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.
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.
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.