Latino America » Uncategorized

Heather Billings — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:54:12 +0000

When Karla fled her native Honduras for the United States she had to cross three borders. On her first trip she was caught and held in Mexico before being deported back to Honduras. On her second try she made it to the United States, only to be caught by Border Patrol. She spent the next seven months in detention while petitioning for asylum.

Click on the headlines in the photo mosaic to the left to learn more about Karla or read her full story below.

Caught Crossing and Detained

By Lisa Ruhl

AUSTIN, Texas — Karla seemed out of place in her bedroom at the shelter. She wore skinny jeans and high heels, and she had carefully done her hair and makeup, making her natural beauty all the more striking. She did not look like a refugee or a person who’d spent time in detention. Her eyes were the only part of her that showed sadness or strain. She lived at the shelter with other immigrant women from around the world. Karla’s story began in Honduras and continued here at Casa Marianella.

The shelter, known as Casa, sits in the middle of a quiet Austin neighborhood. It is made up of three converted residential homes and serves immigrants from around the world, including political asylum seekers and those who have recently been released from nearby immigration detention centers. They stay for weeks – sometimes months – until they get on their feet, or while their immigration cases are still in progress.

The Women

Explore this Topic:

Jennifer Long, executive director of Casa Marianella, has seen many immigrants come and go in her 12 years at the shelter. She introduced Karla, who had recently spent seven months behind bars in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a jail run by a private company with a federal contract. Hutto houses illegal immigrant women in what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service calls the “least restrictive environment” possible.

Karla fled Honduras in August 2009 in search of refuge from her life at home.

She said she did not get along with the father of her children. On top of that she said she’d had problems with a business partner. They’d been involved in a business that sold furniture and domestic items and gave loans to people. She said the customers refused the pay back the loans and her partner held her responsible.

So Karla struck a deal to get across not one or two but three borders. A friend of hers said she’d help Karla if she agreed to bring the woman’s two children. Karla said yes, and her friend got them a coyote.

Karla’s first attempt to reach the U.S. left her in a detention center in Mexico, where she was held for a month, then deported back to Honduras. The children she was responsible for getting across the border were also detained and sent back to Honduras.

On her second attempt, again with the children in tow, she made it much farther.

There was one coyote responsible for her long journey from Honduras to northern Mexico. After her arrival in northern Mexico, she transferred to four guides and a new coyote for the trip into the United States. Karla said the guides took drugs and carried a figurine, Santa Muerte, the death saint, which they worshiped and prayed to.

“We walked a lot – like a hundred miles,” Karla said. “And the man that brought us, the guide, he was yelling at a heavy woman because she could not run. And he left her – a long distance [away] – they left her, yes, they left her – thrown away.”

According to Karla, a 15-year-old boy who was with the group went back to help the woman who couldn’t run. The boy brought her back to the main group, but she still struggled to keep up.

The group of 16 people, including four children and seven women, crossed the Rio Grande near Reynosa, Mexico. They were now in Texas.

“Crossing the river was tremendous, because it was quite cold and the men who [were] passing us from one to another were taking off the clothes of each one – one by one – and I crossed with the children, nude,” Karla said. “The children crossed with nothing. They put us in a car tire [to float across the river].”

“The children cried and yelled because they were cold and they were frozen, very frozen,” Karla said.

Soon after crossing the border, Karla said the guides became extremely nervous about being caught by the U.S. Border Patrol.

They had good reason to worry. The number of Border Patrol agents has increased from 6,000 in 1996 to 20,119 today and the prices coyotes charge to smuggle people have increased proportionately.

Coyotes have also developed a vast system of lookouts and guides to get people across the border. Many of the deals the smugglers make involve one payment up front and another when the immigrant arrives at a drop house or other specified location in the United States. If the smugglers get caught, then they don’t get paid. But they would rather leave their human cargo behind than get caught themselves and face potential criminal prosecution.

Just inside the United States, one of the guides with Karla’s group told them to sit down and wait. Pretty soon the group saw lights in the distance. It was the Border Patrol. The agents took the whole group into custody.

“[The coyote] said he was coming back, but it was a lie. They are the ones that always leave – they never catch them,” Karla said.

Already cold from crossing the river, Karla said she was held three to five days in detention — in a cold room. This was the worst part of her entire detention experience, she said. She described it as, “super, super cold.”

“You don’t know if it is day or night. You don’t know anything. They don’t give you anything to eat,” she said. “Of all the ugly things [that happen to you] this is the ugliest. These rooms. If you ask anyone, the first thing they will tell you is about those rooms.”

Karla said she was interviewed by various immigration officials but mostly she was just left alone with the children in the cold.

Karla said she hugged the children to try to keep them warm. She said the children shivered and cried from the cold. They all slept on the floor. After what Karla thought was three days the children were taken away. She estimated that she spent another two days in the “cold room.” By the end she said she felt “sick in the head.” She said she was hearing voices and talking to herself.

From the Border Patrol station, Karla was transferred to the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas.

Willacy is an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center run by GEO Group, Inc., a private detention company based in Boca Raton, Fla.

There are approximately 442,000 people held in detention centers every year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

A spokesman for ICE said there are more than 2,700 women in federal immigration detention centers on any given day.

According to Eduardo Preciado, assistant field office director for ICE in Arizona, people can stay in detention anywhere between two days and a few years. Their length of stay depends on their immigration case – some choose to stay in detention longer in order to appeal their cases.

Karla was only at Willacy for a few days, but she said the conditions were bad. She talked of food tasting like iodine and having to look at the wall whenever she walked anywhere. The guards would not look her in the face when she asked them a question, she said.

She complained of having to wear a uniform, and not having a private place to bathe.

After her two days in Willacy, she was sent to Hutto – the only all-female detention center in the United States – 40 miles northeast of Austin.

The transfer to Hutto was a welcome change for Karla.

“Hutto was very different,” she said.

From its opening in 2006 until September 2009, Hutto was a family detention center – housing immigrant families, including children, seeking asylum or visas, or facing deportation. The ACLU and the immigration clinic of the University of Texas filed a lawsuit in March of 2007, contending that family detention at Hutto was inhumane.

Because of mounting pressure and public attention that the lawsuit brought to Hutto, ICE moved all of the families out of the facility, transferring them to centers in to Berks County, Pa.

Then the agency set about reforming Hutto. Now, the center houses only women who are apprehended without children. The barbed wire was taken down from the fences; the women are allowed to wear their own clothes and have full-contact visitation seven days per week.

The lawsuit and following reforms have turned Hutto into what ICE calls its “model facility” – and one that made Karla much happier.

Happier, but still in detention.

“Seven months. Seven months I was there. I was sick,” Karla said.

“I was able to put up with being there that long because in truth there are a lot of things there,” Karla said. “There were ball courts — you can go outside! There is no need to have a guard with you, unlike Willacy, where a guard stays with you… there you can walk alone.”

Karla was applied for political asylum, claiming she couldn’t return to her home in Honduras for fear of retribution from her enemies. When she arrived at Hutto, she said, officials asked her if she was afraid to return to her home country then gave her asylum papers to fill out.

She fought for asylum on her own. “I went in front of the judge, the prosecutor, in front of the court by myself.”

After seven months of arguing her case, Karla was granted political asylum. Her excitement didn’t last long, however. According to Karla, her case has been appealed by the government and she is now in immigration limbo.

She has since been released from Hutto, continuing her case while she stays at Casa Marianella. She remains hopeful she’ll win her case. Winning the case or not – she can still never see her three children in Honduras again.

She had to sell her house to get out of debt left over from the business arrangement that went sour. She said the family of her husband bought the house and took her kids away from her.

Karla said the only way she talks to her children is by a friend of her daughter’s going into the house without their father knowing it. She takes pictures for Karla too.

“They wouldn’t let the children come up [to the U.S.], and if I tried they would take them to a place where I couldn’t find them.”

Meanwhile she awaits her fate at Casa Marianella.

While she waited, scandal broke out at Hutto, ICE’s “model facility.”

In early May of 2010 a contract correctional officer working for CCA allegedly groped several women while transporting them to the airport, according to the Williamson County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office.

The correctional officer, Donald Dunn, was fired from his job with CCA, along with his supervisor. After a three-month investigation by the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office, Dunn was arrested and charged with two counts of official oppression and three counts of unlawful restraint.

Heather Billings — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:53:58 +0000

Enriqueta was smuggled across the border and held briefly in a drop house before being arrested and deported. She then made her home in a bus depot on the border… but was she free to leave or caught in some kind of servitude?

Click on the headlines in the photo mosaic to the left to learn more about Enriqueta. Read her full story below.

Smuggled, Held, Deported

By Lauren Gilger

NOGALES, Mexico – Enriqueta was wearing a faded black T-shirt with Playboy bunny logos printed all over it. Her hair was chopped short and her eyes were low. She never smiled, but neither did anyone else in the room.

It was the back room of a bus depot in the border town of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Enriqueta was living there with five or six other people. She’d been working nearly a month to save money for bus fare home — a thousand miles away in Mexico City.

The room stank of unwashed sheets and body odor.

The Women

Explore this topic:

In one corner a man warmed up food in a microwave; another man lay on his back on the beat-up couch, his hands folded under his head, watching advertisements on an old television. His shoes sat on the floor next to the couch.

On the floor lay old mattresses covered with a patchwork of tattered blankets. A woman sat up from one of the beds and spent a minute or two doubled over, putting on her shoes.

Enriqueta’s story didn’t sound very different from the others at first. But as she told it a man stood behind her, his back against the wall. He never took his eyes off of her. Enriqueta wore a cautious expression and leaned close to a woman sitting next to her.

She had decided to immigrate to the United States because she was 47 years old with five children at home in Mexico City. Her job couldn’t pay the bills.

“In Mexico, they pay very little. Everything is expensive; the money doesn’t cover it,” she said in Spanish.

So she made a deal with a coyote — $500 up front to smuggle her across the border, another $500 when they made it into the United States.

Her group started near Sonoita, Sonora and walked for five days through the desert. Enriqueta was the only woman in a group with 12 men. They treated her well, she said. But during the journey her feet were pierced multiple times by cactus spines and became swollen.

“I was very worried because I thought they would leave me behind,” she said.

But Enriqueta made it. Her group was eventually picked up at an arranged spot and taken to a house somewhere in Phoenix.

“The coyote came, got money, and they left us at the house,” she said.

Enriqueta knew she couldn’t leave the house, and she wouldn’t have tried. She still owed the coyotes $500, which “a friend” was going to pay, she said. She had no family in the United States.

“From there we were going to be taken somewhere else,” she said. She didn’t know where.

The house was a brief respite from the journey through the desert. The man watching them there gave her something to eat. He let her take a shower. Then, two hours after the group’s arrival, people were pounding on the door – police, Enriqueta said.

They yelled for all of the immigrants to come out of the house. When they obeyed, “They threw us on the ground,” Enriqueta said.

The police turned Enriqueta and the men over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She was shuffled through the deportation system.

The police told the group they had violated American law, she said.

Immigration officials handcuffed, booked, fingerprinted and detained her overnight before driving her to the border in a bus.

Enriqueta ended up at the bus station. She worked in the grape vineyards outside of town to try to make enough money for the bus ticket home. The men with her at the bus station watched her closely.

In the month since she’d been dropped off at the border, she’d saved 500 pesos, but she needed 700 to pay the fare. She was still $16 short.

As Enriqueta was interviewed by three American reporters, a man stood close by with an stern look on his face, watching her.
Enriqueta looked nervous. Her eyes filled with tears when the reporters asked her in Spanish, “Would you feel more comfortable talking with just women?”

There was nowhere to go to talk alone, she said.

There was a shelter a few blocks away that she could go to, the reporters told her through a translator. She would be safe there; she would be only with women there. In his response, the translator avoided telling her the name of the shelter or where it was.

Outside, after the translator had left with his payment a man approached the reporters. Taking Enriqueta out of that bus depot, he said, would be taking money away from the people who ran it – a woman with dead eyes stationed at the front desk, and a sharply-dressed young man who moved away from the cameras as they approached.

Was Enriqueta paying rent? Was she working off a debt? Was she being held against her will?

The answer was not clear.

Enriqueta and the Men

THE GOODS

Enriqueta’s story is one of tens of thousands of women who risk more than their lives every year crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. For women, the border is more than deadly desert terrain. It’s a battleground and a marketplace – and women are often the goods.

They are the most vulnerable group of people traveling through the desert today: the property of coyotes – human smugglers for hire – and the victims of bajadores – gangs of bandits who roam the desert smuggling corridors kidnapping, robbing and assaulting groups of migrants and their guides as they travel north in the night.

Enriqueta was one of the lucky ones who avoided physical abuse, sexual assault and death. But she did not think so.

“I’m very sad,” she said, sitting in the doorway of the room in the bus depot. “All of the effort was for nothing. It was all to help my kids.”

“I wouldn’t ever try it again.”

If the police had not come so quickly, Enriqueta would have been taken to another underground, unknown location. She was not free to leave.

Had she not come up with another $500 to pay off her smuggling debt, they could have found a way to make her pay – with her hands or with her body. It happens to tens of thousands of immigrants every year.

That’s when a bad situation becomes worse; that’s when a routine smuggling operation becomes human trafficking.

Hundreds of the most desperate people in Mexico and Central America go into debt every day to pay a well-organized network of smugglers to lead them through deadly desert terrain, pack them into the back of old trucks and drop them off north of the border.

Some of them make it. The U.S. Border Patrol apprehends another 600 a day. And unknown numbers remain under control of traffickers.

They are often held and forced to work to pay of a debt that keeps growing.

They work all around us, all the time, as anything – seamstresses, prostitutes, farmworkers, dishwashers, cooks. But they are actually the victims of the one of the most widespread, elusive crimes in the world.

THE ‘SEAMY UNDERBELLY’

In an underground world of labor, sex, money and exploitation, victims of human trafficking are nearly impossible to identify, mainly because they rarely realize that they are victims.

“If somebody is robbed or raped, you know that that’s a crime,” says Dolores Laparte-Litton, a counselor who works as the victim services supervisor for the police department in Austin, Texas. “But if they don’t know that what’s happening to them is a crime, they’re not going to call.”

Sgt. Clay Sutherlin, a 22-year veteran of the Phoenix Police Department and a member of the department’s vice unit, says his team often finds victims of trafficking working as prostitutes.

“There are some girls that we can’t even determine their ages,” Sutherlin said.

“We have this girl in custody and she appears to be a juvenile, but she’s in the country illegally,” he said. “There’s absolutely no records on the girl whatsoever.”

Sutherlin has been working on the vice unit for the last five years – investigating and infiltrating brothels and prostitution rings in Phoenix during a shift that runs from 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. He says the women and girls will not admit to being victims of trafficking.

“It’s mainly the threat of violence, of what will happen to them if they speak,” he said.

