World’s Most Honest Man
HIDALGO, TEXAS, AND REYNOSA, MEXICO
DRIVING OUR CAR, WE FOLLOWED BILL TO THE NEXT BORDER crossing, at Reynosa and Hidalgo, where we parked. We then rode with Bill into Mexico, crossing the international bridge some six miles south of McAllen, Texas. Reynosa is known as a major site for the export of illegal drugs and for human trafficking, both controlled by the Gulf Cartel, a situation that has led its inhabitants (unlike those in Progreso) to give up their tourist trade almost entirely. No one, it seemed, wanted to cross there unless they had to.
Pedestrians crossing the Laredo/Nuevo Laredo Bridge.
Despite this lack of small-scale human interchange, the trade of aboveboard goods moved in lines of tractor-trailers that clipped along over the Free Trade International Bridge in both directions. It was easy for us to see that Reynosa is a key point of entry for NAFTA goods and on some level had benefited from the intercambio that averaged a billion dollars a day or more. At the same time, everything about the town looked poor. None of the money going by in trucks stayed here. But I knew there had to be more going on than met the eye.
Bill knew the border crossing well, having crossed it almost daily for years as part of his reporting job. Some of the ICE (Immigration Control and Enforcement, changed from the INS after 9/11) agents knew him by sight. We were on our way to visit Thomas and Yirit Koblecky, a couple who lived with their children in a Reynosa subdivision near the border. Bill had written a human-interest piece about the family just a few weeks before and he knew we would want to hear them tell their story in person.
Again we cleared customs quickly and turned down a street that ran alongside the south side of the border wall. Spotting some graffiti on one section of the metal fence, I asked if Bill could stop so I could jump out and get a picture of it. Bill said no, we’d better not. “That place is known for narco activity and the graffiti includes a gang sign. Someone just got murdered on this curve earlier this year, so you don’t want to get out of the car here.” Then he pointed out the initials for Cartel de Golfo. Though we could see no one nearby, Bill explained that informants were everywhere. Even beggars work for the cartels. They have to in order to survive. I thanked him, sat back in the seat, put the camera away, and breathed out slowly, as if I had just dodged a bullet.
Thomas and Yirit’s neighborhood was just a few miles from the border. They lived in one of many streets lined with identical white concrete houses built quickly during the last twenty years. Every house had a black cistern on top for water. The cisterns filled up at night while water demand was down and allowed for gravity-flow usage by day. Most houses had concrete driveways and some had cars or trucks parked out front. There was no life on the outside; the neighborhood served only as a bedroom community for border workers, the very design saying people weren’t comfortable outdoors.
All the houses had bars on the windows. There was no open space for kids to play. No basketball or soccer goals. No parks. This was also a barrio for people with no leisure hours on their hands. Their time, you could tell, belonged mostly to companies they worked for, and their lives consisted of working, driving to and from work, sleeping, and eating. Nothing on the exteriors distinguished any house from dozens of other houses around it as far as I could tell. Not a shrub, dog, tricycle, or anything else was outside. Likely there is a safety advantage in this kind of anonymity, and that was the only redeeming quality I could think of. But luckily Bill knew right where to go as he counted the houses and parked the car next to the curb. We walked up the concrete drive. Thomas Koblecky met us at the door before we knocked.
Thomas, a tall, thin, white American man in his late twenties, invited us inside and introduced us to his family. Yirit, a diminutive, dark-skinned Mexican woman with shiny jet-black hair, greeted us from the couch. She had been watching television while feeding their new daughter a bottle of formula. Their three-year-old son played on the floor in front of the couch. Yirit spoke to us in broken English, but switched to Spanish when she realized we could understand her. Then we realized that Thomas couldn’t understand her Spanish, at least not entirely, and so we talked with him in English.
Thomas ushered us to the kitchen table and offered us a soft drink. Bill had already told him about our trip and our goals, so Thomas began to talk almost as soon as we sat down, even before I asked a question. Yirit looked on from the other room and added details. They had an immigration crisis on their hands and they didn’t beat around the bush. I scribbled fast and pulled out my small video recorder to capture some of his words. Thomas opened a folder and read from a written statement he had sent to ICE: “I feel I have been victimized by the broad strokes of immigration law that has caught good people in its grasp.” Then he and Yirit gave us more background on their situation.
