Caught Crossing and Detained

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.

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.

Smuggled, Held, Deported

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.

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.

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.

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.

Missing and Missed

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.

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.

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 Erynn Elizabeth Reitmayer

When the police arrived at his father’s apartment, 1-year-old Christopher lay on the floor holding his 3-week-old brother. The boys were alone and covered in blood.

Christopher has vague memories of the event but says his mother and other relatives later described it to him in detail. He relies on memories and family stories as he recounts his early childhood.

Christopher was born in 1992 to a family of mixed immigration status. His father, a U.S. citizen, married his Mexican mother the year before his birth. Christopher says the relationship turned rocky because his father had a drug problem.

After the birth of her second son, Christopher’s mother decided to leave her troubled husband for the benefit of her children; but when the husband found out what she planned to do, he threatened to call the police. Christopher says his father threatened to tell them his wife was not really the mother of their sons and have her deported so she could never take the children away.

“My mom was not afraid of him,” Christopher said. “She said, ‘Call them, and you’ll see who your wife is.’”

His father wasn’t bluffing.

He called the police. His Spanish-speaking wife had little recourse, unable to understand the scene that was unfolding. She was deported to Sinaloa, Mexico shortly thereafter, her two U.S. citizen sons left in the care of their citizen father.

“She was going crazy, in Mexico without us,” Christopher said. “I was only 1 year and 7 months…my brother was just 3 weeks old.”

Christopher said when his mother’s best friend heard what had happened she went over to the apartment to talk to Christopher’s father, but instead she found the two boys alone and Christopher injured. It appeared that Christoper had climbed into his brother’s crib to comfort the crying boy. Lifting his brother out of the crib, he slipped, cutting his arm on the crib and falling to the floor.

“When they saw us like that, all covered in blood, everyone freaked out, wondering what was going on,” Christopher said. “When they found my father, he was passed out on the street, on drugs and drunk. So they gave my mother a permit to come and get us, to take us back to Mexico.”

[Repeated efforts to speak with Christopher's father for this story were unsuccessful.]

Christopher’s story is not unique. According to a new study conducted by the Urban Institute, a research organization that focuses on social and economic issues, there are 5.5 million children that are currently living in the United States with at least one undocumented parent. Close to 75 percent of the children are U.S. citizens. When one or both parents are deported the result can be years of struggle for the citizen children. They often have to choose between living with their immediate family — in another country — or living without them in the United States. And, now, some conservatives are pushing legislation seeking to strip citizenship from children with two undocumented parents, meaning they would have no choice of which country to live in. The children would be deported along with their parents.

In the years following 1996’s reforms to the Immigration and Nationality Act, efforts to detain and deport undocumented immigrants living illegally in the country have ramped up significantly. Workplace and residential raids have become a relatively common occurrence in some communities. This type of enforcement often leaves young citizens behind with little or no family support.

Margaret Acuitlapa faced a tough decision after her husband, an illegal immigrant, was deported. A U.S. citizen and mother of three, Acuitlapa had to decide whether to raise the children alone or uproot them and move to Mexico so they could be with their father. With her children’s education in mind, Acuitlapa stayed in the United States for a month after her husband’s deportation. However, she says the resulting emotional strain on the family proved overwhelming, and Acuitlapa decided to leave her home in Georgia to reunite her family in Mexico.

“The first year we were here, we were treated as strangers,” Acuitlapa said of her family’s arrival in Malinalco, a small town in southwestern Mexico. “Things were unpleasant for all of us.”

Acuitlapa’s family will have been living in the town three years as of this October — years she describes as very challenging.

“We have not been back home to visit once — and as you may have guessed, it is because of financial difficulties,” Acuitlapa said.

Acuitlapa says that when she lived in the United States, her parents depended on her for rides to their many doctor’s appointments. Her husband, Jose, would often help her father with strenuous jobs around the house, as he could no longer take care of everything on his own.

“They aren’t in good health. So they can’t even come visit us.” Acuitlapa said. “We don’t have the resources. I do feel trapped sometimes.”

Although she moved to keep her family together, the life they have faced in Mexico has put different strains on her marriage, and her children.

“Our kids didn’t speak any Spanish when we moved here. Even now, my 10-year-old daughter is reading at a second-grade level,” she said of the struggles her children have faced in school. “My 15-year-old son is still having a hard time with everything.”

Though she tries to keep in touch with her family back home, Acuitlapa says she has a hard time with being unable to see them.