Traffickers also threaten victims’ families in their home countries. Victims know that “the ability to get other family members out of Mexico ends if they – if they’re going to turn on their traffickers,” he said.

Sutherlin says the police department promises the victims protection if they will talk.

“[W]e’ll take care of them, we’ll protect them, we’ll house them, we’ll feed them, we’ll find them jobs,” he said, incredulous. “They’re still reluctant.”

According to Rachel Braver, a paralegal at North Carolina Legal Aid who works with victims of human trafficking, victims often see their plight as normal.

“Some of these people think that this is just what they have to go through in order to get a better life,” Braver said. “That this is just kind of one of the hurdles that they have to get over – just like potentially running through the desert in the middle of the night.”

But most victims of human trafficking never even have a conversation with a law enforcement official about their situation.

Human trafficking is a hidden crime worldwide. According to the U.S. Department of State’s 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report, there are approximately 12.3 million people forced into labor or prostitution around the world at any given time. Last year, there were just 4,166 successful prosecutions of human traffickers internationally.

In the United States, which rated itself among the top countries in the annual report, the numbers aren’t much more encouraging.

Since 2004, the Department of State has estimated that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States every year. That’s just a guess. In reality, there is no way of tracking how many people fall victim to well-organized operations that feed countless numbers of people into brothels, lettuce fields, restaurants, meat packing plants or clothing factories every day.

The American Bar Association’s Trafficking Assessment Tool, part of its Rule of Law Initiative, estimates that there are 20,000 to 500,000 victims of human trafficking in Mexico at any given time. The Initiative was designed to analyze international anti-human trafficking laws and assist governments in combating the widespread crime. How many of those tens — or hundreds — of thousands of victims end up in the United States is anyone’s guess.

“We know the number of victims out there is very large,” said Bradley Myles, the executive director of the Polaris Project in Washington, D.C., one of the largest anti-trafficking organizations in the country. He is waiting for researchers at Northeastern University and the Department of State to come up with a more comprehensive count of victims being brought into the United States.

The Polaris Project runs the country’s only centralized human trafficking hotline, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center. Myles said that it has received more than 20,000 calls on that hotline since December 2007.

The majority of the U.S. population wouldn’t know to call in about such a crime. Myles says there is “a much, much larger victim population out there” than what is reported.

Last year, the U.S. Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit, a unit of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, earned 47 convictions in 43 human trafficking cases, according to the Trafficking in Persons report. The same year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement opened 566 human trafficking investigations. As a result, the agency arrested 388 people and convicted 165 of them.

In 2001 the Trafficking Victims Protection Act became federal law. It was designed to aid victims of trafficking and give prosecutors a better chance of making cases against trafficking suspects. Between 2001 and 2005, federal prosecutors identified a total of 555 trafficking suspects, according to the Department of Justice. Just 75 of the suspects were convicted during the same time period.

But, in Arizona, where tensions on both sides of the immigration debate are reaching an all-time high, it’s hard to find a cross-border trafficking case. Since 2002 there have been cases opened against 18 individuals, 13 of whom were charged with human trafficking. All of those cases were domestic, dealing mainly with domestic child sex trafficking over state lines and involuntary servitude cases.

“I like to say human trafficking equals slavery whereas human smuggling equals movement,” said Josh Parecki, assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona. “There could be no movement and somebody could be trafficked.”

Katie Resendiz of ALERT, the Arizona League to End Regional Trafficking, says human trafficking has everything to do with forced labor. A victim of the crime must have been forced or coerced into working, she said.

But as members of the Greater Phoenix Area Human Trafficking Task Force, both Resendiz and Parecki recognize that the first hurdle in prosecuting human trafficking cases in Arizona is recognizing them at all.

“From the line levels of the Phoenix Police Department to the most sophisticated FBI agents, there’s difficulty in detecting this kind of seamy underbelly that exists here in the United States and in the state of Arizona,” Parecki said.

And in the seamy underbelly of the borderlands, exploitation of the powerless only multiplies. And the women are the most vulnerable to it.

EASY TARGETS

Jennifer Long has been working with immigrant women and men as the executive director of a community shelter called Casa Marianella in a shade-filled neighborhood in Austin, Texas for more than 10 years. Immigrants from around the world come to Casa Marianella for a few weeks at a time, including many who have recently been released from the nearby detention center, the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, TX.

She has watched the women come and go for a decade, and she has seen a pattern of abuse rule their lives.

“They were battered in their homes, then they go on this journey where they probably get assaulted again. God only knows what happens to them in detention,” she said. “So they’re already really traumatized by the time we see them.”

“And they’re easy targets,” she added.

As a counselor with the Austin Police Department, Laparte-Litton often compares human trafficking to domestic violence, another crime that is difficult to detect but much more widely understood.

She said domestic violence is a widely understood issue in Texas.

“[W]e don’t blame the victim and we help the victim and we understand why the victim doesn’t leave,” she said. Victims of domestic violence are caught in what Laparte-Litton called a love-hate relationship with abusers. To some degree the victims depend on the abusers. “It’s very similar with the human trafficker,” she said.

“These people are threatened, their families are threatened,” she said. “They are here without papers, without their support system, not knowing the language, not knowing anything.”

“There’s no way out.”

It was only 10 years ago that U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., made human trafficking a federal crime in the United States. In 2000, he sponsored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The law states that victims of trafficking will be protected and provided for even if the victim entered the country illegally.

The act created two kinds of visas for victims of certain crimes on U.S. soil and, more specifically, victims of human trafficking. Both visas can become paths to citizenship for immigrants – the answer to the prayers of innumerable immigrant women who have been victimized at every step in their search for a better life.

But, in the state that’s lighting the fire under the nation’s immigration debate, the visas are not being used to shield victims because no victims are being found.

A SIMPLE CHOICE

In the last eight years, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona has prosecuted no international human trafficking cases.

“We just haven’t had a lot of investigations that have yielded prosecutions here in the district with relation to international victims,” Parecki said.

He joined Phoenix’s anti-trafficking task force in December of last year. Parecki recognizes that there are many barriers to break down before that number of prosecutions will get any higher, from outreach and education about the most basic definition of human trafficking to providing enough resources to fight the crime.

But, with people constangly being smuggled into and out of Phoenix, just detecting victims is the greatest challenge.

“Phoenix has long been what’s called a hub city,” Parecki explained. It’s rarely the final destination for traffickers whose pollos — their human cargo — might end up working at a brothel, in a factory or on a farm somewhere on the other side of the country.

“So at the point that they’re here in Phoenix, it’s hard for us to conclude that, ultimately, they’re going to be trafficked,” Parecki said.

Those immigrants likely don’t know, as they are being smuggled across the border through Arizona, that the house they cannot leave in Phoenix is just a stop on the way to that brothel or factory or farm. But for those about to be forced into what some call modern-day slavery, waiting for the crime to happen to attempt in order to detect it is not enough.

Parecki, for one, is hoping to cut it off at the source, using a combination of international cooperation and training for those who patrol the streets every day.

Local law enforcement – police officers, sheriff’s deputies, Department of Public Safety officers – are the most likely to be the first and, often, only officials to come into contact with victims of human trafficking, until they end up in the custody of ICE.

“Law enforcement can play a huge role,” said Braver, the paralegal with North Carolina Legal Aid and a member of the state’s human trafficking task force. “We think it’s really important that they get trained.”

LOCAL POLICE AND BORDER PATROL
ON THE FRONT LINES

In Austin, Texas, Laparte-Litton heads a staff of 28 counselors on the city’s payroll who work with victims of violent crimes alongside Austin police officers.

A few years ago, the department realized that it needed cooperation from victims who were immigrants “because our cases were going nowhere,” she said.

Now, it’s the officers on the streets in Austin who are charged with recognizing the victims and perpetrators of a crime this hidden.

“We usually train our officers for them to recognize these things because we, as counselors, are not going to be first responders to a scene,” said Laparte-Litton.

That kind of front-line response is exactly what Parecki is aiming for in Arizona. Citing an example in Florida where a local officer on routine patrol saw the signs and called in the experts, Parecki said, “I want our DPS officers to be able to say ‘This smells a little funny.’”

But nowhere in the country are local law enforcement agencies required to receive training on how to recognize the signs of human trafficking. It is just not a priority.

“The truth of the matter is the people I really want to know about it probably don’t,” Parecki admitted.

In one state, at least, all of that is about to change.

Jennifer Fisher has been a law enforcement officer in North Carolina for 13 years, She spent the last year and a half preparing a comprehensive curriculum on human trafficking for the state’s law enforcement officers as the in-service Coordinator of the North Carolina Justice Academy, a branch of the state Attorney General’s Office.

Starting next year, it will be mandatory for every new recruit to the state’s 600 local law enforcement agencies to complete that course.

Beginning at the same time, all current officers will have the option of completing Fisher’s human trafficking course for their mandatory annual in-service to maintain their certifications. Fisher’s program will go a long way in training North Carolina’s 30,000 sworn law enforcement officers.

Fisher has offered voluntary courses on the topic since 2008, “though attendance has been fairly low,” she noted.

On the federal level, half of ICE’s regional offices around the country have hired victim specialists like Laparte-Litton — 13 specialists to augment the work of 250 “collateral duty” Victim Assistance Coordinators who work with victims. Collateral duty means that working with victims is their secondary job. That adds up to 263 full or part-time victim specialists in an agency of nearly 19,000 employees.

The agency has conducted some kind of face-to-face outreach to over 20,000 non-government organizations and law enforcement partners worldwide, but only a little more than 6,000 law enforcement agents have been trained on the issue, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

For many immigration lawyers around Arizona, it comes down to a simple choice for local law enforcement: to identify victims or deport illegal immigrants.

“When law enforcement comes into contact with those people, I guess they have only a couple of choices: They can choose to try to help use the person and get them to help in an investigation to prosecute the human smuggling network,” said Regina Jeffries, who has been an immigration attorney in Phoenix for the last five years. “Or they can just turn them over to ICE.”

In North Carolina, the situation isn’t much different, but at least one woman in a position of power is working to change all of that. As it stands, Fisher recognizes that the first priority of most law enforcement officers in her state is likely deportation, but she says it’s “because they don’t understand what human trafficking is.”

“I’m hoping that through the education and training that will change and become more of a victim-centered response,” she said.

Fisher is a trailblazer in the area. Few, if any other, states require training on a crime that is common but often undetected.

Getting the word out about human trafficking means saving a life to Fisher. She has been to Kosovo to work against the crime, “So no place is too far,” she said.

‘PEOPLE ARE SCARED NOW’

In Arizona, the debate over immigration has reached a fever-pitch.

“Things have become much more radical and polemicized,” according to Judy Flanagan, who has been an immigration attorney in Phoenix for more than a decade. “People are scared now.”

And, in the heart of that volatile environment, she thinks victims of crimes like human trafficking will become even more lost in the immigration war.

“There’s going to be more refusals to really cooperate and help victims of crime,” Flanagan said. “I think it’s certainly going to lead to more deportations, more people in removal proceedings.”

“I think, instead of thinking of somebody ‘Oh, this is a victim of a crime?’ it’s ‘Do you have papers?’ she said.

Now, she said, “the focus is on deportation.”

“I’m not saying police shouldn’t check the status of someone who’s committed a double homicide,” Jeffries said. “They shouldn’t be asking questions about victims.”

Building a partnership with the community is written on the wall of the Tucson Police Department in the agency’s mission statement. To public information officer Lt. Fabien Pacheco, enforcing federal immigration laws in his city would counter that most fundamental duty.

“We’ve spent many, many years working out that relationship with the Hispanic community,” he said. “We’ve gotten to the point where they trust us to be able to report crimes.”

Lt. Bob Wilson, 23-year veteran of the police department, agrees.

“If they don’t call us, unless we have the patrol officers noticing something out there that’s very obvious in their face all the time, we won’t know about it until it’s too late,” Wilson said. He said community trust and involvement is increasingly important as the department continues to face budget cuts and a shrinking staff.

“If crime is allowed to foster and nobody does anything about it, it will just grow and grow until there’s decay in the neighborhood,” Wilson said.

IDENTIFIED, FINGERPRINTED,
HANDCUFFED AND DETAINED

For many criminals, the border is a market and women are merchandise. They are the bought and sold by coyotes, smugglers, traffickers. And if they are intercepted by law enforcement or immigration officials their troubles don’t end.

On any given day, more than 2,700 women are held in immigration detention centers in the United States. Some of them are assuredly victims of trafficking, who, according to by federal law, should be protected. But the victims are rarely identified.

The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report recommended that action be taken to identify crime victims within detention centers. The State Department also ranks countries on their ability to combat crime and protect victims. One of the standards for the rankings is whether victims are unnecessarily detained.

But some researchers and victim’s advocates have questioned the U.S. government’s resolve in protecting victims. In April 2010, Meghan Rhoad and Alison Parker of Human Rights Watch in New York wrote a letter to the State Department in which they identified eight victims of human trafficking who had been held in U.S. immigration detention centers.

“It is our understanding that it is the position of the United States government that victims of trafficking are rarely, if ever, held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities,” wrote Rhoad and Parker. “However, in the course of research for numerous reports on immigration enforcement activities, Human Rights Watch has been confronted with cases in which trafficking victims have in fact been detained, sometimes at great length.”

Nina Rabin, director of Border Research for the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University of Arizona says detention centers are not effective at helping victims.

“I think that it’s probably more prevalent than anybody could report… because … it’s so difficult to communicate with people once they’re in detention,” Rabin said.

“There’s just no real mechanisms for a safe place for them to talk about what’s happening to them,” Rabin said. Her report on women in immigration detention facilities in Arizona, “Unseen Prisoners,” brought national attention last to the lack of basic health care in the ICE facilities.

“The system gives very little in the way of opportunities for them to voice it because, especially if they’re in expedited removal, it’s all going to happen really fast,” she said.

“It’s really likely that they’re going to go through the system without any chance to really talk to anyone.”

Many detainees will never go before an immigration judge, she said. And most will not ask for help even from the resources that are available in the detention and deportation process. “It’s not just going to be as a matter of course you get psychiatric or psychological support,” said Rabin, who talked to dozens of women being held in Arizona’s three detention centers for her report.

“A lot of women, I think, whether they’re trafficking victims or [domestic violence] survivors or whatever, I think they’re really unlikely to seek that kind of help out,” Rabin said.

But, from Border Patrol and ICE agents to local law enforcement officers statewide, it seems as if it’s no one’s job to recognize victims as they’re shuffled through the immigration pipeline in Arizona.

According to Border Patrol agent David Jimarez, a public information officer in the Tucson Sector, investigating crimes that may be reported by illegal immigrants in the desert is not their responsibility. “That would have to be local law enforcement,” he said. “There’s no reason for us to gauge that, because we don’t investigate. We gauge the flow of the people, and that’s what we do.”