Yirit had entered the United States without papers in the late 1990s. She came from a poor family. Her father had diabetes and couldn’t work. Intent on sending money back to her parents, Yirit crossed the border to work in the agricultural fields. She had gone back to Mexico twice, carrying cash to give to her parents. When she reentered the United States a third time, still promising to help her struggling parents, she found a job stacking shelves at a Home Depot in a small town in Illinois. Thomas, who hailed from Illinois, also worked there. They met in the store. The unlikely couple, he a lanky, rural American unable to speak a word of Spanish, and she a new U.S. immigrant with no English, tried to communicate across linguistic lines. They fell in love despite the challenges and married in 2004. At that time, Thomas believed that his new wife should have full rights of citizenship. He didn’t want to live with her in the shadows. After all, he had been born a citizen and they were now husband and wife.
“I didn’t like the fact that she was illegal, had a false I.D. and so on,” Thomas said. But Yirit, having already lived as an undocumented person in the United States for some time, was convinced no one was going to help them. No one she knew, no matter how law-abiding and smart, had ever been legalized. There was too much red tape, too many costs, and she had already been in the country working without papers. She knew they would have to pay thousands of dollars to hire an immigration lawyer. Most Mexican people waited more than fifteen years, perhaps thirty, for a green card, even if they applied while in Mexico. She warned Thomas that it would be impossible to get her papers from inside the United States, particularly if they told that she had entered the country before they were married. But he wanted to be married in the open and believed he had nothing to hide. He wrote out the full story and prepared to send it to ICE.
“I didn’t have the money for a lawyer,” Thomas admitted, “So I filed the application myself.” A friend had told him to go to Catholic Charities to seek financial aid, but the nonprofit organization couldn’t help with legal fees. He believed that if he answered honestly and straightforwardly on the application about Yirit and her father’s illness, everything could be rectified. If he could only get the story to the right people, they would be fine. He asked for a green card for her, a pathway to citizenship. He thought her being married to a U.S. citizen was enough.
The written reply they received hit him like a fist in the gut. Not only had they been denied, but now ICE also possessed Yirit’s story in writing, signed by her husband. The letter landed a second punch: she would have to return to Mexico or be deported. It added, in government legalese, that perhaps after some years out of the country (likely three to ten) she could petition for reentry and thereby receive the requested work permit—her green card. Thomas and Yirit tried sending letters of appeal, first to President Bush and then to President Obama. Then he sought legal aid with what little money they could raise, but lawyers said they couldn’t help because he had already admitted she was in the United States before their marriage. Could they have gone to Mexico and mailed a letter requesting a visa from there? We’ll never know.
Thomas had always been a law-abiding citizen. He also believed strongly that he should be with and provide for his wife and future children. When the family began packing to leave the country, their second child was already on the way. He couldn’t in good conscience send them to wait in Mexico while he lived apart. He couldn’t stand the thought of her having to go it alone without him, particularly with her parents in dire straits. So they both moved to Reynosa to live there together. According to law, as a U.S. citizen Thomas may work in his home country no matter where he lives. He found a job driving a beer truck close to the border. Leaving home every day before sunup, he crossed the border with his American passport, drove to the bottling company, and made his rounds in the truck, returning home to Mexico late at night. We know that thousands cross into the United States to work each day, leaving their families behind. Many live south of the line and work north of it, but few who do so look and sound like Thomas.
Thomas continued to hope that justice will allow a hardworking young couple a chance at life in the United States. In the meantime, he was doing the right thing by the woman he loves. Yirit has always been honest too, not greedy, not taking welfare, just working to shelve boxes in a store in Illinois for minimum wage, a job few others wanted. Their son was born in the United States before they left and therefore is a U.S. citizen. Their baby girl was born in Mexico, but is entitled to apply for citizenship because of her father. Their mother, however, can only raise them in Mexico; thus their home in Reynosa.
. . .
WE DROVE BACK THROUGH Reynosa’s broken neighborhoods, overcrowded with stories of hardship, both close to and yet so far from prosperity. We backtracked to the curve of the drug cartel killing and Bill changed the subject to the drug gangs.
“They’re known as La Mafia, mañosos, narcotraficantes, or simply as narcos,” he said. “But you’ve got to understand drugs aren’t just about them, but they’re about both sides of the border, and nothing’s simple.” He brought up Jack Nicholson’s character Charlie Smith in the 1982 movie The Border. In the movie, Nicholson plays a U.S. border guard who starts selling drugs. Movie reviewer Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote the following about the movie the week it was released: “At night, the Rio Grande, which forms the U.S.-Mexican border at El Paso, teems with poor, desperate, illiterate Mexicans seeking entrance into the land of milk, honey, bigotry and exploitation.”1 The reviewer seemed to blame the Mexicans, who he thought were unskilled and ignorant about the country they are entering. Thomas and Yirit are only some who prove otherwise.
