The current yanked the small raft into the center of the river, sucking the Flores twins toward the Gulf of Mexico as the coyote fought it to the opposite shore. They couldn’t see much in the blackness apart from the stars and the outline of trees against the darkness. It wasn’t so bad out here, thought Raúl, compared to what he had imagined during the days in the safe house, though the raft did wobble as it cut across the current, and he could feel the cool water lapping uncomfortably close. Before they left, the coyotes had told them that migrants like them had died making this crossing; Raúl couldn’t help picturing corpses submerged in the water beneath him. Once the raft bumped the Texas shore, the coyote commanded them, in a voice between a whisper and a hiss, to get off.
Ernesto, as usual, stepped off first, into water up to his knees. Once he got his footing, he reached for Raúl’s hand and pulled him up the bank. One by one the migrants scrambled up into the United States, flecking the heavy droplets of the Río Bravo from their skins.
Once the second raft came ashore, the coyotes yelled at the group to run. They took off into the chaparral, struggling through dense brush as thorns ripped through the fabric of their pants. The whole group ran for about an hour; they were in the United States, but all that amounted to so far was a frenzied scramble through a thicket. They stopped to rest for a while at a roadside spot with good cover. No one seemed to sleep. At about six in the morning, just as the sky was lightening, a couple of trucks arrived and picked the migrants up. They packed in and were taken to a safe house in one of the colonias, the small, poverty-stricken unincorporated zones, outside McAllen, Texas. The twins were so hungry, their stomachs cramped and groaned for food. The safe house operators handed out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and water. The boys ate fast, like animals.
They spent the night and the following day there, resting, occasionally eating, waiting. On the night of the second day, they packed into trucks again to be driven up to the desert. There they’d walk overland, circumnavigate the Falfurrias immigration checkpoint, and meet up with a truck on the other side for the drive to Houston. The twins’ plan was to call Wilber once they made it there; though they were already in Texas, Houston still seemed like a long way away.
That night twelve rode in the front cab and even more in the truck bed, huddled in silence. About an hour north, away from McAllen and well into the flat, quiet expanse, the driver pulled over. But as they cut the headlights and the migrants began to get out, a border patrol car sped up, flashing.
The world went silent inside the twins’ heads, as everyone scattered in different directions. Ernesto lurched into action, Raúl following close behind. They ran and ran until the lights were far behind them, then crouched in the night and caught their breath.
They looked around and spotted Edy, a nineteen-year-old from Honduras, with whom they’d exchanged only a few words. Besides Edy, they were alone—everyone else had vanished into the desert.
The trio set out walking, with no idea where they were heading but knowing they needed to move.
“Don’t worry, guys,” Edy said.
“We’ll get there. We’re close. Don’t worry.”
“We got this, guys. We’re getting there.” Edy’s composure and worldliness, along with his insistent optimism, soothed the twins.
In spite of his pep talks, however, Edy groaned every few steps—he had fallen and twisted his ankle on something, a log, a piece of cattle fence, he wasn’t sure. He soldiered through the night, not wanting to slow the group down. They squabbled every now and then about which route to take—this way, no that way, no this. Usually they deferred to Edy.
“Think about it—we’re so close,” he said. “Close to our dreams, man, close to reaching our destiny.” Edy rattled on like this as they walked, his comforting voice spinning dreams in the darkness.
When the sun came up, they rested beneath a mesquite tree, desperate for shade and to keep from being spotted. They scanned the horizon, trying to figure out where, exactly, they were. Had they been going in circles? Which way now?
Beneath the tree, Ernesto rummaged through his backpack for the phone. He turned it on: two bars of signal. “I think it works!” he told Raúl.
He tried texting Sandra: “We’re lost.”
Within moments, his phone pinged with a message from her. The three boys laughed in relief. “Don’t worry, you’ll be okay. Where are you?” read the text.
“In the desert.”
Pick a direction and keep walking, she told them. Once they got past the Customs and Border Protection station in Falfurrias, she instructed, there’d be a car there waiting for them.
They’d make it to a road as long as the boys could mark a straight line in one direction, ideally north. They picked a direction and tried to keep straight.