“Tension has grown between my husband and I, and he blames himself that I’m depressed about missing my family,” she said. “But I know things will work out. Because love does work.”

The Push to Undo Citizenship

Because Margaret and her children were citizens, they had a choice of which country to live in. If some politicians and activists in the United States get their way, citizen children with two undocumented parents would have no choice but to return their parent’s country. They would be stripped of their citizenship and deported. Supporters of the concept often call citizen children of illegal immigrants “anchor babies,” meaning they are an anchor that keeps illegal immigrants in the United States.

Former U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, R-Ga., a leader among those targeting so-called “anchor babies,” introduced Birthright Citizenship Act in 2009. The bill has 91 co-sponsors. (Until March of this year, Deal represented Georgia’s 9th District. He has since resigned to make a run for governor of Georgia.)

The proposed legislation would amend the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act so that children of illegal immigrants would not be considered citizens under the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, which grants citizenship for those born or naturalized in the United States and who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The bill states that illegal immigrants and their children are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States for the purpose of citizenship. The bill was sent to various U.S. House committees for consideration in 2009 but went no further.

One of the bill’s well-known supporters is U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray, a Republican who represents California’s 50th district, which covers part of the greater San Diego area.

“The 14th Amendment of the Constitution has a conditioning clause: ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’” Bilbray said. “Undocumented immigrants, like tourists, are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; they aren’t subject to the draft, you can’t try them for treason.”

Bilbray and other supporters of the legislation argue that it is constitutional. Under the Birthright Citizenship Act, any child born within the U.S. who has at least one citizen parent, a parent who is a legal permanent resident or a parent serving in the military would still be granted citizenship.

Therefore, Bilbray contends, if a parent is subject in one of these ways to the jurisdiction of the government, then the child could rightfully be considered a citizen.

Bilbray says that citizenship is a right that must be earned.

“It isn’t the soil or the climate,” Bilbray said. “It’s the parent, through their obligation to the government, that earn their children citizenship.”

Kevin Johnson, the dean and professor of law at the University of California, Davis, disagrees. He says Bilbray and others are misinterpreting the “jurisdiction” clause in the 14^th Amendment.

“That language was designed to deal with the children of foreign diplomats, who are immune from suit and the laws of the United States while in the United States,” he says. “If proponents of this idea were correct, that would mean undocumented immigrants are not subject to the civil and criminal laws of a state and could not be sentenced to prison for crimes.”

Lino Graglia, a law professor at the University of Texas, supports the idea of revoking the citizenship of children with illegal immigrant parents, arguing that automatic citizenship creates an incentive to break the law.

“It doesn’t really make sense,” Graglia says. “If you’re going to prohibit something, why create a powerful inducement to do it? We make it illegal to come into the country without permission, but if you do it anyway and have children your children are rewarded with citizenship. It’s contrary.”

Graglia says it does not matter that children who have spent their entire lives in the United States may suddenly find themselves deported to a completely unfamiliar environment, where they don’t speak the language or understand the culture.

“Their parents broke the law and came to the country illegally,” Graglia says. “Just as their parents are, they should be subject to deportation.”

Hiroshi Motomura, a professor at the UCLA School of Law has the opposite opinion.

“These children are innocent, even if conceding their parents culpability, so we shouldn’t penalize them,” Motomura says. “Regardless of how they got here, the law should recognize the ties developed and contributions made in this country- especially economically — by unauthorized migrants and their families.”

Other lawmakers are urging reform that would help protect citizen children of undocumented immigrants. U.S. Rep. Jose E. Serrano, D-N.Y., introduced the Child Citizen Protection Act in 2006; the act would amend the immigration reforms of 1996 such that judges would have discretion to consider the best interests of children in deportation hearings. Deportation would not be a forgone conclusion.

Born in the Air?

Kendrick Nunez, 18, is one of those citizen children who would be affected if the “anchor baby” bill became law. He and his citizen sister currently live in Arkansas without their parents, who were deported to Mexico. He finds the logic of the movement confusing.

“That seems unreasonable. What, you’re just born in the air?” Nunez says. “I recognize there is a problem, but there has to be a better solution.”

Nunez and his younger sister initially followed their parents and other siblings to Mexico but returned to the United States so they could continue studying within the American education system.

“I didn’t go to school when I was in Mexico. I spent my time working — in a car wash, a water park, a field,” Nunez said. “I was illegal there. All my best friends in Arkansas were graduating. I felt like I was missing out on something.”

