I SEE HER EVERYWHERE NOW.
Santa Barraza had warned me her spirit could latch onto my shoulder, but the woman in the woods seems to have emblazoned my corneas instead. For months afterward, she is the prism through which I view almost everything. I see her in dark spaces, like the corners of closets, but also in white spaces, like unadorned walls. I see her between the pages of books and flickering across computer screens. I see her at night, when she wards off sleep. Though I heard scores of traumatic border-crossing stories while researching my last book, hers is the one I cannot release, despite knowing only its end.
Maybe she was escaping war, or the ghosts of war, such as the ones that ravaged Guatemala and El Salvador. Maybe she was fleeing natural disaster, like the hurricane that obliterated much of Honduras, or social disaster, like the Mara Salvatrucha, which has infiltrated most of las Américas. The murderous gang could have been pressuring her husband or son to traffic drugs across the border. They could even have been cajoling her.
Or maybe she came for love. Her sister was in the United States, her cousin was in the United States, her absolutely favorite tío. Her husband was here, her child was here, her life, she was convinced, was here.
Whatever the push/pull—war, disaster, violence, family, hope—it must have been fierce, tremendously fierce, if it propelled her to gather all of the money she could raise or borrow and relinquish it to a stranger. Whatever her thought process, whatever her reasoning, her conclusion must have been that possibly dying in El Norte was better than living on at home.
And so she said good-bye to her mother and father, her siblings and cousins, all the tías and abuelas who helped raise her. She said goodbye to the friends whom she grew up with, her classmates and coworkers, the neighbors who lived down the road. She said good-bye to her lover and possibly even her children, then summoned all of the courage within and boarded a bus heading north. Traveling across her homeland, she must have paused to take in one last sunset across her ancestral sky. Eaten one last pupusa that her mother had made, one last mango picked from her backyard tree.
No matter where she came from, traveling across Mexico probably seemed worse. First there was jungle followed by mountains and rivers and desert, all infested with terrifying men trafficking drugs and guns and people. Mexican immigration officials patrolled the highways, street gangs traversed the trains, and swindlers prowled the bus stations, yet somehow she avoided them. Chances are, she had a coyote to guide her, but if she didn’t—or if she did and he’d already abandoned her—she probably hired one at the border. He wouldn’t have been hard to find. He saw her shuffling around the bus terminal with her flowing black hair and her skinny black jeans, and he raised an eyebrow with interest. He convinced her that he knew the way; he ensured her that he could be trusted. Houston, no problem, I got a group of forty there last night. Los Angeles, that’s easy, I was there a week ago. Something in his cocksure voice reminded her of her long-lost tío. Something said he was safe.
Maybe she crossed into the United States by raft in the dark of night, current racing, cold water slapping her face. Maybe she crossed by folding herself into the trunk of a car or by squeezing between shipping containers in an eighteen-wheeler. Maybe she crossed by wading through sandy desert. However she did it, the odds were formidable. About a thousand people are caught each day along the 2,000-mile border and either detained or sent back home. Yet every day, unknown hundreds or thousands more slip through. One day or night, one of those lucky border crossers was her.
The triumph she felt must have been extraordinary. ¡El Otro Lado! The Other Side. Whatever she came for, she must have imagined it would be waiting there, right across la línea. Her mother or brother or lover would be standing there, arms outstretched, ready to receive her. Or else, that cleaning or sewing or child-sitting job she’d heard about—the one that would finally allow her family to buy that house, pay off those debts, finance that car, and splurge on her daughter’s quinceañera while she was at it. Her new boss would be there, ready to stuff her pockets with gringo dollars.
What she probably did not realize—what she couldn’t begin to fathom—was that however far she had traveled, she was still only halfway to her destination. The border is wide; the border is vicious. Her crossing had just begun.
UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS GENERALLY SPEND THEIR first nights in the United States at a stash house. Often located on the fringes of border towns, these rental homes or apartments have traditionally served as motels for illicit travelers—a place to shower and rest while coyotes plot the next stage of the journey. But in the Texas Rio Grande Valley, these houses have degenerated into something else entirely. Ten years ago, coyotes seemed to assign no more than a dozen immigrants to each house, but police these days are finding upward of forty and fifty per house, so many they sleep in shifts (if at all). Food and water are rationed, and when immigrants complain, they often get beaten. Some groups must endure these conditions for weeks while coyotes secretly call their families and extort money for their release. In fiscal year 2012, law enforcement busted 237 stash houses in the Rio Grande Valley and apprehended 4,752 immigrants—nearly two and a half times as many people as the year before.