“You’re at the last step,” she wrote. “You’re so close.”
These messages lifted the boys’ spirits for a while, and they walked with renewed confidence in spite of their thirst and the unbroken horizon of empty, blistering terrain.
“I can’t wait to get a job,” Edy said. He was planning to stay in Houston, where his dad lived. “Construction, restaurant, whatever—I’ll get any kind of job. Think about it—how great will that be? We’re close. We’re so close.”
The three spent another aimless day and night eking out a pathway through the parched rangeland. During the day they hid out and rested, and at night they walked, tangling their feet in the scrub and tumbleweed, rolling their ankles in an occasional divot or one of the cattle muck pits strewn through the flat expanse like mines.
Raúl’s shoes were coming apart, the stitching unraveling. Finally the soles came undone and flapped audibly with each step, exposing his feet to the spiny brush. How would he go on like this, half barefoot?
“Here.” Ernesto yanked off his shoes and demanded Raúl do the same. “Take mine.”
Raúl obliged. Ernesto pulled Raul’s shoes onto his own feet and undid the laces, winding them around the bottom of the soles to hold the halves together, then tied them as tightly as he could.
“Thanks,” Raúl said.
Ernesto made a face to make sure Raúl knew he was annoyed at him for letting this happen. Even with the adjustment, the soles of Raúl’s shoes, now on Ernesto, still dragged against the ground.
The second night Ernesto insisted on walking ahead, though he had no more idea where he was than the other two did.
“We got this, boys,” Edy said periodically. “The last step. We’re almost there.” The twins nodded and kept moving.
Around three in the morning, the stars bright in the sky, Raúl heard a sharp yipping sound behind him. Evil spirits, he thought, on the hunt again.
The noise repeated, louder. “What’s that?” he whispered.
They all stopped. Ernesto and Edy had heard it, too.
“Fuck,” Edy said. “Coyotes.”
They picked up their pace, but the yipping followed them, seeming to get closer and more varied. They walked faster. Every bark felt like a prophecy: the animals caging them in on all sides, their three bodies nothing but future meat.
Edy picked up some stones and hurled them into the blackness, and Ernesto and Raúl followed suit. But the yips didn’t stop.
“Shit,” Ernesto said.
They found a low mesquite tree and scurried up into the slim branches, a handful of rocks in each of their pockets. Raúl knew that coyotes, those scavengers, ate corpses. Were they such obvious prey?
“What do we do?” Raúl asked. Ernesto and Edy didn’t answer.
They spent an hour up in the tree, pitching rocks toward the sounds, until eventually the animals lumbered away.
The next day their thirst became unbearable. It scratched their throats as though they were swallowing bits of chaparral. But they trudged on. Occasionally they came across a cattle trough and drank, first skimming the slimy green muck off the water’s surface. The water tasted terrible, but it soothed their throats.
Maybe this was where they’d die, Raúl thought. At least they’d die together. He didn’t say it out aloud because it would affront Edy’s optimism and because Ernesto would scold him. But he was sure his brother was having the same thoughts. Sometimes he prayed for the border patrol to come and find them—though then they’d be sent back to El Salvador and would likely die all the same. Those guys in the trucks in Guatemala—there were more of them waiting for him, he felt sure. They had to make it to Houston, and then on to California.
“I wonder what the others are doing,” Raúl said. The guys from their migrant group, he meant. Had they been caught, or were they also lost in the desert? Or worse? Ernesto and Edy didn’t reply.
Edy’s limp had grown more pronounced, but he kept up the positive talk. Maybe he’d broken the ankle, or maybe it just needed some rest, but he didn’t complain. “Just a little more, brothers, we’re so close, just imagine how close we are. Reaching our dreams!”
By the third day, though, Edy was sick. His stomach hurt, and as they walked, he had less and less to say. They figured he might be dehydrated, or maybe it was something in the water they drank. Normally he took a medication every day, he said—he’d been off it for a week now.
They needed help. Sandra in Mexico wasn’t of much use. So Ernesto texted Wilber Jr.—they were in his territory now, after all: “We’re in the desert in Texas,” he wrote. “Me and Raúl.” “We’re lost. We have no food or water.” Their parents had told him they were coming, they knew, but they didn’t get a reply.
