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.

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.