“How much manpower does it take to do an investigation?” he asked. “You see what I’m saying?”

“It just got overwhelming,” he said.

The Tucson Sector is the busiest in the country. It covers 262 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border and 90,000 square miles of the desert terrain. There are more than 3,000 agents in the sector, Jimarez said, and, in fiscal year 2009, agents apprehended more than 240,000 people.

And for the size of the area there is a relatively small number of local law enforcement officers on patrol. They can’t begin to investigate all of the crimes that happen in the region. “We are, oftentimes, the only law enforcement out in the desert,” Jimarez said.

According to Rabin, neither local nor federal law enforcement are focused on human trafficking.

“I don’t think there’s somebody whose job description it is to do that right now, but I think it should be built into the system,” Rabin said.

Rabin says victims should be brought before judges who can “weigh whether it really made sense to detain somebody that’s dealing with that kind of trauma.”

But Rabin says it’s unlikely that a victim in the immigration detention system will come forward to a law enforcement official of any kind – federal or local.

“I think, ideally, you would have someone removed from the system that they could turn to,” she said.

Even then – and even if a woman got the rare chance to tell her story to an official along the way – it doesn’t mean she’ll be released from ICE custody. Once someone is detained, he or she is isolated from the outside world.

“Part of it is that there isn’t enough notification,” Rabin said, “but the other part is even when there is notification, they often don’t release people.

On the whole, there is a system of well-meaning laws, watchful local officers, investigating federal agents, prosecuting attorneys and altruistic lawyers in place to combat human trafficking in America. There is a system in place.

But the most vulnerable people in the most vulnerable place are slipping through the cracks.

Heather Billings — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:53:46 +0000

Iris didn’t know when she left on her journey that a woman’s body is all she has to barter with in the desert. Frequently, it is the only currency that matters.

Click on the headlines to the left to view photos of Iris and learn more about what happened to her.

Read Iris’s full story below.

Bought, Sold and Assaulted

By Lauren Gilger

NOGALES, Mexico — Iris cried as the curved needle pierced the skin on the palm of her hand.

A medical volunteer had numbed the area, but Iris still clutched the older woman’s hand and cried. The woman rocked 21-year-old Iris back and forth like a child.

The volunteer with the needle was just a college kid on an alternative Spring Break in Nogales, Mexico; they were probably the same age. He shook his long hair out of his eyes, set his face with a stony glare and pushed the needle through and out the other side of the gash. It would only take a few stitches to close the cut.

The Women

Explore this topic:

Iris hid her face in the older woman’s chest. The two had never talked directly because they didn’t speak the same language; they didn’t even know each other’s names. But the older woman sat on the metal bench and whispered into Iris’s ear as the young man with the needle sewed her skin back together where it had been torn apart.

The older woman — an American — had come to the Kino Border Initiative because she wanted to help; Iris was there because she had nowhere else to go. She’d been dropped off on the Mexican side of Nogales the day before — by the U.S. Border Patrol. She came to the shelter to get a meal.

The Kino Border Initiative shelter consists of a makeshift kitchen and three long tables under a sloping, corrugated metal roof. One wall is a fence, another is a bright blue tarp; another, the red dirt of a Sonoran hillside. The shelter is operated by the Catholic Church and staffed and managed by Jesuit priests.

Iris lined up before breakfast that morning and ate at a long table lined with other migrants, but she didn’t blend in. Unlike the other women, who mostly wore dark or masculine clothing for their attempts to cross the border, Iris wore a bright purple shirt and a plastic clip in her hair. It was in the shape of a bow. Her shirt was skin-tight and unbuttoned at her breast, and she wore skinny jeans with her stylish tennis shoes. The others knew better. They had crossed many times before.

This had been Iris’ first – and last – attempt.

When the American volunteers came after the meal with their bags full of clothing and their boxes of medical supplies, she showed them her hand. The antiseptic stung so much it brought tears to her eyes. But there was an even deeper pain.

A volunteer translated questions.

“Are you going back?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

The volunteer listened to the answer. He fell silent and looked at his hands. After a moment, he repeated what she said.

Iris wouldn’t try to cross the border again because something terrible, nearly unspeakable, had happened in the desert.

A VIRTUAL WAR ZONE

Iris didn’t know when she left on that journey that a woman’s body is all she has to barter with in the desert. Frequently, it is the only currency that matters.

Most immigrants begin their journey far from the border and risk becoming victims at any point. More than half of the women migrating through Mexico, hoping to reach the United States, will be sexually assaulted along the way, according to a report by Amnesty International. They might be forced to pay the coyotes — smugglers for hire — with their bodies or they might choose to become a smuggler’s “compañera” in return for protection of their lives. Some will be forced into human trafficking and held for ransom or sold into prostitution. Many will be raped because they don’t have the power to stop it.

Iris is one victim of a wave of crime that everyone knows is rampant but rarely reported.

Crossing the desert is going to be dangerous for anyone, man or woman, said Border Patrol agent Colleen Agle. She said the coyotes on the border are part of “multi-tiered, very sophisticated organizations that are basically in the business of smuggling people.”

Those organizations are often controlled by drug cartels that have power over every part of an immigrant’s journey north. People paying for the service of being escorted across are often actually paying to be abducted, abused, abandoned, or held for ransom.

The record shows that illegal immigration is inherently more dangerous for women.

According to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s records, 56 women died in the desert in 2008 and 2009. In 2007, it was 50 in one year alone — around a quarter of the total number of deaths that year. The same year women made up only 17 percent of all deportees sent back to Mexico, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

A 2006 report by the University of Arizona’s Bi-national Migration Institute, which looked at deaths in Pima County from 1990 to 2005, found that women are 2.87 times more likely to die from exposure than men.

A report by the American Civil Liberties Union says that women are also more likely to be left behind by coyotes, who often abandon groups of border crossers when they become lost or when Border Patrol agents are closing in.

While it is dangerous for anyone in the desert, the numbers show that danger multiplies if you’re a woman.

Iris unknowingly walked into a virtual war zone – a territory controlled by gangs and defined by violence. When she did, she became collateral.

THE CHASE

Iris is from Veracruz, the lush state on the southeastern coast of Mexico. She and her 18-year-old sister left for the border to escape poverty and send money back to family, just like most of the migrants who cross the desert to get to the United States.

“My mother is sick and my sister has a child,” she said at the Kino shelter, which is a five-minute walk from the border. “There’s no work.”

Iris left for America with her hair in a neat braid, her eyebrow pierced, and her eyes wide. She started the trip with two coyotes. She paid them $2,000 up front — with another $2,000 promised upon arrival. She did not know they would exact a much higher payment.

But coyotes aren’t the only ones looking for money in the no man’s land that is the Sonoran border region.

They started out walking at night, with the smugglers smoking a drug that Iris could not identify. After two days the group of 16 people crossed into forbidden territory – controlled by bajadores, or gangs of bandits who kidnap, traffic and otherwise profit from the migrants and smugglers in the desert. “Very bad people,” Iris called them.

“They wait in the desert for us, the women,” Iris said. “They grab us.”

The $2,000 Iris had paid wasn’t enough to buy any protection from the original coyotes. They sold Iris, along with her younger sister and six others, to the bajadores for 500 pesos each — about $40. And with that simple transaction, she was theirs.

Soon after the exchange, six of the men attacked and raped a 17-year-old girl from the group. Iris and her sister ran. A man chased them.

Iris fell on a rock and cut the palm of her left hand – but she got away by hiding under a cactus.

The man told her to come out. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he told her.

“But I knew,” Iris said. “One guy before had touched us.”

Iris kept her younger sister hidden under a cactus beside her for the next three nights, until another gang of men spotted her sister’s bag.

This time, Iris did not escape.

“They told us we had to give up our bodies if we wanted to go free,” she said. “We had to give ourselves to them.”

Iris cried again as she said this, like she had when the needle first pierced her numbed skin.

She did it for her little sister. “If I didn’t, they would kill her,” she said.

The sisters lived but didn’t go free. Shortly after being sexually assaulted Iris and those in her group were caught by the U.S. Border Patrol and deported. The got off the bus in Nogales and she made her way to the Kino shelter.

NOBODY’S JOB

Iris was one victim in the desert. The 17-year-old who was assaulted in front of her was another.

Officials who monitor every part of the immigration pipeline – law enforcement, immigration lawyers, advocates, and activists – all agree the situation is dire. A large proportion of women crossing the border are being attacked, kidnapped, raped and held for ransom.

What no one agrees upon is a solution.

Tim Jefferson, an advocate with the U.S. Attorney’s Office Victim Witness program in Tucson, recognizes the problem: Violence on the border is increasing, “and it affects everything.”

Eydie Robertson, Jefferson’s colleague based in Phoenix, said her office sees two major ways immigrant women become victims: injured in car crashes or held hostage by smugglers and traffickers. She has worked on behalf of women who have been raped or forced into servitude in the process of coming to this country.

“They’re traumatized,” she said.

But Robertson most often deals with women at the end of their harrowing experiences. Border Patrol agents are most likely U.S. officials to first to have first contact with a woman who is a victim – though, odds are, they’ll never hear about it, nor are they eager to find out.

“If someone doesn’t tell us, then we’re not going to know,” said Agle, who works for the Border Patrol in the Tucson Sector. “And that’s not a question that we would immediately ask somebody.”

They look for signs of injury or severe dehydration, she said. “If they request to see a doctor immediately, we make sure that they get the attention that they need.”

But Iris didn’t have any visible wounds, save the deep cut on her hand.

For Agle, it comes down to the numbers. Almost half of the illegal immigrants apprehended along the southern border are caught within the 90,000 square mile zone that makes up the Tucson Sector, she said. The sector covers 262 linear miles of the border.

The Border Patrol there is overwhelmed – and the pressure is only increasing. In fiscal year 2009, agents apprehended more than 240,000 people in the Tucson sector alone, according to Agle. So far this year, through the end of June, the Border Patrol has already arrested more than three-quarters of that number.

“We’re seeing huge volumes and we want to process people as fast as possible,” she said. “If they don’t let us know things like they’ve been assaulted or that they’ve been raped or that they, for some reason or another, fear for their safety, then we wouldn’t know.”

Valerie Hink has been a lawyer with Southern Arizona Legal Aid in Tucson for more than a decade. She has only encountered one woman who pressed charges after being raped in the desert. But Hink knows there are likely countless similar cases that are never reported – or recognized.

“We’re trying to get Border Patrol to recognize them, identify them and refer them,” she said. “But they don’t have enough training, or they don’t have enough time or expertise to do that.”

Agle does not disagree. It is a matter of focus and mission.

“The Border Patrol is just a border enforcement agency,” according to Agle. “We don’t do investigations.”

“It’s always very sad when you see anyone put through any kind of hardship or any kind of traumatic situation,” she said. “But it’s just one of those things where we have to do our job.”

Investigating the cases of rape victims like Iris is simply not their job. Deporting them is.

A BROKEN PROMISE

Just on the other side of the hill from the Kino Border Initiative shelter lies the U.S.-Mexico border.

Corie Darling spent five months this year interviewing migrants, sweeping the floors, washing the dishes and cooking beans and rice at Kino. She recently earned her master’s degree in international social work from Boston College and she has kept a running tab of the number of people who came there to eat twice a day since January, when she arrived.

In a three-month period last spring Kino served more than 19,000 meals, feeding only a small fraction of the people who are dropped off just over the border in Nogales daily. In 2006, the Border Patrol apprehended more than 1 million illegal immigrants, according to the Department of Homeland Security. In 2008, it was more than 700,000. Sixteen percent of them were women.

Darling watched them come in and out every day, twice a day, and she conducted interviews with more than 2,000 of them. “There are still a lot of people coming for the first time,” she says. “So whatever we’re doing on this side – beefing up the border or all this stuff – it’s not affecting the flow of people.”

Men, women and sometimes children, she’s watched them come in after sleepless nights on buses and long mornings waiting in the crowded line outside of the comedor, or food kitchen. “It seems like the majority of people are being deported between the hours of 10 p.m. and, like, 5 a.m.,” she says.

After working with the homeless in Chicago for two years after college, Darling is used to hearing tough stories. Darling helped translate Iris’s story for this article. And she knows that women’s experiences are often more traumatizing and painful than those of immigrant men.

“The women, when you talk to them, their stories are just … their stories are just tinged … with an extra bit of tragedy,” Darling said.

“The migrant men have told me that they think that it’s just the hardest for the women because of all the extra stuff they have to go through,” she said.

For Sister Maria Engracia Robles Robles, each woman who comes to Kino is facing the decision of a lifetime. “For all, it’s always a dilemma about what to do – to try to go back again to the United States or go back to where they came from,” she said in Spanish.

Robles, a small woman, talked as she sat at the head of a large dining room table inside Casa Nazaret, a two-bedroom apartment with four bunk beds, located across the street from the comedor at Kino. It’s a special residential shelter for the women who come to Kino, a place to take a breath and soak their feet and think for a time.

Robles has seen 500 women come and go since the shelter opened two years ago – plus 50 of their children. “They have to decide,” she said. “It’s their lives, it’s their history, their future, their luck.”

And luck is something each woman will need — whether she decides to cross again, or go back home. For Darling, neither answer is a good one.

In the United States, “she’s making five times what she would be making in Mexico and she can send that back home,” Darling said. “It’s very hard, then, for her to say ‘Well I’m just going to stay here in Mexico and basically we’re all going to starve.’”

But, Darling knows the alternative is just as deadly.

“It’s a risk when you go across,” she said. “There are all of these men out there and you are the minority, you have something that they want and so sometimes giving that piece of yourself up keeps you safe in other ways … It’s like Iris was saying, I mean, she gave up herself to protect her sister.”

From the first woman she met working at Kino, Darling said their reasons for crossing have stayed the same: “Over and over, that’s been repeated,” she said, “that they’re doing it for their family, that they’re trying to support their kids.”

For Iris, giving up that piece of herself to that man on the ground in the desert wasn’t too much to ask, for her family. Her biggest regret was that she didn’t make it to the U.S. to send money back home.

“I made a promise to my mother,” Iris said.

The border broke it.

Heather Billings — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:53:03 +0000

Concepcion set out from the state of Morelos, in Mexico, to visit her daughter in Pennsylvania. She made it to the border and was never heard from again.

Click the headlines on the left to view photos of Concepcion and her family.

Read Concepcion’s story below.

Missing and Missed

By Rebekah Zemansky

Maria Hernandez missed her mother’s long-awaited church wedding in Mexico City. But her mother, Concepcion Tlatenchi, did not want to miss Maria’s wedding day in Pennsylvania.

So Concepcion set out with Laura Delgado, a 21-year-old neighbor from the state of Morelos in Mexico, to make the precarious journey north. Concepcion was coming for Maria’s wedding and to visit her grandchildren. Laura was headed to join her father in New York.