He texted the same thing to his sister Maricela. “We’re lost. We have no water. We’re drinking dirty water, water from the cows.”
Finally, in the distance, they spotted a house. It appeared empty; no car outside. They moved toward it with caution.
The door was unlocked, so they stepped inside and into the kitchen. They turned on the faucet and took turns sucking water straight into their mouths. They’d seen a hose outside, and Ernesto went out to fill their long-empty water bottles. They were trespassers, intruders, low-down burglars, but they were desperate. Raúl apologized to God, then began rummaging through the cabinets. They were stocked with bread, rice, and cans of food. He began pulling them from the shelves.
Just then a man walked into the kitchen.
Raúl saw him first and immediately put his hands up. Edy startled and did the same. Eyes wide and hands in the air, the boys backed away from the counter, nodding, trying to show they meant no harm. The man’s wife walked in, seeming not all that surprised at their presence.
“Who are you guys?” the man asked in Spanish.
“We’re coming from Mexico,” Edy said. “We’re sorry. We’re so sorry. But we’re lost.”
“Don’t be scared,” he said. He told them to call in “the other guy.” Raúl yelled for his brother to come inside. Ernesto hadn’t seen the car drive up, so he panicked when he saw it parked out front, and then the man and woman in the kitchen. He, too, put his hands in the air.
The man sat them down at the table and poured them glasses of water, then, once the boys emptied them, filled the same glasses up with juice. He put a stack of white Bimbo bread in front of them. They ate the entire stack, slice by slice.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You just gotta walk that way.” He indicated a direction. “If you go that way”—he pointed in another direction—“you’ll hit a big road with an immigration station, and you want to avoid that.”
The boys nodded, as the man pointed in the right direction again. “Thank you,” Ernesto said. He retied his shoelaces around the broken soles, and the boys took off walking.
“Yep, that way, that’s the way,” the man said, waving goodbye to his trio of intruders.
They trudged on, feeling better. As the third night fell, they could hear only the sound of their feet crunching through the scrub. Lost in thought, Ernesto tripped on something and fell. Another log, or a water trough? He reached his hands out to catch himself, but as he hit the ground, his hands pressed into a soft mass that collapsed in a wet, sickly mess under his weight.
As he got his bearings and pushed himself up, he realized he’d fallen onto a human body. He screamed.
Raúl ran up behind him. They could see in the dim moonlight that the corpse was headless.
Ernesto fell back onto the ground away from it and began to shake and hyperventilate. A migrant, alone and decapitated, in their very path. “I touched it,” he said. “I touched it with my own hands.”
Raúl and Edy soothed him, but Ernesto couldn’t speak for a long time.
They kept walking, then rested at dawn and through the heat of the next day. While the two others slept, Ernesto forced his eyes to stay open. He couldn’t shake the feeling of death on him. When he finally nodded off, he dreamed that two men were chasing him to cut off his head.
He awoke with a start.
A text popped up on the screen. “Okay, está bien.” It was their brother Wilber.
Finally they came to a road—a blessedly paved, even surface, presumably leading somewhere. It was dark, but the road was busy, cars flying in both directions. Could they get anywhere on this road without being seen? They hid in the scrub for a few minutes, assessing their options, staying still. But all of a sudden a light flashed over them and a truck sped their way.
Edy, despite his weak stomach and his bum ankle, took off running again. But not the twins. They wanted to follow Edy, but their feet wouldn’t move. Ernesto’s shoes were torn to bits, and they were hungry and thirsty and rendered inert by the cumulative effect of the coyotes, the corpse, and all the curses that had brought them here.
“Stop,” they heard in Spanish. It was the border patrol, la migra. “Don’t move!” an agent shouted.
They stood there, hands in the air, eyes heavy and resigned. Raúl braced himself to be punched and kicked into submission, as cops sometimes did in El Salvador.
Instead the agent just patted them down. “What are your names?” he asked in twangy Spanish. He turned the boys around, patted them down, and cuffed them. Another couple of trucks had pulled up.
“Where are you from?” the agent asked as he walked them toward the truck. “Where are you going?”
