 near the capital of San Salvador. Living there were her husband, Melanio Sobala-Hernandez, who is a police officer, daughter Pauola and an adult niece.

Being married to a police officer in El Salvador was no protection.

"It made us more of a target," she said in an interview from her present-day first-floor apartment in Spring Grove Village. The gang logic was that the family had money and should pay it to the gang as "rent."

Gang harassment started with telephone calls and demands of $200 payments. The family endured it for almost three years. At one point, gang members moved into a neighboring house. Her husband worked 48 hours on and 48 hours off with the police. Intimidation increased when he was not home. One night, Orrego de Zavalo awoke to gang members trying to saw through metal bars that held the flat roof in place.

The family moved several times. The gang always found them.

At 1 a.m. overnight on June 10, 2014, gang members in a yellow pickup and on motorcycles came to their house and started shooting in the windows and doors. The huddled on the concrete floor and prayed. Her husband called the police, who arrived quickly and took the family to the station house. The family did not have enough money for all four of them to leave El Salvador, so Orrego de Zavalo's husband remained behind while she, her daughter and the niece fled.

They were apprehended after crossing the border into the United States. Orrego de Zavalo and Pauola were sent to the New Mexico detention center while the niece was held elsewhere.

This was the path, then, that led mother and daughter to Artesia.

Few immigration lawyers worked in the remote location – 200 miles from El Paso, Texas. She said an outbreak of chicken pox led to a quarantine and delay of a planeload of women and children being sent back in July 2014 to Honduras. She expected that a plane filled with Salvadorans would be next.

For strength, Orrego de Zavalo read the bible she'd carried with her since leaving El Salvador.

She recited the Lord's Prayer. She repeatedly prayed Psalms 23 and 91: "I will say of the Lord, 'He is my refuge and my fortress.'"

One of Orrego de Zavalo's rare calls out of Artesia went to her sister, who has lived in Cincinnati since the early 1990s. The sister, who had received asylum, is married with six children. Her lawyer lives in Texas. A few days later, the lawyer, another attorney and a nun drove to Artesia.

"I told them everything," Orrego de Zavalo said of her conversation with the lawyer, who eventually talked with several other women held there. Other complaints leaked out of Artesia. Shortly after, Orrego de Zavalo saw the first reporters visit the camp.

She and Pauola would be held at Artesia from June 28, 2014, through Aug. 8, 2014. Two weeks after her release, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Immigration Council and other organizations filed suit on behalf of seven women and three children at Artesia. The suit claimed the Department of Homeland Security was denying detainees' legal rights to representation and due process.

In December 2014, Homeland Security closed the temporary facility that been built as a training post for border patrol agents.

Throughout the ordeal, Orrego de Zavalo kept her faith that their lives would improve. They did, eventually. Mother and daughter moved here. Immigration officials granted her a work permit, and she has an appeal for asylum pending. She cleans commercial buildings at night from 5 to midnight. Pauola is in school. The niece is living in Texas.

"I had belief in God and belief in my little daughter," Orrego de Zavalo said.

Her husband, the police officer? He remains in El Salvador.