Returning Home

Hope for an education brought Christopher back into the United States nearly 13 years after his departure. As a teenager growing up in Mexico, Christopher would often daydream about the future he could have in America and the possibilities that might await him if he returned.

“We were home-schooled through elementary, and my mother was very protective,” Christopher recalls of the years he spent in Sinaloa with his mother. “I always wanted to be doing what the other kids were doing.”

When he finished elementary school, Christopher begged his mother to place him in a public school so he could experience more than the small world he knew living in their small home. She enrolled him in, and he started in the fall.

“I was shocked at seeing so many kids!” Christopher said. “They all called me a nerd because I was studious, and I was better educated from being home-schooled.”

Christopher said there were 56 students to a room — a hard adjustment for someone who had constant attention while being home-schooled.

It wasn’t long before his dreams once again outgrew his circumstances.

“I started thinking, ‘What am I going to be, what kind of man am I going to become?’” Christopher said. “At the same time, I was realizing how exciting I found America to be.”

Part of Christopher’s extended family resides in Texas, and he describes visiting as a young teenager and being in awe of his home country.

“Seeing the United States was like a dream,” he said. “Everything was so perfect. I was amazed. I told my mother, one day I wanted to come to the United States and study English so I can live my life here.”

Christopher says his mother agreed that he should return to the United States and take advantage of the future available to him as a citizen, but she hadn’t expected that he would make the decision to go by himself at the age of fourteen.

“A dream was placed in my mind,” Christopher said. “I knew that the goal would be difficult for me, but I was motivated to make this change.”

Christopher returned to America to as a bright-eyed teenager, intent on making the most of the opportunities he would not have in Mexico. He didn’t realize that what lay ahead were years of struggle.

Parents Deported, Children in Foster Care

Because Christopher’s only legal parent, his citizen father, was unable to be his guardian, he accompanied his mother back to Mexico as a young child. When a citizen child is left in this situation — either because both parents are deported or a legal parent is unable to take custody — they often end up staying with relatives who have legal status, entering public foster care or wandering homeless. Complications surrounding a parent’s ability to come to the United States after they have been deported can make it difficult, or impossible, for some deported parents to regain their parental rights, meaning that their children can be put in foster care for long periods of time or put up for adoption.

Such was the case for Nathaly Perez’s mother, who was deported in June 2008, leaving her three teenage daughters behind.

Perez, now 18, was born in San Diego to a large family with varying immigration status. Her parents and four older siblings were all born in Mexico. Nathaly’s sister Eralia, now 19, was just over a year old when the Perez family moved the to the United States. Her two older brothers and eldest sister were nearly grown. Over the next two years, her mother had Nathaly and another daughter.

Although Perez’s father immigrated legally, his status was revoked when he and Perez’s mother were both jailed for a domestic disturbance. He was subsequently deported in 2006. Perez’s mother was given probation. Following her father’s deportation, Perez recalls her mother struggling to support the family alone, sometimes working two or more jobs to care for her three young daughters.

Eralia Perez points to her father’s sudden, complete absence as the catalyst for a pattern of unhealthy behavior that would continue for years to come.

“I was only 14 years old when he was deported. Everything changed,” Perez said. “I started making bad choices. I wouldn’t listen to my mom.”

Eventually, the Perez sisters would also have to deal with losing their mother. Two years after their father’s deportation their eldest sister filed a report alleging that the girls’ older brothers were abusive towards their youngest sister. As the boys both had prior records, they were not legally allowed to be living with their mother, because probationers can only live together if they have court permission.

“Before this happened, my mom had been doing really well. She was doing awesome,” Nathaly recalls. “I don’t know if anything was going on with my brothers. We didn’t know about it. ”

Perez’s mother and two older brothers were arrested and deported in the following months, and all three girls were placed in public foster care.

After losing so many close family members, Nathaly says she struggled to find stability.

“Little by little I felt like everybody was getting taken away from me. To me, in my head, I was just ready for my sister Eralia to be deported,” Nathaly said.

Inspiration From a Foster Parent

Eralia, also an undocumented immigrant, had been struggling for some time before her mother’s deportation, and it took her several years to get back on solid ground. During that time, she was separated from her younger sisters and sent to live in a different home in the small, rural town of Jackson, Calif.

“The part that killed me the most was that when I finally wanted to stop doing all that running around and come home and make up for that lost time with my mom, it was too late,” Eralia said.

In time, Eralia finally found a foster mother who helped her realize who she wanted to be and gave her the structure and stability she needed to get there. She recently graduated from high school and received her green card.

Nathaly also graduated this past June, and looks forward to attending college in the future.