The twins answered in unison. “California.”
The agent passed Raúl to another agent and helped Ernesto up into his truck. They were separated.
“Don’t worry,” Ernesto called to Raúl. “I’ll see you when we get there.” He wasn’t sure where “there” was, but he didn’t want Raúl to be too scared.
Inside the truck, Ernesto’s agent filled out some paperwork and handed him two bottles of water and a packet of crackers. Ernesto sucked down the water like a drunk. They were caught, but they weren’t dead.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Seventeen.”
So they counted as “juvies,” as the border patrol likes to call them—unaccompanied alien children, paperless and parentless. The agent likely knew all about these kids from the uptick in their numbers over the years. This time last year there had been no place to put them all—they’d had to lodge them in former military bases along the border, scrambling even to have enough mattresses for them to sleep on. Since then, the numbers had kept rising. By the end of September 2013, just over two months from now, 24,668 minors (87 percent teenagers like the twins) would have been taken into federal custody with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. For all of 2013, fully 93 percent of these juvies came from the Northern Triangle. El Salvador, the twins’ home country, would account for 26 percent of them. The twins were just two among thousands.
In another truck, separated from his brother, Raúl figured the agents would drive them to the border and drop them off in Mexico. Perhaps after that they could try to swim across on their own. But then what?
“You boys are lucky I found you when I did,” the agent told Raúl. “We just found five dead bodies not too far from here.” He said something into his radio, put the truck in gear, and drove.
For three days, Maricela kept the phone by her side, waiting for news from the twins. Each text was a slug in the chest: “We’re lost.” “We have nothing to eat.” “We’re drinking dirty cattle water.” “It’s hot.” “Our friend is hurt.” Every time she tried to text them back—with something comforting, like “Keep walking” or “You’re going to be okay”—her message was rejected. The limitations of her phone plan made for a cruel echo chamber: she could receive their messages but could do absolutely nothing to help, not even offer advice.
At first she didn’t show their messages to her parents. But as things appeared more desperate in the desert, she told them what was going on.
“They’ll be okay,” Esperanza said knowingly. “God will protect them.”
Finally, a phone call: they were in detention in Texas. “We’re okay,” they said. “We’re okay. We’re alive.” But they’d been caught. After all that, Maricela thought, the twins would just be sent right back home.
In fact, they weren’t. The agents took them to the immigration station to be fingerprinted and questioned to be sure they were really minors. There the twins, thankfully, were reunited. Being under eighteen, that line in the sand of life, mattered: if they’d been adults, they would have been put into an adult detention center and ordered deported, likely without seeing a lawyer. But because the twins really were juvies, they’d be put in a special detention center, a “youth friendly” shelter overseen by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.
First they were sent to the hielera, or icebox, the immigration holding tank, the official limbo zone of the U.S. immigration system.
The icebox was a cold, windowless room, packed with about thirty other young men and boys. They shared one toilet with only a low barrier; going to the bathroom meant doing so in front of everyone. They held it in as long as they could. There were no beds or mattresses, and it was too difficult for everyone to lie down on the concrete floor all at once, so they took turns. The others seemed to be minors, like the twins. Immigration gave them all apple juice boxes and cookies every now and then.
Every detainee received an aluminum blanket, but it hardly kept them warm—the air conditioner remained cranked up seemingly as high as it could go, in spite of the inmates’ quiet complaints. Some immigration advocates claim that the cold temperature is intentional, a tactic used to break the spirits of immigrants who, they hope, will opt for voluntary departure—that is, agree to be sent home.
Immigration authorities contend that they need the hielera as a temporary place to house people while they figure out where to send them. Because they have no beds or showers and are not designed for overnight accommodation, a 2008 internal Border Patrol memorandum asserted that immigration detainees should not be held in hieleras for more than twelve hours, pending release to an official detention center. But the reality, according to a report by the American Immigration Council, is that they are often held longer; in the fall of 2014, they were held for an average of four days. In 2015 a U.S. District Court Judge ruled that DHS must release children from their custody to that of the Office of Refugee Resettlement within seventy-two hours. In June 2014 a consortium of human rights and immigrant advocacy agencies, including the ACLU, filed an administrative complaint against U.S. Customs and Border Protection, outlining complaints of physical, verbal, and sexual abuse, as well as withholding food, water, and medical care, of 116 unaccompanied minors while they were in temporary custody in the hieleras.