Bill also brought up the collusion of drug kingpins with big business and government. “None of this could happen without the military,” Bill said, meaning that the cartels work in collusion with the military in Mexico—and the United States is giving military aid to Mexico. Since the signing of the Merida Initiative in 2007 and 2011, the U.S. government has funded $1.8 billion worth of training and equipment for Mexico’s military.2 So we work together in some sense, but not at all as one might hope.
He then added another important fact: it is legal to possess and use small amounts of heroin, LSD, cocaine, and pot in Mexico—one of the means Mexico used to fight its war on drugs was to remove the prohibition and thus reduce the profit margin. The law passed both houses of the Mexican Congress in 2006, but after the Bush administration protested, Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón refused to sign the bill into law. Slowly and quietly it became law in 2009 anyway. That means the demand and big profits have been pushed northward.
The war on drugs in the United States has done little to stop drugs from crossing the border from Mexico. Everyone seems to know that despite our drug laws, and perhaps because of them, the Mexican cartels are mopping up billions in illegal profits. I asked Bill what would stop it. Only taking the profits out of the equation, he said. Profits breed competition and violence, and as long as there is profit, the cartels will compete down to the last man. Killings, like the one at the curve we had just rounded, will continue. As far as Mexico goes, he said, “Until one person is in charge of all the drugs, they’re going to keep killing each other.” He was quoting a sheriff he had heard on National Public Radio: Every drug lord wants to be at the top of his pyramid, and to topple the pyramids of his competitors.
. . .
WE DROVE TO MISSION, where Bill joined us for a brief meal with a former student of mine named Jean Abreu. The daughter of Cuban immigrants and fluent in Spanish, Jean had won a Cesar Chavez Fellowship with the National Farmworker Center of the United Farm Workers and was living near Mission for the year. I was happy to see her working for justice at the border, but worried about her isolation and vulnerability. She was so young and alone. Her job was to tutor twenty-five kids whose mothers live with them in the United States but have fathers who are migrant workers and sleep apart from them in Reynosa. They go to school in Pharr, she told us, a little U.S. town of fifteen thousand. She helped with dropout prevention, homework, and academic enrichment. She seemed exhausted.
She told us about her day. That morning Jean had had to answer questions from some of her pupils’ parents about a written notice the kids had taken home from school. The note mentioned the possibility of federal raids in their apartment complex and warned that parents could be apprehended. It reported that children could be left alone—particularly those children born in the United States—if the parents were taken. The notice, written by a school official, used the word “alien,” Jean said, and the kids were incensed not just about the threat of deportation, but the word itself. “That means we’re aliens!” They thought it meant they were being called freaks from other planets. Of course our Constitution says children born in the United States aren’t “aliens” after all—only their parents have to live like extraterrestrials.
Bill asked, “How could a child concentrate on getting ahead in school when at any moment a raid could destroy his life?” Jean only nodded and frowned. It disturbed me to see a young person stripped of some of her optimism, but I could offer no magical words of encouragement. All we could do was try to get her to talk about the challenges and to give her some nourishing food. After seeing us for just an hour, Jean had to go back to her organization again. They had called an emergency meeting with the parents. We convinced her, with some urging on Hope’s part, to at least finish her salad before heading back.
After Jean left for work, we had a few minutes to talk with Bill about his own personal border saga. His wife is Salvadoran and can’t live in the United States or even visit Bill while they are petitioning for her visa, so they await the results of her appeal for citizenship while living apart. If she crossed the border without papers, she could be deported and never allowed to return, he explained. So when possible, Bill would travel to meet his wife in Mexico at some halfway point.
The rest of his time he spent driving along the border in search of stories, amplifying the voices of those like Thomas and Yirit. He talked with his wife by Skype at night. The border, he said, had given him a vocation, but it had also cut through the middle of his marriage.
Notes
1. Vincent Canby, “The Border (1982): Jack Nicholson in ‘The Border,’” New York Times, January 29, 1982.
2. Ioan Grillo, “NGOS to Washington: Cut Military Aid to Mexico,” Global Post, November 10, 2011.