“I don’t know for sure what I’m going to do yet,” she says. “I just know I’m going to do my best, and keep striving.”

The Perez sisters were able to find foster parents that not only made them feel loved but provided them with role models they could respect. That is not the case for many children who are placed in the system.

Hemal Sharifzada is a former foster youth who now works for California Youth Connection, an organization that advocates for foster care support and educates foster youth on how they can navigate the world of adulthood when they may not have family support.

Sharifzada says that one of the biggest hurdles many foster youth will face is trying to find a place where they feel loved and supported.

“You build a lot of barriers. Everyone is kind of a question mark,” he says, speaking from years of experience. “You’re always thinking, ‘Who are you, how long are you going to be around- are you going to leave, are you going to stay? Does it matter?’”

Sharifzada says that the trust issues and emotional struggles common among foster youth often carry into adulthood and can complicate future relationships.

There are no nationwide statistics on the number of citizen children placed in foster care after a parent’s deportation.

But according to numbers reported by the Department of Health and Human Services, if 10 percent of the approximately 5 million children of undocumented parents were placed in foster care, this would double the number of children in the system, which is already overburdened. In 2009 by the Child Welfare League of America reported the cost for public foster care exceeds $4 billion per year.

Financial estimates don’t take into account the human costs of placing a child in foster care. According to the report by the Child Welfare League of America, an estimated 85 percent of all youth in public foster care have an emotional disorder, a substance abuse problem or both. Statistics indicate that children who grow up in foster care will experience a wide variety of hardships at a much higher rate than the general population.

Homeless, Hungry and Wandering

Not all children of deported parents will end up in foster care, but even those who don’t often lack basic family support.

Stephen Coger, a social worker in Arkansas, has worked with many undocumented immigrants in his town of Fayetteville. Coger says that even the loss of one parent tends to have an extremely negative effect on the upbringing of a child.

“Food hardship is one of the most common occurrences for children in these situations,” Coger says. “Often these families need both incomes. When a parent is deported the household income decreases significantly.”

Homelessness can also become a consequence. When Christopher returned to America, he found friends and family members in Arizona willing to take him in — but only for a time.

In many ways, he lived like most American teenagers. He attended high school and played tennis on the school team. Having always been a creative child, he found the arts especially stimulating.

“It was really hard at first because I didn’t speak English. My mom thought that after a month I would give up,” he said, laughing. “She was amazed how well I did after only a semester. She said she was really proud of me.”

But Christopher struggled trying to find a place within families that weren’t his own. One night, after his presence caused a bitter argument among relatives who had taken him in, he ran away. After spending a terrifying night alone in a park, he was able to find a friend’s family willing to take him in.

The family lived close to some of Christopher’s other relatives. The mother of the family remembers her son’s friend as being isolated from family.

“I know he sometimes talked to his grandmother and aunt in California … and of course his mother. But his father didn’t seem to be in the picture,” she said. “He didn’t really have anyone to depend on.”

Unfortunately, things didn’t get easier from there; in just a few months, the economic downturn resulted in his friend’s father losing his job.

“It was some of the best times of my life, living with that family,” Christopher says. “When they told me they couldn’t afford to have me anymore, I told them it was OK. I told them that they had saved my life.”

At the age of 15, Christopher found himself cleaning his community church to earn room and board there. In time, he found another family willing to take him in.

“I was glad to have a place to live, but I was doing a lot of work around the house to earn my keep,” he said. “That was my junior year. It was hard for me to see all the other kids having fun, being kids.”

In spite of these struggles, Christopher says he never regretted his decision to return to the United States. Instead of seeing a country that has let him down, he sees the country of the American Dream — a dream that as a citizen he is entitled to.

Education & The American Dream

The desire to help immigrants take part in the American Dream drove Jose “Joe” Kennard to take action. A successful real estate investor and land developer, Kennard founded the Organization to Help Citizen Children with hopes that he might find like-minded community members to spark a movement toward providing better options for citizen children.

Until two years ago, Kennard and his wife lived in Seattle — as did Ana Reyes, a woman Kennard had never met. Unlike Kennard, however, Reyes was living and working in the country illegally. In 2007, U.S. immigration officials came to arrest Reyes early on the morning of her birthday. It was also the day her 13-year-old daughter Julie Quiroz was to graduate from seventh grade. Instead, Quiroz spent the afternoon helping her grandmother empty her family’s Seattle home, preparing herself and her younger sister to move to Mexico.