A few months after the twins were first detained, the U.S. government and media officially christened the “unaccompanied minor crisis,” and photos of children in these hieleras were leaked to the press. The images of dozens of children locked in windowless rooms revealed the institutional overwhelming and deplorable conditions to which these children were subjected: they were crammed into cells and slept en masse, like prisoners, on the floor. The photos spurned outrage on all sides for the poor treatment of minors within our borders, as well as frustration at the undue burden these migrants were placing on U.S. infrastructure.
First separately, then together, Raúl and Ernesto were taken from the hielera and interviewed by an immigration officer. She asked their age, where they were from, and if they were using a false identity. Then she asked if they had anyone in the United States they could call.
“Our brother,” Ernesto said.
“Wilber.”
She dialed for them.
Wilber picked up after a few rings. “Who is this?” he asked suspiciously. Despite their texts from the desert, he didn’t totally believe it was them.
“Ernesto and Raúl. Immigration has us,” said Ernesto.
Silence.
“Hello?” Ernesto said.
“You’re here? Seriously?”
They were serious.
“How are you?”
“Hungry,” he said. “But we’re okay.”
“Make sure you answer our calls,” Ernesto added.
Wilber said he would, and then the officer took the receiver, asked Wilber a series of questions, and jotted down his information. The twins knew Wilber didn’t have papers. Had they just got him in trouble with the authorities?
They waited in the hielera for three days or so; it was hard to mark the passage of time since the lights were always on. Then they were put into a car with four other boys, sure once again that they were being taken to the other side of the border. But soon they were pulling into the gated front lot of a two-story white clapboard house. A small sign with an orange sunburst hung along the gate: SOUTHWEST KEY PROGRAMS.
At the front desk, they handed over their belongings: a backpack each, the cellphone, Ernesto’s rosary belt, and Raúl’s Niño Divino book. They took showers and were given a change of clothes—jeans, shorts, some colored T-shirts, and sneakers. They were given several medical tests and vaccinations. They stayed in quarantine for three days, just the two of them in a room, lying around in the morning, pissing into cups, getting their blood drawn. In the afternoons they were let upstairs to watch TV, though they had to wear medical facemasks and weren’t let around any other kids. When they were finally released into the shelter, they found themselves, to their surprise, among about two hundred minors, mostly teens from Central America like them.
They were put in a room with two sets of bunk beds—Ernesto took the top—that they shared with two boys from Guatemala. It didn’t seem so bad in here. Much better, in any case, than in the hielera.
They were awakened early by the shelter staff—five-thirty a.m., time to take showers and do chores. They made their beds, straightened their room, scrubbed the bathroom sinks, and mopped the floors. They had to keep their rooms neat and orderly for daily checks. During the day they attended English classes, played soccer—always supervised—and met occasionally with their counselor, Gerardo.
Ernesto looked forward to his meetings with Gerardo. He told him things he’d never told anyone before, not even Raúl. His dreams had been getting worse and worse—like the recurring dream with a headless man chasing him down, trying to strangle him—and he’d awaken in a sweat, screaming and trembling. Gerardo was often on duty in the middle of the night, and Ernesto could ask permission to walk down and see him. In the daytime, Ernesto began to suffer from panic attacks, and Gerardo helped him calm down. “Breathe,” he’d say. “Deep breaths.” With each inhale, Ernesto was to focus on calming, and with each exhale, he’d repeat out loud something bad that had happened, as if he were releasing it into the air around him.
“My uncle wanted to kill me.”
“My brother was kidnapped, and it was my fault.”
“I fell onto a body—I can still feel it on my hands.”
“What happened that day in Reynosa.”
After sessions like that, he could sleep a little. But the following day the cycle would start over again, and he’d be back in Gerardo’s office, breathing deep and asking for a caramel.
Raúl noticed that Ernesto wasn’t doing so well. He was glad he had his counselor. But why wouldn’t he talk to him?