They never made it.

The Women

Explore this topic:

It’s been a year, and no one’s heard since from either woman or the man hired to smuggle them into the United States.

Their families’ hopes that they are alive fade a little more each day, just like those of thousands of families whose loved ones have disappeared in their attempts to enter the country illegally.

“I think the worst that happens to a person is missing someone that you love and living with not knowing where is that person at, and having that faith that one day she’s gonna appear – and that’s the worst,” said Maria, herself an illegal immigrant. “Because if your mother dies you… in your heart, you know that she is dead and you pray for her and everything, but you know that she is dead. But in my situation, I don’t know if she’s dead [or] she’s alive.”

Maria tries to keep hope, but her mind inevitably wanders.

“They say that they have people working like slaves, that they use their body and sell it, so many things I heard everywhere, and I’m always thinking where is she, where is she, and it’s very hard…If she’s dead, I only want to know where she’s dead so I can cry over her body.”

She feels pangs of guilt but says she went on with the wedding because that’s what her mother wanted.

“Sometimes I feel guilty because she came for me…she came to see me. She came for my wedding, she came to help me. And a lot of people told me to don’t get married anymore because she was not here. And I told them that was the [dream] of my mother, to see me with a white dress,” she recalled.

“I was gonna do it, no matter what, no matter if my wedding was not what I was expecting, to be the happy ceremony that I always expect but it was the wedding my mom always want for me.”

‘A Better Life’

What Maria’s parents wanted for her and her siblings was a better life. It’s a familiar story, one shared by her mother’s missing traveling companion as well.

As a child, Laura Delgado lived in San Carlos Yautepec, Morelos, with her mother, Maria del Carmen, and her brother, Jose Ernesto. Her father, Leonicio, had gone to the U.S. “to give them a better life,” he said in a series of e-mails.

“She was a very happy child and during that time we only talked by telephone,” he recalled.

Laura graduated from elementary and secondary school, but by 15 she was married and had a daughter named Maria Fernanda.

“But after the birth of her daughter, the husband practically abandoned her in Mexico,” her father noted. “Seeing herself the situation she was in, she told me she wanted to come to change her luck because she didn’t have any work and it was very difficult for her…She asked me to help her to come (to the U.S.) to give a better life to her daughter.”

She would send for her daughter when she could. Her boyfriend was in New York as well as her father.

Delgado said Laura took a bus to Mexico City on July 30, 2009, then took a plane to Hermosillo, Sonora. She arrived at 9:30 p.m. at a hotel named El Aguila.

“She sent a message to Carmen (her mother) asking about her daughter, Maria Fernanda. The next day she sent another message saying that she was going to try to cross the border and then we never heard from her again,” Delgado recalled.

The Search

Maria last communicated with her mother by text message. Then a week passed and she heard nothing. Worried, she used the only contact information she had for the man paid to guide Concepcion and Laura.

“First he says he didn’t know where she was, then he told me to wait, then passed two weeks, three weeks, and it was too much and I didn’t know where she was,” Maria said. “First he told me that immigration probably caught them and had them with them and that’s why he didn’t know nothing about them, then he told me that last time they see my mother was crossing the border from Nogales to Nogales, Ariz. in a town called Rio Rico, and then immigration comes and everybody separate and everybody run, and then that was the last time they see my mother. They never see my mother again.”

From Pennsylvania, Maria began to search for her mother.

“I call immigration and they look for her if they have her in there,” Maria said. “So I call them and I ask about her and they sent me to different places, and I call them and call them, and all of them told me that they don’t have no record of her in there.”

Maria also contacted officials at the Mexican Embassy; they had no record of her mother. She called Derechos Humanos — an immigrant advocacy group in Arizona, who had heard nothing. Maria asked the group for help checking the morgues. There was no trace of her mother.

Help for Families of the Missing

A host of public and private agencies help relatives of missing immigrants in the search for their loved ones. Read More >>

Family members like Maria call anyone they think may have information or be able to help – local law enforcement, humanitarian groups, consulates, morgues and even immigration.

Detective Sgt. Jose Cota of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department says it is routine for family members of the missing to do their own investigations and to contact multiple agencies looking for information. They worry that officials will find the body of their loved one.

“That’s what they fear the most,” Cota said. “That this person is now dead.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have a centralized place for family members to call, but the agency lists its detention centers and contact information by state on its website.

In Tucson, the Mexican Consulate has set up a 24-hour call center that has fielded inquiries from all over the world. There are also non-governmental organizations like Coalición de Derechos Humanos that help family members track of missing persons.

Kat Rodriguez of Derechos Humanos guides callers through an intake form used to collect information that can identify someone by physical characteristics – height, weight, hair color, scars – or track possible places to search – date of crossing, who else was traveling in the group, where they were going to get picked up and if anyone else in the group was apprehended.

“They call. They find us online. We try not to go back and forth because we don’t really want to re-victimize people, so we get the data, as much as we can,” said Rodriguez. “If there was somebody in the group, that’s ideal, and I’d rather talk to that person than third hand through the father who the cousin told the father… so I go directly to the person.”

In cases like Maria’s, there’s little that officers or officials can offer.

“They only told us to wait and wait and wait,” Maria said. “And next Monday’s gonna be a year, waiting, on what’s going on, and nothing happened – nothing happened, and it’s already a year waiting.”

Without answers, families struggle to cope with uncertainty.

“My dad is so desperate to find her,” Maria said.

When no more information came, her father, Nicolas Hernandez, contacted psychics.

Nicolas also went to the Mexican side of the border himself to look for his wife, checking with police, government groups, border crossing points and even the hotel where she may have stayed in hopes of getting more information. On the U.S. side, Laura’s father did the same.

Both families were left with a sense of uncertainty.

**********

Maria says short moments and mundane activities take on new meaning when a loved one is missing.

“It’s hard. It’s hard because you don’t know to cry of her death or cry because you don’t know nothing about her or be happy because probably she’s alive or…” Maria said, pausing. “You gonna eat something, and you don’t know if she’s already ate something, you’re happy and you don’t know if she’s happy.”

Two Worlds, Two Weddings

There are two sets of wedding photographs in Maria’s living room. One set is from her mother’s day and the other from her own. Each is a daily reminder of what the family has gained – and what it has lost.

Maria’s parents spent over 15 years in New York, bringing their two children to keep the family together. But after a brush with immigration and several failed attempts to get legal residency papers, Concepcion and Nicolas decided to retire to their house in Morelos, Mexico.

Their younger children, Hector and U.S. -born Elizabeth, went back, too. But Maria had recently relocated to a small town in Pennsylvania with her long-term boyfriend and her two U.S.-born. Maria stayed.

The transition was tough for everyone. Her parents had to deal with a harsher side to life back home.

“They saved a little bit of money, but the money over there go fast, and when they end up with they almost have that their savings is gone, and when my dad start working, and he find out that the money over there is nothing, it goes very fast, and there’s less,” Maria said.

While Maria’s parents struggled financially, her children asked about their grandparents frequently.

“It was lonely,” Maria said.

Even celebrations turned bittersweet. Having been together over 30 years, Concepcion and Nicolas decided to get married by the church. Maria and her family were unable to attend; they’re missing from the pictures on the wall from Mexico City.

Then it was Maria’s turn to plan a wedding.

She remembers telling her mother that she was engaged.

“She said she wanted to be in the wedding, and I told her no because it was too dangerous,” she said. “Then she said, ‘I’m going to do everything to be in your wedding.’”

Everyone was aware of the danger.

“Everybody told her, ‘Don’t do it,’ and it was something she wanted to do it so badly so she didn’t even tell us when she was coming, she called me and she told me, ‘Oh, I’m on my way,’ and I told her, ‘Don’t do it,’ but she didn’t listen.”

Moving On

Maria has attempted to make the most of her life in America. In New York City, she had volunteered at a radio station that wanted to hire her but couldn’t because she had no Social Security number. She is now active in community affairs, serving on the board of directors of her church and a community group. She works as a translator.

She has agreed to speak about her mother in the hopes of finding her, in spite of the possibilities that she may put herself in legal jeopardy. She’s going on with her daily life, but there are constant reminders of the uncertainty of her mother’s situation.

Maria’s children ask about their grandmother – at bedtime, at special events, at church.

“We stopped talking about it because of the health of my kids, and I want — I keep everything for myself because I don’t want them to see me sad all the time because now I’m living for my kids right now,” Maria said. “I want them to be happy and not grow up with the depression I have and being OK, and I try to not talk about it. And this affects me a lot.”

When it gets too much to handle, she talks to her husband and to her family in Mexico – her father, her brother and sister, her mother-in-law and brothers-in-law.

Maria and her husband sometimes talk about going back too.

“When you have a birthday or something, you feel lonely because you want your family to be with you. No matter how good the party is or how good everything is, you know you’re missing something.”

But like her own mother, Maria wants her children to do better than she did.

“My kids were born here, my son wants to do something in life, and we take him over there, it’s gonna be hard for him,” she explains.

Her son, Julio, is an honors student. He wants to be a neurosurgeon and at 14 is thinking ahead towards medical school and a practice, possibly back in New York City.

Maria looks forward to the day when he will graduate.

“I will feel very proud, I will feel that all the sacrifice that I’m doing is going to be rewarded,” Maria said. “Cause I’m teaching my kids to be good kids, to be good citizens and to help whoever ask for help, no matter who or what, what color, what person, what age, they always has to help people.”

By Rebekah Zemansky

The Busiest Border Patrol Sector

Heather Billings — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:59:45 +0000

The Tucson Border Patrol Sector is the busiest in the nation. Its agents apprehend between 400 and 600 illegal immigrants daily. Ten percent of those are processed through Streamline.

by Lauren Gambino

Operation Streamline

Explore this topic:

Main

Prosecuted Under Streamline
Jailed for Crossing

In Tucson, the criminal hearing process begins at 9 a.m. in the Evo A. DeConcini U.S. Courthouse. The defense attorneys arrive in the second-floor courtroom to meet with their clients. It is common for one lawyer to represent six clients per day.

In the morning the courtroom is treated as a pseudo-jail because there is not enough space to provide private sessions between client and lawyer. The lawyer gets between 20 and 30 minutes to explain the charge brought against the client, the potential sentences, and the client’s legal options — and to offer legal advice. The defendants and lawyers are given a short reprieve before they appear again in court for the defendants’ combined initial appearance, change of plea hearing and sentencing hearing.

Court commences promptly at 1:30 on this afternoon with U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Ferraro of the U.S. District Court in Tucson calling each defendant by name.

“Presente,” the defendants respond one by one. Of the 70 people processed for court on May 27, 39 plead guilty to a misdemeanor illegal entry charge (United States Code, Title 8, 1325), 28 plead guilty to an illegal re-entry felony charge (United States Code, Title 8, 1326) and three are dismissed prior to the hearing.

Arizona is divided into two Border Patrol sectors, Tucson and Yuma. Tucson Sector agents patrol the eastern half of the state, starting in Ajo and stretching across Nogales, Tucson, Douglas and Patagonia and other cities and towns along the border. The Yuma sector patrols the western side of the state from the Colorado River into California’s Imperial County.

The Evo A DeConcini Federal Courthouse in Tucson, Ariz.

The Tucson Sector is the busiest in the nation. On any given day Border Patrol agents will apprehend between 400 and 600 illegal immigrants, of whom about 10 percent will be processed for Streamline, said David Jimarez, the Tucson Border Patrol’s public information officer.

There are three other methods of removing an illegal immigrant from the country aside from Operation Streamline in Tucson, Jimarez said. It is up to Border Patrol agents to decide how an illegal immigrant will be processed and deported, according to the rules and regulations stipulated by the District of Arizona U.S. Attorney’s Office.

One process is an “expedited removal,” in which an agent formally removes the illegal immigrant from the country. To qualify for an expedited removal, the illegal immigrant must have entered the U.S. within the past 14 days and must have been apprehended within 100 miles of the border, Jimarez said.

Another option is the “Alien Transfer and Exit Program,” which ships illegal immigrants to California for a voluntary return. This program buses about 94 illegal immigrants per day from Tucson to a port of entry between Mexico and California. Candidates for this program are generally males over 18 who are not traveling with their families.

Another 30 illegal immigrants a day will receive a “notice to appear,” which means they will have to go before an immigration judge within 48 hours of receiving the notice. The plea is processed in a “quick court,” where expedited immigration hearings take place. Only adults who are not eligible for asylum or voluntary return can be given a notice to appear. The quick courts take place in Border Patrol detention stations and in the judge’s chambers.

All of those who are not removed through one of these programs are processed administratively and then voluntarily returned, Jimarez said. All of these programs are designed to deter border crossers from entering illegally and to reduce the number of voluntary returns processed each day.

On this day, Judge Ferraro calls the migrants to the front in small groups to make their guilty pleas. Each migrant in the group makes the plea individually: some for illegal re-entry, some for misdemeanor entry but who had criminal records. These defendants were sentenced to between 10 and 180 days in prison depending on their criminal history and the severity of the crime.

Everyone else pleads guilty to a misdemeanor and are given a sentence of time served because they have no criminal record.

The accelerated pace of the Streamline cases make it harder to ensure that a defendant understands the process, as one case illustrated that afternoon.

“How do you plead to the charge?” Ferraro asks one defendant.

“Sì, Señor.” The defendant responds.

“ ‘Yes’ is not an answer. How do you plead to the charge? Guilty or not guilty?” Ferraro asks again.

“Sì, Señor.” The defendant answers, shifting his weight nervously. Ferraro says again that “yes” is not the appropriate response to the question he is asking. He repeats the charges to the defendant and again asks for a plea. The defendant looks at his lawyer for help. His lawyer whispers something into the defendant’s ear.

“Cupable, Señor?” The defendant answers a third time. The magistrate judge nods, accepts the guilty plea and calls the next defendant’s name.

By 3:30 p.m. most defendants are on a deportation bus back to Mexico. Very few actually understand what has just happened or that they now have a criminal record in the U.S., say public defenders who are involved with the process.

Heather Williams, a federal public defender in Tucson, says if attorneys must spend at least 20 or 30 minutes with each client to offer the minimal level of legal help to which they’re entitled.

“We don’t really feel comfortable about that for all kinds of reasons, but we think that there is something that resembles effective representation to have that,” Williams said.

Twenty or 30 minutes with each client means an attorney can represent up to six people a day, Williams said.

Attorneys must determine if the client is competent enough to make a plea. He or she must rule out incompetency due to mental illness, lack of education, being under the influence, physical illness, inadequate nourishment or lack of sleep, in the short amount of time the attorney has with the client, according to a letter Williams addressed to the U.S. House of Representatives regarding Operation Streamline.

“Many of these people have no inkling of what this is about,” said William Fry, a supervisory federal public defender in Del Rio, Texas. “You do the best you can with them. If I sense that a particular person that I’m talking to doesn’t understand what he’s doing, of course I would certainly bring that to the attention of the judge.”

