Margaret Regan - Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire

Stories of Immigrant
Families Under Fire

Margaret Regan

BEACON PRESS, BOSTON

For my family,

Kevin, Linda, and Will Gosner,

with love

CHAPTER ONE
Yolanda in Limbo

CHAPTER TWO
Suicide

CHAPTER THREE
Purgatorio Arpaio

CHAPTER FOUR
A Tale of Two Towns

CHAPTER FIVE
Greyhound

CHAPTER SIX
Woman Without a Country

CHAPTER SEVEN
In the City of the Deported

CHAPTER EIGHT
Albergue Evening

CHAPTER NINE
Showdown on Tenth Avenue

CHAPTER TEN
Streamline

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dreaming

A man named Enrique was packing up his hot dog cart on Calle Internacional in Nogales, Sonora, on a hot summer afternoon. The United States had just erected a brand-new border wall across the street, dividing Nogales, Sonora, from Nogales, Arizona. Enrique looked up appraisingly at its steel posts. They loomed above him.

Its ms beautiful, he said, speaking in the Spanglish of the borderlands. Prettier than the old wall. Not everyone agreed. At the bus stop down the street, an older man shrugged. The two walls were igual, he said. Equally ugly.

The old wall had been a rough patchwork of used helicopter-landing pads, hastily cobbled together in the 1990s when migrants first began to surge in large numbers into Arizona. The US Army had discarded the flats after using them in the Persian Gulf and in the jungles of Vietnam and was only too happy to turn them over to the Border Patrol free of charge. Rising up twelve to fifteen feetminiature compared to the big new wallthe landing-mat fence was colored the purples and rusts of a bruise. It was unapologetically ugly, and its battle history provided an uncomfortable metaphor for an international border between two nations at peace.

Even the Border Patrol didnt like it. Coyotes smuggling migrants to the North routinely used torches to blast holes into its thin metal skin before hustling their charges through. No danger of that with the new wall, Steve Passement, a Border Patrol supervising agent, said proudly. The flimsy corrugated panels had been replaced by towering new poles that rose as high as thirty feet in some places. The massive poles, six inches square and filled with concrete, descended six feet into the earth.

The old wall had another flaw, Passement said. It was opaque, and agents couldnt see what migrants were doing on the other side. The new wall was see-through. The heavy posts were separated by four inches of open air, too small for a body to slip through but big enough for la migra to look south into Mexico.

Our agents need to be aware of whats on the other side, Passement said. Theres always the chance of being rockedhit by rocks thrown from across the border. The new [wall] definitely gives agents an awareness.

But the open spaces cued in potential wall-crossers as well. As Enrique closed up his cart and prepared to head home, three likely migrants ambled down the street, equipped with telltale border-crosser backpacks. They could see right through the new posts to a Border Patrol agent stationed on the other side. They laughed when they saw him pacing just yards from the barricade they intended to cross; then they turned and walked off in another direction.

And enterprising families quickly found a way to convert the see-through wall to their own purposes. They transformed it from a divider into a connector. Days after it went up in 2011, families separated by deportation began staging cross-border visits through the bars, a tacit protest against the international laws that kept them apart. Mothers brought children to the wall to see their deported dads on the Mexican side. Husbands living alone in America slipped down to Nogales to see their families. Separated sweethearts held hands through the bars.

The new wall also developed deadly uses. On October 13, 2012, when it had been up little more than a year, a Border Patrol agent reached his gun through its poles into Mexico and shot a volley of bullets into the back of a sixteen-year-old Mexican boy. Jos Antonio Elena Rodriguez collapsed and died on the sidewalk in Sonora. His grieving family turned the barrier into a platform for protest. At a gathering marking the anniversary of his death, they reached through the bars to clasp hands with American supporters on the other side. And the poles were just wide enough to accommodate a picture of Jos Antonio. His mourners plastered images of his haunting young face on the wall all up and down the Nogales line.

In 2014, when eight Catholic bishops came to the border to call for immigration reform, they said a Mass in the shadow of the wall. Congregants gathered on both sides to pray together. Preaching to both nations, Cardinal Sean Patrick OMalley lamented both the sufferings of families separated by deportation and the deaths of migrants in the desert. Invoking the memory of the Irish who died in coffin ships crossing the Atlantic, he reminded his listeners that America has always been a nation of immigrants. At Communion time he walked to the wall with the consecrated hosts, and the faithful in Mexico extended their hands through the bars for the body of Christ.

But even on ordinary days, when there were no prayers or protests, families kept coming to the wall. Just before Fathers Day one year, a little girl dressed up in pink to see her father, come to visit from America. She sat by her mother, her legs dangling into the ditch that ran along the Mexican side. Her parents leaned into the poles, and her father listened intently as her mother spoke.

A few feet away, a little boy of about five or six had brought along a school papera drawing, perhaps?to give to his father. The boys arms were too short to get the paper across the divide into the United States, so his father thrust his own hand between the bars and reached toward his child in Mexico.

Whats new is that were deporting people who have been here for a long period of time. When they cross back to the north, theyre coming home. Theyre coming to where their family is.

Kat Rodriguez, immigrant advocate

Yolanda Fontes sat in her prison scrubs and watched the families gathered all around her. Husbands were reconnecting with wives, sisters with sisters, mothers with children. It was a sunny Sunday in April, and the families had flocked to the Eloy Detention Center, a dreary for-profit immigration prison in rural Arizona, to visit their detained loved ones. A female prisoner sat with her small son on her lap, her arms wrapped tightly around him, as if she were imagining never letting him go. The aunt who had brought the little boy spoke sorrowfully to her sister as the child snuggled in his mothers embrace. Nearby, an imprisoned father sat across a table from his wife, clutching her hand. They were trying to talk, but their four-year-old daughter, hungry and tired, fussed on the floor below.

None of the families in the packed room had any privacy. An impassive guard presided over their melancholy reunions, keeping a close watch on the mothers and fathers dressed in jailbird scrubs. The visiting room was bleak and windowless, lit by glaring prison lights. It was a beautiful spring day outside, but no rays of sunlight pierced its cinder block walls.

Alone among the detainees in this stark space, Yolanda had no family visiting, just me, a writer who had come to hear her story. She was glad to be out of her prison unit, and she was full of smiles, determined to be cheerful. Yet her tale was grim, and she looked at the other detainees kids wistfully as she recounted it. During the two years shed spent locked up in Eloy, shed seen her two little girls and her little boy only sporadically. The children, all American citizens, lived in a distant suburb northwest of Phoenix. They came to visit their mom only when a relative or friend could spare the time to drive the two-hundred-mile round trip to Eloy. The last time Yolanda had seen them was two months before.