The Southwest Key Facility in San Benito, Texas, just outside Harlingen and about ten miles as the crow flies from the border, is part of a lucrative federal contracting industry in which contracts are awarded to nonprofit agencies for the short-term housing and care of unaccompanied minors.
Prior to 1997, unaccompanied minors like the Flores twins had been detained along with adults in prison-like detention facilities. That put them at obvious risk and violated the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In 1997 an agreement known as the Flores Settlement (no relation to the twins) laid out new requirements for child-appropriate facilities for unaccompanied minors. It also provided for an alternative detention model in which children would be released, when possible, to trusted adults in the United States pending their immigration proceedings in court. In 2003 the Department of Homeland Security transferred the responsibility for the housing and care of unaccompanied minors to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)—specifically, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)—which meant the government agency that was attempting to deport children was no longer also in charge of their day-to-day care.
As was formerly common in the U.S. penal system and as remains a norm in adult immigration detention, these youth detention facilities were run by outside contractors, all nonprofit agencies like Southwest Key. But in spite of their 501(c)3 status, youth shelters are often a big business. The year the Flores twins crossed the border, DHHS budgeted $175 million for the Unaccompanied Minor Program, over 80 percent of which went to the shelter costs through federal contracts. In response to the surging numbers, in fiscal year 2014, Obama’s budget plan allocated $494 million to the ORR in support of unaccompanied minors, nearly double the program’s 2012 budget. Southwest Key received $164 million in government grants that year. In fiscal year 2017 the ORR’s Unaccompanied Alien Children budget is approximately $1.32 billion, up more than $373 million from 2016.
Southwest Key is one of the largest UAC contractors, priding itself on its mission of “opening doors to opportunity so individuals can achieve their dreams.” Though it is a nonprofit, it looks a lot like a private prison company in its reliance on high-priced federal contracts. In some cases, former prison guards have been hired to work in ORR-funded shelters.
Though the vast majority of children report that the shelters are well run and safe (even if they don’t like being stuck there), abuse seems to be not uncommon. In 2007 the nonprofit Texas Shelter Care outside San Antonio was shut down over allegations of sexual abuse. There were other reports over the years, though they were kept in relative secrecy until a 2014 Houston Chronicle exposé. The Chronicle investigated 101 reports of sexual misconduct between 2011 and 2013, with unaccompanied minors in custody in New York, Illinois, Texas, and Florida; the alleged sexual abuse was often accompanied by threats if these incidents were reported. In cases of allegations, the shelters contact local law enforcement. But “in the hands of local police and prosecutors,” reported the Chronicle, “criminal cases have crumbled because of sloppy detective work, communication gaps with federal officials and jurisdictional confusion.” As a result, very few perpetrators have served jail time, and none of them were prosecuted under a 2008 federal law designed specifically to protect children in custody from child abuse. (To make matters worse, because seventeen is the age of consent in Texas, abuse of a seventeen-year-old in custody was on at least several occasions not deemed abuse by the local authorities.)
Prior to 2012 the average stay for children in ORR custody was seventy-five days before they opted for voluntary departure, were ordered deported, or most commonly, were reunited with family in other states pending their day in immigration court. In 2016, the average stay was thirty-four days. When the budget is broken down, the total cost of detaining each child has, since the initial 2012 surge, totaled between $200 and $500 per night. Profits have been healthy: in 2014 the Southwest Key CEO made $659,000, including bonuses and incentives.
The Flores twins stayed at the Southwest Key facility for over two months. It was here that a social worker finally explained what was happening to them. They had entered the country illegally, she said, so they were being placed in deportation proceedings, but they would not be sent home before first going to court and talking to a judge. They could try to find a lawyer to fight their case, though that might cost money. If the judge did not accept their plea to stay, they would be deported. Meanwhile they’d stay at Southwest Key. If they had a family member or other close friend in the United States who was willing to take them in, they could be transferred out of the facility to live with them.
“But,” the woman warned, “this does not mean you have permission to stay in the United States for good. You still have to go to court.” While they were cared for under the auspices of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Flores twins and their peers were not considered refugees; they were illegal aliens under the letter of the law, with a pending order for deportation.