There are also concerns that a client may be unaware that he or she has a claim to citizenship, a claim to asylum, or is disqualified from going through the Streamline process because he or she is a juvenile. The defense attorney has to gather enough information in a half hour to offer sound legal advice.

“Some of these cases are defensible and some of these people have claims to citizenship that they’re not even aware of,” Fry said. “In other words, it was difficult for me as a defense lawyer to agree to a program like that.”

A major legal concern regarding Streamline is the “en masse” hearings that have been conducted in Tucson. Opponents argue that mass advising of rights and mass taking of guilty pleas violates a person’s right to due process and Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Rule 11 says that defendant’s must be addressed in person by a judge in open court and advised of his or her rights. The court must also ensure that pleas are made voluntarily and that there is a factual basis for the plea being entered. and that the information given to the defendant, and the defendant’s plea, must be recorded.

“Dispensation of justice? Are we doing this to give people justice or to move them through the system?” said U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard Mesa, of the U.S. District court in El Paso. Mesa allows seven people into his court at a time. Each day he has three one-hour court sessions for illegal immigration hearings.

Mesa understands why these shortcuts have to be made, especially in sectors where the numbers are nearly triple the number he sees per day.

“It’s difficult to make the accommodations to do seven at a time. What would happen if we did them one at a time and went through the requirements of Rule 11? That is all I would be doing all day?” Mesa said.

A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling based on a challenge to Tucson’s mass hearings established that magistrates cannot take pleas in large groups. Mass hearings persist in the Tucson court, but the major difference is that magistrate judges now take pleas individually from each of the 70 illegal immigrants in the courtroom. Magistrates must also secure individual responses to a series of questions that ensure the defendants understand their rights and the charges being brought against them.

Critics argue that the ruling did little to protect the migrants’ rights to due process and effective legal counsel. A series of appeals by public defender Jason Hannan of Tucson and one by fellow public defender Heather Williams, are currently going through the district appeals court, fueled by accusations that the mass hearings still violate Rule 11.

U.S. District Judge Philip Martinez says he too has qualms about en masse hearings violating Rule 11. He said taking mass pleas shortchanges a defendant’s right to a fair hearing and belittles the significance of each individual case. But he also admires the overall way the United States deals with illegal immigrants.

“It’s a remarkable country that provides [illegal immigrants] with a lawyer, with an ability to contest charges, with a requirement that the government meet the required burden of proof, and I think that’s one of the reasons so many individuals really wish to be here in this country,” Martinez said.

Streamlined, Prosecuted and Deported With a Criminal Record

Heather Billings — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:50:44 +0000

by Lauren Gambino

Operation Streamline

Explore this topic:

Main
Prosecuted Under Streamline
Jailed for Crossing

NOGALES, Sonora, Mexico — Rosalinda Rodriguez-Martinez, 61, worked as a caretaker for an elderly couple in Arizona for 14 years. She developed a genuine affection for the family and enjoyed taking care of them. She said the family paid her fairly, $12 an hour, and treated her with kindness and respect.

It was the kind of job that people travel hundreds of miles across the Sonoran desert to secure. It is the kind of job Rodriguez-Martinez is certain she won’t find in Guadalajara, Mexico; her final destination after being deported through Operation Streamline, a program aimed at deterring illegal immigration by criminally prosecuting border crossers.

She pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor entry into the United States. If she tries to cross again and is caught she will be charged with a felony and could face up two years in prison.

It’s been a hard transition for Rodriguez-Martinez, who this day is sitting in a bus depot in Nogales. Her odyssey began when she decided earlier this year that she wanted to return to Mexico to visit her parents, who live in Guadalajara. They were getting old, and her father’s health was beginning to fail.

Rosalinda Rodriguez-Martinez tells her story of apprehension, detention, prosecution and deportation under Operation Streamline. (Click to play video.)

In early May 2010, Rodriguez-Martinez crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, going south. She made it to Guadalajara without any problems. But getting there was never going to be the problem. It was the arduous journey back north that would be challenging.

Rodriguez-Martinez said she realized that she could be caught trying to cross the border into the United States without papers but willingly took that risk to visit her parents in their old age.

She paid a coyote — a smuggler — to lead her into the United States, where she had a job, a home, a 30-year-old daughter and a boyfriend. She was part of a small group of people who began the clandestine journey north on May 25.

The group walked for several days, and at one point stopped to rest. Rodriguez-Martinez said her feet were blistered so badly that she was unable continue walking. She lay down and fell asleep. When she awoke, the group had abandoned her. Alone in the blazing desert heat with no food or water and no idea where she was, Rodriguez-Martinez continued walking.

After two days of wandering through the desert, Rodriguez-Martinez was so dehydrated and sun-baked that she could not speak. On June 1, a U.S. Border Patrol agent found her nearly unconscious on the side of the road near Lukeville, Ariz.

The agent gave her water and took her to the Tucson Border Patrol Station. Rodriguez-Martinez said she drifted in and out of consciousness during the ride. She remembers signing some paperwork at the station. Her next memory is of being shackled and put into a crowded room in the detention center. She said she was forced to stand in the room for hours.

She said the agents separated detainees into groups to eat. They were fed cold hamburgers and given juice to drink. Their shackles were not removed while they ate. There was also a large dispenser of warm water available to the detainees.

Rodriguez-Martinez said she felt like she was treated badly in the detention center. She said there were some guards that were kind to the detainees and others who yelled and threw juice cartons at them.

The Nogales border crossing.

“I’m very afraid about what happened with the immigration officials, the way they threatened me, the way they yelled at me,” Rodriguez-Martinez said.

The next morning, Rodriguez-Martinez was transferred to the Red Cross for a medical examination and returned to detention the same day.

On June 4, Rodriguez-Martinez was brought to court at 9 a.m. to meet with her court-appointed attorney David Maldonado. She said the lawyer explained to her in Spanish what was going to happen in court and advised her to plead guilty. Rodriguez-Martinez said she wanted to plead guilty because she knew she had entered the United States unlawfully.

That afternoon Rodriguez-Martinez pleaded guilty before Magistrate Judge Hector Estrada to improper entry by an alien. She received a sentence of time served and was deported the same day.

Rodriguez-Martinez, who has no formal schooling, said she understands that she now has a criminal record in the U.S. and can be convicted of a felony if she is caught trying to enter unlawfully again. Her eyes well with tears as she relates how she felt going through Streamline. She said having a criminal record embarrasses her, especially after spending 14 years in the U.S. without an infraction.

She would like to return to the United States to see her 30-year-old daughter, who is a legal resident of the United States, and to see her American boyfriend. However, this process has made her wary of returning.

“I don’t know if I will go again,” Rodriguez-Martinez said. “I’m very afraid [to go back].”

Four days after her deportation, Rodriguez-Martinez is sharing a makeshift bedroom with several other deportees in the back of a bus depot in Nogales, Sonora. She will stay here until she earns the 600 pesos — the equivalent of $46, necessary purchase a discounted bus ticket to Guadalajara, where her parents and other children live.

Sentenced to 30 Days in Jail For Illegally Crossing the Border

Heather Billings — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:47:21 +0000

by Lauren Gambino

Operation Streamline

Explore this topic:

Main
Prosecuted Under Streamline
Jailed for Crossing

FLORENCE, Ariz. — Gerardo Morales-Perez knew crossing la frontera wasn’t going to be easy.

The 22-year-old knew about the Sonoran Desert wasteland and the risks that came with traversing it. He knew if he could get to North Carolina he might find the job his friends promised existed. And he knew if he was caught he would end up where he began: in Siltepec, Chiapas, Mexico, with no job and no money.

What Morales-Perez didn’t know: He could end up serving 30 days in federal detention for entering the U.S. without documentation.

And on this day, Morales-Perez, is telling his story from the Central Arizona Detention Center, a federal prison in Florence, 62 miles south of Phoenix and 140 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Morales-Perez first attempted to enter the United States through El Paso, Texas in 2009. Not long into his journey norte, Morales-Perez was apprehended by a U.S. Border Patrol agent on July 31, 2009 and immediately deported to Nuevo Laredo.

From there he traveled to Monterrey, where he worked until he earned enough money to return to home to his family in Siltepec, a town at the southern tip of Mexico near the Guatemala border.

In Siltepec, Morales-Perez worked on his family’s milpa (field) alongside his mother, father and older brother. After a year of farming maize, squash and beans and earning no money, the yearning to head north to the U.S. and escape his poverty-stricken hometown returned.

A mural painted on the border fence in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.

He heard whispers of a job opportunity in North Carolina. Without confirmation or certainty, Morales-Perez departed for the U.S. by way of Tucson, Ariz., in July 2010. He said he didn’t know how far North Carolina was from Arizona or how he would get there once he arrived in the United States. Still, the possibility of a better life outweighed the alternative: poverty and no hope for the future.

Morales-Perez hitched a ride from his home to Comitan, Chiapas. He then boarded a bus to Altar, Sonora, which cost him 1,100 pesos ($86) and took four days. In Altar he hired a coyote to help him cross. Morales-Perez, along with 26 other migrants, followed the coyote into Sonoran desert.

At some point during the first night, the coyote fled. The migrants were awakened before dawn by a Border Patrol agent. The agent loaded the migrants into cars and transferred them from Lukeville to a detention center in Tucson on July 7.

Morales-Perez said they were processed immediately and given cold hamburgers for breakfast. That afternoon an agent informed him that he would be going to court the following day.

At 5 a.m. on July 8, Morales-Perez was brought in shackles to the Evo A. DeConcini U.S. Courthouse in Tucson. He and the 69 other Streamline defendants were put in holding cells until it was time to meet with the lawyers at 9 a.m. They were given hamburgers while they waited.

The Central Arizona Detention Center in Florence, Ariz.

Morales-Perez met with Richard Bacal, an attorney from Tucson under contract to the federal courts. Bacal explained that he would represent Morales-Perez that afternoon and told him what the charges were: a misdemeanor for entering the U.S. illegally and a felony for re-entering after his previous former deportation.

Bacal briefed him on the Streamline process and told him that this was different than an immigration court. Bacal advised him to plead guilty to the charges because if he did the felony would be dropped. The lawyer said Morales-Perez could plead not guilty and he would be entitled to trial, but he would spend more time fighting the charges than it would take him to serve a misdemeanor sentence. And regardless of the sentencing, the end result would be the same: deportation. After his 30-minute session with Bacal, Morales-Perez returned to the holding cell to be re-processed by the federal marshals and to await the afternoon hearing.

That afternoon Morales-Perez pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 30 days in the Central Arizona Detention Center federal prison in Florence. Morales-Perez said he believed that he was the only one from his group apprehended in the desert to go through Streamline.

On July 10, Bacal sits with Morales-Perez in the visitation room at the prison. It has only been two days in lock up but Morales-Perez said he is convinced that he will not try to cross illegally again. He said the 30 days in prison will work as a deterrent because he cannot afford to be out of work for a month.

“It’s better to be making a little money then to be here in jail,” Morales-Perez said in Spanish.

When he is released, he will have to do the same thing he did before – work until he can make enough money to afford a bus ticket back to Chiapas.

He knows what awaits him in Chiapas: He’ll be forced to take whatever job he can find just to get by. But the threat of a longer prison sentence if he is caught is enough to keep him from trying again to cross the border again —for now, anyway.

Mexican Horse Breeder Victim of Execution-style Murder

Heather Billings — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:02:32 +0000

Violent death stalks immigrants and others who come into contact with cartels.

By Lisa Ruhl

TUCSON, Ariz. – Line by line, the police and autopsy reports tell the story of Mario Rivera-Rivera’s undoing along the border.

His head was almost completely wrapped in duct tape. It covered his scalp, eyes, nose, and top lip.

Death on the Border

Explore This Topic:

Main
An Execution-style Murder

Unidentified Dead Common Along the Border

His hands were secured with electrical cord and baling string, then duct-taped behind his back.

The bullet entered near his right ear and traveled through his skull from back to front.

A pool of blood lay coagulating next to the body — some of it running down an incline in the terrain.

It was an execution.

“There wasn’t any sign of a struggle,” said Detective Martyn Rosalik of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. “He was walked north of the border and he was either put down on his knees or face down — really hard to tell — and shot behind his right ear.”

The body was found 26 yards inside the United States.

Violence like this is escalating in Pima County, which borders Mexico and is part of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, by far the agency’s busiest enforcement zone. Much of the violence is attributed to the illicit drug trade — investigators believe this was the case in Rivera’s execution — but some of it is increasingly directed toward illegal immigrants trying to enter the U.S. to work.

Pima County records show that in 2001 there were three violent deaths — a classification that ranges from blunt force trauma to hanging to gunshot wounds — among suspected illegal border crossers. In 2002, the number rose to 14 and has stayed in the double digits ever since. In 2009 there were 24.

Photo Gallery: An Execution on the Border

“Most gunshot deaths are from drug trafficking — from the rival smugglers,” said Dr. Bruce Parks, the chief medical examiner at the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office.

The Rev. Delle McCormick, executive director of BorderLinks, an education and activism group that focuses on immigration issues, described drug trafficking and smuggling as “the big business of war on the border.”

That big — and growing — business is taking over illegal immigration and seeking to turn a profit from it. And these businessmen aren’t really interested in keeping their customers safe.

“The smuggling routes are absolutely being controlled by the cartels now,” said Agent David Jimarez, a spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol in the Tucson Sector. “Because of them, it’s become a much more dangerous place to be.”

That danger extends to Border Patrol agents who deal with everything from being pelted with rocks to armed confrontations with drug smugglers.

In June, in El Paso, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed a 15-year-old Mexican boy in response to alleged rock throwing.

As cartels have taken over human smuggling routes they have also increased their drug running into Arizona. Last year, 1.2 million pounds of marijuana was seized in the Tucson sector — the most marijuana that’s ever been seized by one sector, according to Jimarez. This year, he said, agents are on track to break that record.

The drug smuggling, the human smuggling and the harsh elements make the Tucson Sector an increasingly dangerous place for illegal immigrants, who can end up as victims even though they took no part in crime, other than paying to be smuggled across. Most of them come to the United States looking for work, and the Border Patrol has stated that the vast majority of illegal immigrants detained and deported aren’t taking part in the drug trade.

There were more than 1,500 deaths in the sector between 2001 and 2009, according to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. Most of the victims succumbed to the harsh elements. The causes of more than 500 of these deaths are still undetermined, mostly because the bodies were so badly decomposed by the time they were found that bones were all that remained.

When the Desert Itself Becomes a Killer

Besides the danger of violence that can come from criminal elements along the U.S.-Mexico border, the environment can seem almost as ruthless and unforgiving.

The terrain is harsh. The weather is torturous – especially during the summer months.