“I just remember looking out the window and seeing my mom in handcuffs,” Quiroz says. “My little sister was crying. Then we had to empty out the house … It kind of felt like this was it.”

Shortly after, Quiroz was reunited with her mother, brother and stepfather — in Mexico. The whole family had been deported. She began attending school, but was soon frustrated by her inability to keep up.

“I couldn’t read or write Spanish! I felt out of place, like I didn’t belong,” she said. “I only went to school for two weeks … then I guess I just gave up. I couldn’t understand anything.”

After she dropped out of school, help came to Quiroz’s family in an unexpected way. Having read an article about her family’s plight in The Seattle Times one Sunday, Joe Kennard felt compelled to help Julie — and all citizen children placed in these situations.

“I read the follow-up article about what was happening with Julie since her family was deported. I found the article really heart wrenching,” Kennard remembers. “I couldn’t shake it. We went to church and continued our usual routine, but when we got home I told my wife about it. I told her I felt like maybe the Lord was calling me to help this family.”

Kennard says his wife was supportive of what he felt he had to do.

“She just says, ‘If that’s what you think he’s telling you, then that’s what you ought to do,’” Kennard said.

Kennard began communicating by phone with Ana Reyes, trying to think of a solution her daughter Julie and other kids in her situation.

“I did some research, and I thought that the best way to help would be to get churches involved,” Kennard says. “I thought if we could get a network of families started through churches on both sides of the border we could create a support system for the children to go back and forth.”

Kennard provided funding for Reyes to move from Mexico City to Juarez so that Julie could attend school across the border in El Paso. He arranged for a family to take Julie in during the school week, and she would return to her mother on weekends.

“The idea was to minimize the trauma on these children by finding legal alternatives,” Kennard says of his idea.

In time, the violence in Juarez became a concern for Reyes, and she worried for the safety of herself and her two young daughters. She decided to move back to Mexico City. Kennard, who was committed to helping Julie achieve her dreams, extended her the offer of taking up residence with himself and his family for the entire school year.

“I had to make the choice to go with my mom in Mexico or stay here with the Kennards,” Quiroz says. “It was a really hard choice, but I decided to stay.”

Kennard and his wife returned to his native Texas. He opened an authentic Mexican restaurant that serves his mother’s traditional dishes in the downtown square and continues to advocate for the rights of citizen children.

“The problem is that we are punishing the children, and they are innocents in this situation,” Kennard says. “The laws aren’t protecting them — and as citizens they deserve to have their rights taken into consideration.”

According to a 2009 study by Human Rights Watch, nearly every major human rights treaty recognizes the need for special protection of children. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, for example, explicitly states that every child has the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.

Though Kennard is glad to be doing his part to find a solution, he says he has been disheartened that his organization hasn’t gotten much traction.

“What was really surprising to me was that we couldn’t really get churches to help,” Kennard says. “To me, at the time, fellow evangelicals weren’t acting very Christian. They were saying that these people were illegal, and obeying the law is a biblical mandate …. To me, the overriding biblical mandate is ‘Love your neighbor.’ I couldn’t believe fellow Christians were taking such a cavalier-or sometimes outright hostile- attitude toward these families.”

But luckily for Julie Quiroz, now 15, Joe Kennard stepped up to become the defender of her rights. Quiroz currently lives with Kennard and his family at their home in Waxahachie, Texas. She attends a local school, where she is excelling, but the opportunity comes with a downside. She only sees her family on Christmas and summer vacation, when she travels to Mexico for the school break.

“It’s hard, always having to leave them again,” Quiroz says. “It’s like I almost don’t want to get very attached to them, because I know I have to go — but of course it’s hard not to get attached.”

Quiroz knows she is lucky. Many children in her situation may see their families even less, if at all. Kendrick Nunez hasn’t seen his family in more than six months; the Perez sisters haven’t seen their mother since she was deported more than two years ago. In spite of the obstacles that have been placed in front of these children, each of them has expressed a desire to remain in the United States.

“I don’t know what I’d be doing if I stayed there [in Mexico],” Quiroz says. “Probably doing nothing with my life, making nothing of myself.”

For Christopher, the future is getting brighter — but his achievements have been hard won with years of difficulty and uncertainty. He was able to find a home at the Tumbleweeds Center for Youth Development in Phoenix and was accepted to Arizona State University for the coming fall. He puts his creativity to good use, participating in Phoenix’s popular art walk on the first Friday of every month.

“I am glad that I came here, even if I had to go through those hard times,” he says. “It’s made me who I am.”

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