The social worker explained the release process to Wilber Jr.: he would be background-checked, and if they found him fit to be a sponsor, he would have to pay the plane fare for the boys to travel to his city, as well as for a social worker to accompany them on the journey. He would be responsible for making sure they were fed, clothed, housed, that they were safe, that they enrolled in school, and most important, that they made it to their court date.
She added, “And if you don’t have papers, don’t worry—this will not impact your immigration status.”
This fact put the boys somewhat at ease. But still—could they trust her?
The shelters wanted to release children to sponsors to keep their time in detention to a minimum, or at the very least to free up bed space. In practice, neither the shelters nor the ORR turned over information about sponsors or their immigration status to the Department of Homeland Security. (That practice could change, however, under pressure from the executive branch.) Wilber took the social worker at her word. Within a few days, he started the process to become the twins’ guardian.
Once a week they got to make a fifteen-minute phone call home. They alternated between calling Wilber and calling their parents. Fifteen minutes went quickly, and each time the staff member motioned for them that their time was up, they rambled a quick goodbye and handed the receiver back over. Gerardo sometimes let Ernesto make special phone calls home during their sessions. Talking to Esperanza was the most soothing for him and also the hardest of all. “I’m okay, don’t worry,” Ernesto would say. “We’re okay!” But she was always crying into the phone. She didn’t believe him, he could tell. Likewise, the twins didn’t believe her when she insisted the family was safe back home. They worried that Agustín might go after their family to punish them.
Meanwhile they made a few friends at the shelter, who, like their old classmates, referred to them as a unit. “The twins,” los gemelos, the boys called them as they passed in the cafeteria or the game room, all in their standard-issue clothes. They didn’t share much about their past, preferring to focus on the now of the shelter: video games, gossip, and what was—gross, what is this?—for dinner today.
They ate their meals in the big cafeteria downstairs. The food was terrible—slop on a tray, nothing like what they were used to eating at home. On special days they’d get pizza, which wasn’t bad.
There were girls there, too, but they were housed in a separate part of the campus and had meals separately.
Raúl noticed one Guatemalan boy, ten or twelve years old, who spent a lot of time staring fixedly out the windows. He carried a little blue rock with him everywhere, until one day it disappeared. “Black magic,” one of their new friends whispered over dinner. Another morning the Guatemalan boy woke up to find his clothes were gone, and then, the morning cafeteria chatter went, he found a noose hanging from the ceiling—the Guatemalan’s roommate had seen it, too, or so the kid reporting it said. Then his clothes turned different colors. Someone, it was clear, was doing brujería, witchcraft, against this kid. The more strange things happened to him, the more the other kids steered clear of him, and the more time the boy spent at the window, staring. Eventually he was taken to the hospital “because he was driven crazy,” said Raúl, “by the sorcery.” It confirmed what Raúl had assumed: the boy had been seeing the same bad spirits he had.
Occasionally the kids with good behavior were taken out on field trips. One night it was to the movies; the Flores twins had never been to a movie theater before. They loved the cool, dark room and the chairs like individual couches, comfortable and soft so you could sink back and stare up at the big screen. They had no idea what the film was called, or what exactly was happening, since it was in English. Something about a boy and girl falling in love. The popcorn was delicious and left tracks of butter on their hands.
They went to the park in town from time to time to kick the ball around. Once they heard a commotion and turned: one of the shelter staff was demanding that a man please put down his camera. The man had it trained on the shelter kids and was saying something about how, as Ernesto and Raúl took it, he didn’t want his own kids playing with a bunch of immigrants. Eventually the guy collected his own child and drove away. The staff wouldn’t tell them what, exactly, the guy had said.
The twins wanted out of Southwest Key as fast as possible. As competently cared for as they were, their life was on hold, which was maddening. Their debt was climbing, for one thing—every day in here meant another line of compounding interest in the ledger, another day they weren’t earning money to pay it back. Their world was precarious. They called Wilber every other week, and more if Gerardo gave them extra calls, asking for an update, hoping he hadn’t changed his mind about letting them come live with him.
In the middle of each night, a train clattered by their window, slicing east-west through Texas.