To Border Patrol Agent David Jimarez, a death from dehydration and hyperthermia can look just as violent as murder. He described the recent scene of a death caused by the elements. The man had struggled in his last moments, no doubt wanting to keep moving in order to find water.

“I saw suffering; I could see his kick marks in the sand. His eyes were glazed over,” Jimarez said.

Out of the 1,534 border-crosser deaths in Pima County between 2001 and 2009, at least half were environmental — which means hyperthermia, heat stroke, dehydration and exposure. There were probably hundreds more, but their remains were so badly decomposed that the cause of death couldn’t be determined.

Hyperthermia — the overheating of the body — includes six stages that eventually end in death.

It starts with heat stress – when people can start to get tired and dizzy from walking in the heat.

It ends with heat stroke. A person’s sweat runs out; muscles lack water and therefore break down. Body temperature skyrockets to 108 degrees. There’s no coming back at this point.

The elements have always been present. But the elements combined with cartel violence have made the border region a special kind of hell for illegal crossers.

– Lisa Ruhl

But of the deaths for which autopsies have determined causes, about 17 percent of them were violent in nature. And for all but a few of them, it’s likely the killers will never be identified.

Murders in the desert are among the toughest to solve because Mexican authorities aren’t always willing to cooperate with their counterparts in the United States, Rosalik, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department investigator said.

Such is the case with Mario Rivera-Rivera, the victim who was tied up and shot in the head. His body was found Nov. 2, 2009, and despite intensive investigation there have been no arrests.

Rosalik said Rivera’s family broke off communication with the sheriff’s department after they identified the body and he does not know if they reported the case to Mexican police — leaving the investigation on the American side at a dead end.

“The thing that’s really frustrating in a case like this is that we can’t go into Mexico,” Rosalik said.

There are some clues as to what might have happened. Authorities believe Rivera was not trying to enter the United States but likely was forcibly taken north across the border to die, perhaps to throw off investigators.

Rivera was a horse breeder outside of Sonoita, Sonora a city of about 10,000 located across the border from Lukeville, Ariz. On Oct. 31, 2009, Rivera walked with his dog away from his farm and wasn’t seen again until he turned up dead just 26 yards inside the United States.

His family knew something was wrong when his dog returned to the farm alone an hour and a half after Rivera first left. And there were other clues that led family members to believe something sinister had happened.

“His baseball cap was laying on the ground and that was unusual because he never took his baseball cap off,” a family member said in the police report.

Two days later, Agent J. Lewis of the Border Patrol was the first to stumble upon Rivera’s body.

On patrol around 9:30 a.m., Lewis saw a water bottle cap and footprints crossing from the Mexico side of the border into the United States. He followed the tracks north.

In his report to sheriff’s investigators Lewis said he found a Hispanic male lying on his stomach surrounded by foliage. The victim was dressed in brown boots, white pants, a green belt and a sweatshirt. Lewis notice that the victim’s head was wrapped in duct tape and that his hands were tied behind his back.

Another interesting detail: a horse bridle was tied to the body.

Rumors going around Rivera’s hometown of Sonoita said the drug cartels murdered the horse breeder. Family members told authorities they believe Rivera could have been doing something illegal and that they too believe his murder has ties to the cartels.

The horse farm Rivera owned is close to the border in an area known for marijuana smuggling and as a launching point for those trying to enter the United States.

According to the police report, Rivera had sold horses to local drug dealers to be used for drug smuggling into the United States. And, according to the police report, people in Sonoita said that Rivera had lost a drug load that he was storing at his farm.

Rivera was found 14 miles west of the Lukeville, Ariz. port of entry — in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where violence and drug smuggling is nothing new.

The National Monument land shares a 31-mile border with Mexico. In recent years Park Rangers have been drawn into drug trafficking cases, arresting smugglers and seizing loads. In 2002, U.S. Park Ranger Kris Eggle was killed by a suspected drug cartel hitman fleeing Mexican authorities.

The escalating violence is not lost on many who are smuggled into the U.S. illegally. Dozens of recently interviewed border crossers attest to the growing danger.

One, Juan, has tried his luck in the desert twice — and was recently waiting to go for a third time. He had lived in North Carolina with his family for 15 years before being deported for driving without a license.

On the day he spoke to a reporter, Juan was at the Kino Border Initiative, a shelter for deportees and potential border crossers in Nogales, Mexico. Juan washed dishes, ate, and talked to other deportees while waiting for the right opportunity to return to his wife and children in North Carolina.

Juan knows from experience the danger that awaits border crossers in the desert, and he knows he is lucky to have twice survived the trip.

“Some groups, they get jumped by guys. They take their money, clothing, and they abuse the women – they get violated, you know,” he said.

Juan’s first journey to the United States, he says, was uneventful. It was in 1995 and he was in search of a better life. His brother said, “Don’t worry about a visa, you’ll be fine without it.”

And Juan was fine for a few years. After being deported for the first time in 2002, he ventured into the desert to cross again.

He crossed successfully but he could tell the border was now a more violent place. He believes it was worse because of 9/11. Ramped up security on the border, Juan thinks, has caused a more ruthless and violent environment for crossers to navigate. The number of Border Patrol agents has increased from 6,000 in 1996 to 20,000 and so the risk of being caught has risen dramatically. So have the prices coyotes charge to smuggle people.

Last year, 241,000 people were apprehended in the Tucson Sector. According to Jimarez, an estimated 20 percent of those people had criminal backgrounds, ranging from theft to murder. The other 80 percent are the people who may get caught in the crossfire.

Juan doesn’t want to cross again but he probably will. What he wants is to bring his family back to Mexico. “It’s not such a good idea to cross the border,” he says in wry understatement.

Unidentified Dead Common on the Border

Heather Billings — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:55:38 +0000

Families of missing immigrants, law enforcement and medical examiners band together in a macabre effort to match unidentified dead bodies with missing persons.

By Rebekah Zemansky

TUCSON, Ariz. — The calls come in every day from people who are searching for sons and fathers, mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers. Robin Reineke seems unfazed by the volume as she patiently asks the same questions case after case.

Where was he going? When was she last seen? How tall? How much does he weigh? Does she have any tattoos or scars? Has he had any dental work, and do you have a picture where he’s smiling?

Death on the Border

Explore this topic:

Main
Unidentified Dead Common Along the Border

Luis
Estefany
John Doe
Carmen
An Overwhelmed System

An Execution on the Border

Reineke, a University of Arizona graduate student, is working for the Pima County, Arizona Medical Examiner’s Office, trying to identify the unidentified — scores of people who have died in the desert, most of them migrants crossing illegally from Mexico to the U.S.

Pima County is more successful than most at the task — it identifies 70 percent of the bodies brought in. Yet staff members push themselves to do better — they know that for the 30 percent of their cases that are unresolved they cannot return the body to family members. And those mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, husbands and wives may never be at peace.

“The tragedy of the situation is similar to the tragedy that we see on a daily basis here of people who often through no fault of their own or maybe were naive to some degree end up dying at the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Dr. Bruce Parks, Pima County’s medical examiner.

Since 2001, Parks’ office has handled more than 1,500 border-crosser deaths, a major increase from prior decades. More than 500 are John or Jane Does — people whose bodies have been too damaged by the harsh desert conditions or who carry no verifiable identification.

Southern Arizona became a preferred place to cross in the 1990s, when U.S. immigration officials implemented tougher border enforcement through Operation Gatekeeper in California and Operation Hold the Line in Texas. The clamp down in those states funneled more illegal immigrant traffic into Arizona. In the meantime, border security has been increased across the board, with more formidable fences and an increase in Border Patrol officers. All this has resulted in smugglers leading migrants through more remote territory — higher into the mountains, farther from towns and highways and deeper into the desert.

Workers from Adair’s Carroon Mortuary help Santa Cruz County officials recover an unidentified dead body in the desert near Nogales, Ariz.

“It’s been going on now for over 10 years and there are offices like this which are involved in finding out who the people are and there’re offices doing other aspects of the work to try to locate these people and save them and take care of them and render medical care, if they’re lucky enough to survive,” said Parks. “So in southern Arizona, and a few other places along the border, it’s a big deal and it’s a sad situation.”

And the problem continues to grow worse. So far 2010 has broken records for migrant deaths each month: 18 deaths in January; 24 in February; 11 in March; 14 in April; 17 in May; and 25 in June.

The process of identifying the dead is a painstaking one. Sometimes things fall into place — a missing person’s report matches physical descriptions of a body or other descriptions provided by relatives searching for loved ones.

Reineke is the last person relatives of missing persons call. It means they’ve already spoken to other family members and aid workers searching for loved ones; they’ve already checked with the detention centers and the consulate offices. They’re facing an unpleasant possibility — that their search will have a quick ending and a very permanent resolution. The reality is that, for many of them, a process with an uncertain ending has only just begun.

After each phone call, Reineke hangs up, and the detailed work of cross-checking the missing persons report with possible matches in the medical examiner’s records begins.

As she goes through clothing and effects, she’s looking for anything that stands out as unusual, something that might make the person identifiable to relatives searching for missing loved ones. For one John Doe, it was a religious token.

“I always enter all of the clothing this person was wearing, and I try to enter as much detail as I can about any words on personal documents,” Reineke said. “One of the documents that was found with this body was this saint card.”

Photo Gallery: Identifying the Dead in Southern Arizona

Many migrants carry scapulars, saint cards that they pray will give them extra protection on the dangerous journey north. When Reineke began cataloging effects for the body recovered July 7, 2008, the saint card stood out not because it was there but because it wasn’t the Virgin of Guadalupe or another familiar saint. Instead, Señor Santiago Apostol, venerated in the town of Oxtotitlan , state of Guerrero, in southwestern Mexico, was someone she had never heard of.

“But the important thing was that on the back, there’s this handwriting here,” Reinke said.

Some words were clear — “Victorino,” “Grande” and possibly “Cruz” — while others, like what might be “Acattandela,” were puzzling.

“I wrote that in the notes,” Reineke said. “And then I actually had a couple of dreams about that word I think ‘cause it stuck in my head and I was Googling it a lot because I was trying to figure out if it was a town or a village or someone’s last name and I kept coming up with nothing. These two t’s, that’s really unusual in Spanish, so I couldn’t figure it out.”

Also noted in the John Doe’s case file — a rosary, a blue shirt, black pants, red and black shoes. Reineke looked at the information, entered it and searched among the missing based on time, location, and physical descriptions — but among nearly 500 unique, complicated cases, there was no instant match.

A match was finally made — seven months later.

Each time an unidentified body is found, a new story starts for Reineke. Each missing person report becomes a file with a case number assigned to the name, the story and the family’s contact information. Carmen Antunez Grande, Estefany Lisseth Chavez Chavez and Luis Yair Zamudio Rodriguez are among the Pima County cases.

Luis Yair Zamudio Rodriguez, 31, was from the state of Oaxaca, Mexico but had lived in Phoenix for over 20 years. When his attorney called Reineke to file a missing person report, Luis had last been seen Aug. 19, 2008.

Estefany Lisseth Chavez Chavez was also trying to reach family. The 17-year-old from El Salvador hadn’t seen her parents since they left her with relatives to try to make a living in Southern California. Of the cases reviewed for this story, she is the only person who had never lived in the United States. According to her missing person report, she was last seen May 16, 2008.

Carmen Antunez Grande was going to rejoin his brothers, partner and child in North Carolina after visiting Mexico to take care of family there.

Luis

Luis Yair Zamudio Rodriguez, 31, had lived in Phoenix for more than a decade. He was married with three children who were all U.S. citizens. But his missing person report was filed by his attorney in Florence, Ariz., because after a year of struggling for legal residency, Luis had exhausted all options but voluntary departure. So he left but decided to return.

“He tried to re-cross to join his wife and three children in Phoenix, but he was never seen again after Aug. 19,” Reineke said. “All his family knows is that he was crossing with one other man who had been deported. This man said that Luis’ feet had become damaged and he couldn’t continue.”

The man traveling with Luis remembered part of the name of the place where he had left Luis — at “Marshall Station,” “Mars Station” or maybe “Marsh Station.”

There had been no new word for two weeks. At the same time, Luis’ wife and children were facing eviction in Phoenix, because without him working, rent was unaffordable.

When they filed a missing person report on Sept. 12, 2008, Luis’s family thought they knew where he had been left and heard that a body had been recovered from the area. The family attorney faxed a missing person’s report with his name, photograph and fingerprints to Reineke.

Along with a pair of Nike tennis shoes and a receipt from a Mexican drugstore dated Aug. 16, three days before Luis was last seen, the body recovered on Aug. 31 near Marsh Station road and Interstate 10 had legal documents with Luis’ name and a Phoenix address.

Luis’ autopsy report lists the cause of death as hyperthermia — overheating of the body. His wife’s examination of his teeth finalized the identification. She was now officially a widow with three young children.

Reineke said the deaths and disappearances she deals with has the biggest impact on citizen children of immigrants, who are often left without one or both parents, sometimes far from other family members. “They’re probably being more affected than their relatives in Mexico, for instance,” she said.

Most unidentified cases handled by the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office do not move so quickly.

Luis’ travel companion was willing to talk and gave important, accurate information about when and where Luis was last seen. The family and Luis’ attorney acted quickly, contacting the Mexican Consulate and the medical examiner; Luis himself was carrying identifying paperwork that helped make the circumstantial identification. That led straight to a positive identification based on his medical and dental records.

Without documents, with a bigger gap in time, or with less information known, a case quickly becomes much more complicated.

Estefany

The call came in to law enforcement shortly after 6 p.m. on May 26, 2008, from a mile marker on Arizona state route 286. A local man walking his dog spotted buzzards in the sky. He investigated, thinking one of his cattle had died. Instead, he found a young woman face down, a shoe nearby.

The Border Patrol arrived, secured the area and took his statement. A deputy and then a forensics officer arrived from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. They photographed the scene. The deputy helped place the body into a bag and then into the Medical Examiner’s vehicle that would take her to Tucson. She was another Jane Doe.

The Mexican Consulate was notified and came to examine the body as well, looking, like Reineke, for clues that would lead them to her name and family: her glittery belt, her crooked front teeth — a condition known as maxillary winging — her young age and tiny stature.

About the same time, the family of Estefany Lisseth Chavez Chavez was contacting the El Salvadoran Consulate, worried about their daughter.

Estefany was 17 on May 16, 2008, when she last communicated with her father from Puebla, Mexico. This was not the start of her journey, but the middle. She had already traveled a long way since she left her home with relatives in El Salvador on May 8. She was coming to join her parents, who’d been living in Southern California for years now, saving enough money first to send back to her and then to bring her to them.

Reineke said Estefany set out to cross the border into Arizona on May 20. Many people in the group she had traveled with ended up in detention — but Estefany did not. “She wasn’t detained and they don’t know what happened to her.”

The Salvadoran consulate put together a flier with Estefany’s name, information and the dates. At the top, her photograph shows her alone, in graduation regalia from her school in El Salvador and with serious expression on her face.

Reineke began her search after she got the report from the Salvadoran consulate. And she called the family to ask follow up questions, including whether Estafany had crooked front teeth — like the body that was found on May 26.

“I talked to the dad in California, and this was on a Friday, and he showed up here on a Monday,” Reineke remembers. “He drove all the way with three of his other family members, to come here. And they were waiting in my office when I showed up here on Monday morning.”

That office is a testament to the ongoing identification process. One set of shelves holds the case files of the unidentified, two others hold the case files of the missing. A corner desk is available for staffers of the federal database known as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NAMUS, described on its website as “a clearinghouse for missing persons and unidentified decedent records.”

Two walls are covered with maps — the state of Arizona, the cities along the border. One of the maps includes the GIS readings of water stations, Border Patrol rescue beacons and death locations. It was put together by the Tucson-based humanitarian group Humane Borders.

Another wall has a few photographs of memorable effects — a handwritten note, a sneaker with a name inked into the stripes, a penciled sketch of a horse. Press releases, missing posters, a list of aliases and a full map of the United States. Also, the story of Josseline Hernandez Quinteros — a 14-year-old El Salvadoran girl who died in the desert.

Reineke’s desk is perpetually covered in the paperwork of the moment.

The conference room around the corner is larger, yet still private, with bookshelves and a Southwestern décor. Here, Reineke and Dr. Bruce Anderson who has been with the office for more than a decade, went through descriptions of Estefany’s possible routes and her clothing when last seen — blue sweater, blue jeans, black tennis shoes with red decorations, a hair tie. They discussed Estefany’s stature — a little over 5 feet and maybe 125 pounds — and her teeth: all natural, no dental work.

They compared everything to the Jane Doe in the lab. Because of the condition of the body, the evidence discussed in the conference room would be important, if not conclusive, in narrowing down who the Jane Doe might really be.

“You can’t count on it obviously because sometimes people change clothing,” Reineke. “And there’s always the possibility that even if they didn’t change clothing that someone changed their clothing for them, it’s just a … possibility that you have to entertain.”

Finally, the aunt and uncle went to look. Afterward, they were sure the body was Estafany.

“They really believed that it was her, based on the crooked central incisors,” Reineke said.

The circumstantial identification was noted in the file: ML 08-0996. A DNA sample was prepared for processing by BODE Technology, a Virginia DNA identification lab that works with law enforcement nationwide.

Reineke said family and friends pooled their money to pay for the DNA exam, which cost around $600. Everything hinged on the results.

The DNA was not a match. The body was not Estefany’s.

“And it turned out not to be her, which is sadder like three times over because that means that there’s another 17-year-old or 16-year-old dead girl that’s not Estefany, and the family went through all of this and they didn’t find their daughter, so… we’re still looking for her,” Reineke said.

A case photo of the glittery belt hangs on the computer screen. It poses the same challenge, more forlornly, as Estefany’s graduation photograph.

“So that’s Estefany, and the girl that turned out not to be Estefany.”

John Doe

“He was found on the 25th of February,” Dr. Bruce Anderson said, standing over a table in his pathology lab, looking at fragments of what used to be a complete body — a cranium, shoulder blade, pelvis, left leg bones, and teeth. When little else is found with a body, the identification process focuses on the bones.

According to Anderson, there should be about 200 bones in a complete human skeleton. But if the body was undiscovered for 2 to 5 years like this one, there had been “a lot of time for animals and critters to haul stuff away — we’ve had time for people to take portions away if they wanted to,” Anderson said.

The more complete a skeleton is, the more accurate Anderson can be with gender, age, height and weight — the markers that begin to recreate the missing person and create a profile for comparison against the missing.

Anderson said the best indicator of sex is the pelvic bone — women have a birth canal that men do not. Also, adult female skeletons are basically larger versions of the same bones the woman had as a child. Males on the other change over time — they “look rougher” in the face and forehead after puberty.

For the pieces on the table, a determination is cumulative.

“So the combination of a big body, big muscles, rough skull and a male-looking pelvis, argues very strongly that this is not a woman,” Anderson said. “Here, there’s little doubt in my mind this is a man, it’d be the first woman that combined all these features that I’ve ever seen in my career, so, I’d be very surprised if this turns out to be a woman.”

This John Doe has been given the case number ML 10-00438 — the 24th unidentified body found in February 2010, the 29th of the year.

“The bones and then these shoes were delivered, so my assumption is that the police think these shoes are related to the bones,” Anderson said.
But it’s hard to be sure. In fact, nothing about this case will be easy. The trail is cold from the beginning.

“This guy’s been dead for several years, I don’t think he died last summer, so we’re probably looking at ’07, ’06, maybe even longer than that.”
Anderson goes through the case step by step, recording every observation.

“Bone is about yellow,” Anderson said. “It turns white because of solar radiation, so this is what we call sun bleaching. That almost never happens before about a year of direct exposure, daily exposure to the sun. “

Bone by bone, he looks for clues that can narrow the possibilities on when the man died.

“The cracking usually doesn’t start till about a year, this checking on the surface doesn’t occur till after a year. This pinkish hue sometimes takes several years to form.”

Once again, unique factors stand out — rare age or height marks left on a bone broken in childhood, unusual dental work.

Anderson points out that teeth can dramatically narrow the possibilities for a match with a missing person. Dental work or missing teeth means that Reineke can sometimes narrow down the possible matches to a list a few hundred people. But if the dead person has all of his or her teeth? “What can we do with that?” Anderson asks rhetorically. “You can’t do anything with that, it’s too big of a number.”

These are the cases where databases will make the most difference.

“In a perfect world if we had blood or saliva samples from the families of all 420 men or whatever that was, we could then sample this for DNA and run that against there and hope and hope that one of those families actually were the family of this guy,” Anderson said.

Databases like NAMUS allow families to look for cases similar to those of the relatives they’re searching for and then contact the office that posted the information. In too many cases, the searches last for years.

“I’ve talked to enough mothers and fathers of missing people who, that consumes them, and that they go home and night and they can’t do something constructive — they feel like they’re not doing enough to find their child,” said Anderson. “So with NAMUS, every time you want to go online and you search the case that came in today… it’s a terrible thought, but the case that came in today could be the child you’ve been missing for 20 years … If we could get the families of every missing person, which is never going to happen, but if you could get all those families looking at NAMUS, there’d be hundreds or thousands of ID’s rather quickly. Because the families would see something amongst the descriptions of the dead.”

A name association can be a case’s break through point.

“The family now is in a position to either tell us something about him that we can evaluate him by and say, ‘Yeah, we believe that’s him, or give us a blood or saliva sample and we’ll try to analyze using that,’” Anderson said.

For this John Doe, it may be a deciding factor, since today’s technology makes it possible for any bone in a human body to potentially provide testable DNA.

“[E]very time we identify someone I get the anthropology report out and we grade ourselves — how did we do — did we get the age right, did we get the sex right, hopefully we got the sex right,” Anderson said.

They’ll verify the nationality, too, as the office’s unidentified cases are not limited to migrants or border crossers.

“I say we probably have over-counted,” Anderson said. “If we were lucky enough to have all of these people identified eventually, I’ll be very surprised if not one or more or several are actually missing Americans.”

Who is John Doe, case ML 10-00438; a missing American or a border crosser?

“Until he’s identified, we’ll never know,” Anderson said.

Carmen

Carmen Antunez Grande had made the trip before. Not only were seven older brothers in North Carolina – a wife and, soon, a baby waited for his return.

His family reported Carmen missing in July to Kat Rodriguez at the humanitarian organization Derechos Humanos. They provided Rodriguez, and later Reineke directly, with information, photographs, and ultimately X-rays in the hopes of tracing him.

The family said he had large birthmarks on his face and black hair, and on his right knee he had a scar from an operation. He had been wearing a dark blue long-sleeve shirt with black dress pants.

“What caught my eye was I was entering Carmen’s information into the database and I noticed his red shoes, blue shirt and black pants combination, and I remembered there being some combination that was really similar,” Reineke said. She started going through the cases again — until she got to one John Doe, case ML 08-01295. “And I was like, wow, well, that’s exactly what they said — dark blue long sleeve-shirt, black dress pants, this is what the family reported, black tennis shoes with red stripes.”

The age range and stature were close — 28 to 45, 68 inches, more than 145 pounds. Carmen was 26, tall and around 170. It was close enough.

“I decided to call the brother and ask him if he would view these photographs of the clothing, and if they would be familiar to him,” Reineke said. “And I asked him while I was on the phone with him, you know, do these names, Victorino, Attendela ring a bell?”

They didn’t, so Reineke sent photographs of the shirt, the shoes, the rosary, the front and back of the saint card.

“He called back and he said ‘First of all, I’m certain that this is my brother and I know because this card, this is our saint that we venerate in our town,’” Reineke remembers. The brother deciphered the rest of the writing on the card: “Acatlan de la Cruz,” the name of the family’s home town in Guerrero. And “Grande,” part of Carmen’s full name: Carmen Antunez Grande.

Carmen’s family sent photographs, and then skeletal radiographs taken after knee surgery.

“It actually wasn’t the injury or the surgery that identified him, it was the morphology of the bone,” Reineke said. “So we were able to take the ante-mortem — prior to death — X-rays and compare them to post-mortem X-rays and just look at the shape, the contour of the patella, and compare those between ante-mortem and post-mortem to say it’s the same individual.”

In Carmen’s case, that resulted in a positive ID. But the process wasn’t over.

“Once you get to the positive ID point for the scientist, it’s not necessarily easy from then on out, for a number of reasons,” Reineke said. “A lot of times … it’s not good enough for the family, why should they trust you. Your belief in those methodologies, you might have those for specific reasons that you’ve been educated to believe and you understand statistics and why it’s more likely to be him than anyone else, but when a family can’t look someone in the face, it’s very hard for them to take a set of bones and trust you that this is their brother.”

For Carmen’s family, the handwriting helped with absorbing the technical and medical conclusions.

“For them, it was just really challenging because, and I remember him calling — this is one family I gave them my cell phone number because they were really nice and really upset and I wanted to be able to respond to them if they needed something.”

But officially, Reineke’s role — and the role of the medical examiner’s office as a whole — ends once one of its doctors signs off on paperwork that releases the body to the family, consulate or funeral home.

Carmen’s family waited more than six months for an answer that might never have come.

Reneike said she felt bad because the body was found on July 7 and the family reported Carmen missing a couple of weeks later. But it was winter before a match was made. The delay bothers her.

“He was one of eight brothers and they all had migrated, and he was the very last one, he was the youngest, and he basically was staying there to help out with his parents, and he was very connected to his family,” Reineke remembered. “He fell in love with someone and got married.”

When Carmen’s identification was finished, there was one more person waiting for the news.

“By the time we ID’d him he had a 3 or 4 month little baby son.”

System Overwhelmed

Each closed case is a step — but the staircase keeps growing.

The staff members of the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office are realistic about the challenges they face, as well as the solutions they’re working to implement.

“The identification process is always part of our biggest challenge,” Parks said. “And storage space — we end up holding on to people for a long time to get all the work done that we need to do.”

Also at issue are time and money. Grant funding is being sought for additional forensic consultants to work under Anderson, and for database building. Currently, a sample is collected from each unidentified person so that if relatives come forward now or in several years, a DNA test will be possible. Databasing these samples and samples from families may produce matches that were missed before. So might the geospatial database that Reineke is building that will prioritize her record cross-checks and hopefully save valuable time for both families and staff, leading to even more matches – and more returns.

“It’s going to save hours and hours of time,” Reineke said. “Ideally, if they call up today, Friday, maybe on Monday I can come up and the system will have processed several possibilities, and at least I can say, ok, we have a possibility — two of them have tattoos, one of them has this characteristic, do you know, you know, could this, did your brother ever have some particular dental thing, or did they ever have surgery, or did they speak with a lisp, or did they have a painful tooth — you can try to narrow it down and rule people out that way.”

Reineke believes the database will also mean more matches. Cases like Carmen’s “made me wonder how many cases are like that that I’m overlooking or that we’re overlooking.”

This meticulous cross-checking is how Carmen and Luis were both returned to their families. Parents, siblings, spouses and friends made decisions about their funerals and burials.

For John Does and Jane Does, there comes a time when that decision is made by medical staff and county officials to bury or cremate them.

In Pima County, the medical examiner releases bodies to the county’s public fiduciary that makes the arrangements for a burial or, as Arizona state law allows, the more affordable option of cremation.

The county cemetery sits within a corner of Evergreen Mortuary, Cemetery and Crematory next to a busy intersection. The county has a contract, regularly put up for bid with local mortuaries, to handle unidentified cases.

The later burial plots in the county section hold two bodies per grave said William B. Addison, Evergreen’s president who worked there since 1965. Addison said that, though it has the option, the county does not usually cremate remains.

“The problem with cremation is that you can’t undo it. You bury somebody, no problem — you really want to be cremated, we can handle that — disinter them, cremate them, and there you go. But if you’ve cremated somebody first, you can’t un-cremate them, haven’t quite figured out a way to put all that together yet, so they’re still sensitive to the possible issues and will usually hold off on cremation unless they have some reason to believe that wouldn’t be a problem.”

The sensitivity lies in the question of identity. Personal or religious wishes are just as indecipherable as name and nationality.

It is here, at the very end, that the impact of being identified or unidentified – between closed case and open case, found and not found, between knowing and not knowing, becomes most immediate and final.

“The sooner, obviously, the sooner they find out, the better off they are, no matter what the news is,” Addison said. “No news is good news is not necessarily true if they’re expecting the worst in the first place.”

As Immigration Rose, Crime Dipped

Heather Billings — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 17:28:30 +0000

Experts say illegal immigration has not increased crime in the United States. But some politicians and law enforcement officials continue to insist otherwise.

By Cristina Rayas

The first casualty in the war of words over illegal immigration seems to have been the facts.

Political rhetoric about a wave of crime engulfing the nation from our southern border is flat wrong, according to widely trusted and long-used crime reporting data. Crime is down in the United States — nationwide and along the border.

And, in a deeply ironic twist new research shows that immigrants of all kinds might actually make communities safer.

All the while, Latino immigrants who are coming, or have already settled, in the United States continue to be labeled a serious threat to the country.

The Numbers

The most recent estimate from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics is that 10.8 million unauthorized immigrants live in the United States. This number of illegal immigrants trended upward from the 1990s to early 2000s and dropped off around 2004, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a non-partisan research organization. (Experts have debated the cause of the mid-2000s decline, arguing whether increased border enforcement or economic trends — or other factors — made the difference.)

Immigration & Crime

Main

Immigration Rose, Crime Dipped

Explore this topic:

The Numbers
Arizona’s Story

A Latino Paradox

Moral Panic

As illegal immigration to the United States has declined in the past few years, violence has raged in Mexico, due to ongoing wars among drug cartels and between cartels and the government. Some of that violence has come close to the border and has sometimes spilled over it.

But during the big growth period for illegal immigration, the early 1990s to early 2000s, the national crime rate dropped, year after year, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The FBI data shows that crime decreased every year from 1992 to 2004. During this period illegal immigration peaked, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

“Rather than undergoing a continuous increase in immigrant levels as is commonly perceived, the United States experienced a sharp spike in immigration flows over the past decade that had a distinct beginning, middle and end,” wrote Pew researchers Jeffrey S. Passel and Roberto Suro in their 2005 report. “From the early 1990s through the middle of the decade, slightly more than 1.1 million migrants came to the United States every year on average. In the peak years of 1999 and 2000, the annual inflow was about 35 percent higher, topping 1.5 million. By 2002 and 2003, the number coming to the country was back around the 1.1 million mark.”

SOURCE: Rethinking Crime and Immigration, Robert Sampson, Contexts Magazine, Winter 2008 Issue.

So crime rates declined during the period when immigration increased. The FBI’s UCR data also shows that crime rates inched up slightly in 2005 and 2006 — during a period when illegal immigration was on the decline, according to Pew.

By the time Arizona’s legislators first began debating the state’s controversial immigration enforcement law, SB 1070, and other “get tough” laws pertaining to immigration, crime AND immigration were on the decline nationally. From 2007 to 2009, the national crime rate declined, as did illegal immigration.

The initial estimates, released in December 2009 from the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report’s violent crime statistics for 2009, show national crime rates continuing to decline. Compared to 2008, violent crime is down 4.4 percent with property crime down 6.1 percent. And the border region has enjoyed that decline in crime along with the rest of the country, a fact President Barack Obama pointed out in his July 2010 speech on immigration.

Arizona’s Story

The creators of Arizona’s tough new immigration law, SB 1070, which brought national attention to the state, originally dubbed the measure the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” and argued that the law is a serious crime-fighting policy.

[Parts of SB 1070 have been put on hold by a federal judge.]

Jan Brewer, Arizona’s governor and a supporter of SB 1070, has inaccurately claimed that most illegal immigrants have prior criminal records and connections to the cross-border drug trade. These assertions have been flatly refuted by law enforcement officials.

Immigrants who cross the border illegally or who stay in the country illegally are definitely breaking federal law. But Border Patrol officials estimate that 80 percent of those the agency detains in their busiest sector — in southern Arizona — have no other criminal record.

And despite the pictures of fence-jumpers regularly shown on television news, a large portion of illegal immigrants initially came into the United States legally. An estimated 40 percent are visa “overstayers,” who were welcomed into the country by the U.S. State Department and walked, drove or flew over the border legally, according to Bernard Schwartz, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan research organization. In March 2010 Schwartz told the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security that multiple groups, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service (before it was re-organized and its name was changed) and the Pew Hispanic Center, had settled on a number around 40 percent. But Schwartz pointed out that it is just an estimate because the government “still has no fully reliable method for tracking those who overstay.”

Phoenix Police Officer Paul Dobson has spoken out against Arizona’s new immigration law, SB1070. Dobson says the law will thwart police efforts to investigate and stop serious crime. [Parts of the law were put on hold by a federal judge in July 2010.]

Whether they cross the fence and walk across the desert or fly in with a visa, the largest portion of illegal immigrants are crossing along Arizona’s southern border. When tougher border security measures were put into place in California and Texas in the mid 1990′s they created a funnel effect into Arizona. The state’s Border Patrol sectors are now the busiest in the country, and the Pew Hispanic Center shows that Maricopa County, which contains the city of Phoenix and its suburbs, more than doubled its Hispanic population between 1990 and 2000. The Hispanic population in Phoenix rose by another 60 percent between 2000 and 2008. This growth stems from illegal immigrants, native-born Hispanics and legal resident Hispanics who have migrated to the state. After this explosive 18-year growth spurt, the greater Phoenix area now has the fifth largest Hispanic population in the United States, behind Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and Miami. According to Pew, 30 percent of Hispanics in Phoenix are likely illegal immigrants.

For Arizona specifically, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting data shows that crime has fallen in recent years and trended downward over six of the last nine years — all while immigration increased.

Violent crime in particular declined in the state between 2001 and 2004. It rose in 2005 and 2006, then again declined from 2007 to 2009. The latest official statistics of the UCR program show that Arizona’s 2008 violent crime rate is lower than the national average—continuing a trend that has been ongoing since well before the SB 1070 debate. The number of violent crimes in Arizona’s three largest cities, Phoenix, Tucson, and Mesa are also all down.

When Forbes released its April 2009 list of the nation’s most dangerous cities, based on the statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report of cities with more than 500,000 residents, border towns that would fit in this category such as El Paso, Tex., or San Diego, Calif. were absent. Detroit, Memphis, and Miami were the cities with highest violent crime rates. Phoenix did not make the list.

Despite these numbers, some officials in Arizona, like state Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, say this does not paint an accurate picture.

“This latest analysis concerning crime in Arizona going down is very misleading. First of all, crime in the overall state is going down. But if you break into metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas, we see that crime in our non-metropolitan areas is in fact dramatically increasing 30, 40 percent. I’m talking violent crime now. And I would assume much of that is due to crimes being committed in border towns by illegal immigrants,” said Kavanagh.

But when looking at Arizona’s non-metro statistics from the FBI for 2007 and 2008 (2009’s figures have not been released) violent crimes in these non-metro areas have also gone down. There were 347 fewer violent crimes reported — a 26 percent drop.

Still, Sheriff Paul Babeu, the top lawman in rural/suburban Pinal County, says he is observing criminal activity that may not register in the FBI’s reporting system. He says much of it is related to cross-border smuggling and drug trafficking. He has joined Arizona’s U.S. Sen. John McCain in calling for President Barack Obama to send 3,000 troops to patrol the border.

Babeu said that pursuits of suspected drug traffickers by his deputies are far more common now than in years past.

“[T]hese people are acting crazy, putting people in harms way, including our deputies and our citizens,” Babeu said.

The sheriff’s office turned over one hundred undocumented persons to U.S. Border Patrol between January and May, charging forty-one of them for drug smuggling. Babeu says he supports SB 1070 as another way to combat crime.

“Regardless of what your political opinion is, then it [SB1070] got turned onto on the police officers,” Babeu said. “We didn’t write this law. In fact, I don’t believe it’s the solution, yet I support the law because its uniform enforcement… it gives us another tool.”

A Latino Paradox

In his July 1, 2010, speech at American University, President Barack Obama told the country the current immigration system is broken and laws like those in Arizona have “fanned the flames of an already contentious debate.”

So what is really happening in our American cities? And what kind of role do immigrants really have in the safety of our neighborhoods?

Some researchers actually argue that immigration makes the country safer and that there is a correlation between increases in immigration and decreases in crime.

Highlighting the “Latino Paradox,” Robert Sampson, chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Sociology, notes that there are significantly lower rates of violence among Mexican-Americans, even compared to blacks and whites.

His 2008 study, “Rethinking Crime and Immigration,” argues that neighborhoods with high numbers of immigrants — legal and illegal — are directly associated with lower violence. In fact, immigrant presence was noted as a protection against violence.

After he read a Sampson op-ed piece published in The New York Times, Tim Wadsworth of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wanted to explore this idea that immigration was a missing piece in explaining the crime drop in the 1990s through 2000.

His project, recently published in Social Science Quarterly’s June 2010 issue, is titled: “Is Immigration Responsible for the Crime Drop?” Because of the historical and contemporary importance this question has on criminological theory and public and political debate, Wadsworth wanted his work to provide insight to this complex relationship.

Tim Wadsworth, Ph.D., has researched the influence of immigration on changes in violent crime.

“The thing that often comes up in these debates and these discussions is this idea that immigration is increasing crime. And my study, while not looking specifically looking at Arizona or other border towns, is looking at about 459 cities, virtually all medium to large cities in the United States and suggest that at least in the period between 1990 and 2000, the cities that experienced the greatest increases in immigration tended to be the ones were also experiencing the greatest decreases in crime—and that’s while also considering economic factors, other demographic factors, et cetera,” Wadsworth said in a phone interview.

Wadsworth focused on homicide and robbery in cities larger than 50,000 people. These crime stats are considered most reliable because of the regularity of their reporting. These are the crimes that draw people’s concern and attention. Wadsworth’s findings contradict popularly held notions that high levels of immigration result in more crime.

“When John McCain was talking about this was the worst crime situation he had ever seen, in talking about the border of Arizona, he wasn’t talking about shoplifting. He was at least alluding to the idea that this was serious violence going on. And that especially is just where there is no evidence whatsoever,” said Wadsworth.

This is a very different picture than what is seen and heard regularly in the news and in the rhetoric of many politicians. When asked what kind of reaction he has received because of his work, Wadsworth said the general reaction has varied.

“[The] comments have generally tended to come from people who really don’t believe statistics and they don’t believe the data and they’ve already decided what they think about relationship between immigration and crime and there is very little evidence that is going to convince them otherwise,” Wadsworth said.

But why doesn’t hard data, gathered and analyzed by respected researchers, have more of an impact on the public?

Wadsworth points to two issues: the general misinformed understanding of crime by the average citizen and the feeding frenzy on specific, horrendous cases by the media. Instead of reporting about broad trends or larger context, which Wadsworth says “tend to bore people or put them to sleep,” attention-seeking news outlets often go for the most dramatic story they can find — even if it does not reflect reality.

Wadsworth said he reminds his students that crime rates are half of what they were 20 years ago, telling them they can reassure their parents they are actually safer than their parents were when they were the same age.

Wadsworth’s next project will be replicating this study again once the 2010 Census data are available — to see if the pattern changed during the first decade of the 21st century, a time when crime was not dropping as rapidly and we did not have the boom in immigration that the nation saw between 1990 and 2000.

Moral Panic

Another scholar, Arthur Lurigio from Loyola University in Chicago, agrees that immigration and crime is an issue that is picking up steam.

“It reminds me of a moral panic,” Lurigio said. “Moral panics occur when people believe their values and interests and social order is being threatened and they need to take immediate action.”

He pointed to the Red Scare as another example of when the United States experienced a moral panic.

“When you identify an out-group, they are usually a target for hostility and they are treated monolithically,” Lurigio said. “So, there is one group who we believe is all the same and they are called illegal immigrants and we attribute to them a variety of characteristics, mostly unfavorable, that we believe apply to all of them.”

Arthur Lurigio, Ph.D. is an expert in criminal justice and psychology and is currently a faculty scholar and professor at Loyola University-Chicago. His research has considered why Latino immigrants are blamed for crime.

Lurigio said people in that frame of mind don’t “pay a lot of attention to statistics or other data.”

A contributing factor in the problem of “moral panic” is violence related to the cross-border drug trade, which has grown as Mexico’s president has attempted to crack down.

According to U.S. law enforcement officials, the drug cartels are also diversifying their operations, taking over the business of smuggling humans in the United States — making border crossing in general a more risky activity.

However, Harvard professor Edward Schumacher-Matos argues that drugs and migrants are separate issues that need separate solutions. Schumacher-Matos teaches about immigration policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In his work he focuses on the impact of unauthorized immigrants from Latin America on the United States and what kind of options the country should consider when creating immigration policy.

“There is a total conflation of the drug violence issue with the immigration issue, and they are two very different issues and need to be treated separately,” Schumacher-Matos said in an interview. “The overwhelming amount of undocumented immigrants do not commit any crime—other than the crime they committed to come into the country. You know, that is a crime; you’ve got to recognize that.”

Schumacher-Matos said that he recognizes some Americans reject all border-crossers as law-breakers who should be punished but that the larger fear is that they are already violent criminals who will bring more criminal activity to the United States.

“And there is just not a study out there to supports that,” he said. “Not one.”

But he says Arizona does face a major, dramatic crime problem that breeds violence — related to drug trafficking.

“Phoenix today is the drug capital of the United States. It’s replaced what Miami was back in the ’70s and ’80s, if you remember the movie ‘Scarface,’ that sort of thing,” Schumacher-Matos said. He said that crimes like kidnappings are indeed happening, but most often between drug gangs and as a result of safe house raids. Rarely does this touch regular citizens of Arizona.

“It’s really important the public understands,” Schumacher-Matos said. “Most of our political leaders know these numbers. They’re smart people. But they want to play on the perception and build on perceptions and play on fears. And that’s what is criminal if you ask me.”

Schumacher-Matos, as did Wadsworth, pointed out that the 24- hour news cycle makes crime look like it is much more prevalent than it really is, because one event is often repeated many times on the television news, on the radio, and on the Internet throughout the day.

Schumacher-Matos cited the still unsolved March 2010 murder of border rancher Robert Krentz, as an example. Krentz’s murder caused an immediate outcry for more border security and a crackdown on illegal immigrants because unnamed sources said an illegal immigrant might have been involved.

“You don’t make public policy off one murder,” Schumacher-Matos said. “You make public policy based on the facts and trends and what’s really happening.”

Latino America » Uncategorized

Caught Crossing and Detained

The Women

Smuggled, Held, Deported

The Women

Enriqueta and the Men

THE GOODS

THE ‘SEAMY UNDERBELLY’

EASY TARGETS

A SIMPLE CHOICE

LOCAL POLICE AND BORDER PATROL ON THE FRONT LINES

‘PEOPLE ARE SCARED NOW’

IDENTIFIED, FINGERPRINTED, HANDCUFFED AND DETAINED

Bought, Sold and Assaulted

The Women

A VIRTUAL WAR ZONE

THE CHASE

NOBODY’S JOB

A BROKEN PROMISE

Missing and Missed

The Women

‘A Better Life’

The Search

Help for Families of the Missing

Two Worlds, Two Weddings

Moving On

The Busiest Border Patrol Sector

Operation Streamline

Streamlined, Prosecuted and Deported With a Criminal Record

Operation Streamline

Sentenced to 30 Days in Jail For Illegally Crossing the Border

Operation Streamline

Mexican Horse Breeder Victim of Execution-style Murder

Death on the Border

Photo Gallery: An Execution on the Border

When the Desert Itself Becomes a Killer

Unidentified Dead Common on the Border

Death on the Border

Photo Gallery: Identifying the Dead in Southern Arizona

Luis

Estefany

John Doe

Carmen

System Overwhelmed

As Immigration Rose, Crime Dipped

The Numbers

Immigration & Crime

Arizona’s Story

A Latino Paradox

Moral Panic

LOCAL POLICE AND BORDER PATROL
ON THE FRONT LINES

IDENTIFIED, FINGERPRINTED,
HANDCUFFED AND DETAINED