An especially grisly discovery occurred in Edinburg in May 2012 when a Spanish-speaking man called 911 and, in a hushed voice, pleaded for help. He was being held prisoner, he said, and feared for his life. When police arrived, scores of immigrants fled from a house and trailer at the end of a caliche road. During their search, police found even more people locked inside of a cinder block building with security bars on the windows. All told, 115 immigrants had been stowed inside the three-building property, and they claimed not to have eaten in days. They also said that their ringleader, a twenty-three-year-old Mexican national named Marcial Salas Gardunio, had greeted them upon their arrival with an ominous “Welcome to hell.”
After Salas gets sentenced to a hell of his own, I persuade Greg to join me in paying the former stash house a visit. (“Only if I can wait in the car,” he says.) Traveling south on U.S. 281, we pass ranch after ranch until a delta of taquerias and RV parks opens up. This is the Rio Grande Valley: one million Tejanos, Mexican nationals, and snowbirds coexisting on the northern banks of the famous river, minutes from Mexico. It’s a 100-mile strip where Spanish is offered before English, where churches are either grand and Catholic or plain and Pentecostal, where the grapefruit is ruby red and the sky is denim blue, where a side of beans comes with every meal, where a Border Patrol vehicle is never far from view.
Exiting University Avenue and turning east, the fast food franchises gradually give way to mom-and-pop restaurants with hand-painted signs. Vera’s King-O-Meats. Esner’s Playa Azul. The local newspaper gave only an approximation of the stash house’s address, so we drive up and down the avenue a few times before selecting a side street at random. The neighborhood is exceedingly humble with boarded-up windows and rotting cars, but in time a cinder block house appears behind a chain-link fence. Looking closely, we see a gaping hole has been cut through it. Is that it? Greg waits in the car with the engine running while I duck beneath the hole in the fence and dart to the nearest window. The house appears to have been ransacked. Overturned furniture covers the floor along with heaps of clothing and shoes and bits of ceiling streaked in sludge. In the farthest corner, an office-size photocopier lay on its side, coughing up moldy papers as if it had been bludgeoned. Do smugglers make photocopies? Maybe of contracts—or receipts?
Nearby is a house with a few licks of paint and some long-retired blinds. The truck out front suggests it might be occupied, so I knock. The blinds rustle. A woman’s face becomes visible, then disappears. I wait a while before knocking again, louder this time. The door creaks open, and a thin man in a threadbare cap emerges.
“Are you Immigration?” he asks in Spanish, anxiety pinching his face.
I assure him I’m only a writer, but that seems equally bad. Shaking his head, he says that he’s sorry, he would like to help me but he can’t, it’s too dangerous, this isn’t the kind of neighborhood where you can walk around writing things, I really should just leave. Yet he makes no motion to leave himself. If anything, he more firmly establishes his presence on the doorstep. We are sizing each other up now. No tattoos, pistol-bulges, or signs of unaccountable wealth: this man looks safe to me. He, in turn, seems to be digesting my college-ruled notebook. I start making small talk, banking on a year’s worth of experiences in Mexico that, in the end, the men always open up, whether out of politeness or machismo or a plaintive desire to be heard. Sure enough, after a few exchanges about the weather, this one does too.
On the morning of the stash house raid, he says, he woke up early to get ready for work and saw squad cars and Border Patrol circling his street. He told his wife to turn off the lights and not to answer the door. His family waited quietly in an unlit room, missing work and school, until finally the neighborhood emptied. He later learned that a friend had been arrested in the raid for the crime of living next door to the stash house. For thirty days, he got interrogated in a detention center1 until deemed innocent. Then he was dropped off at the international bridge in Brownsville and forced to retreat into Matamoros.
“He got bronchitis while he was in the detention center and they didn’t give him any medicine,” the man says, indignant on his friend’s behalf. “They took his money and they didn’t give it back.”
The friend had to hire a coyote to cross the border again—a debt he’ll be paying for years to come—but now he’s back in the neighborhood. They both work at the same construction site.
I ask if he had known so many immigrants were being held at the stash house, and he admits to having noticed some unusually nice trucks in the neighborhood lately. Having lived here seven years, he sensed something was wrong, but he knew better than to ask any questions.
“The people involved, they are very bad. Whenever we see a new car, we know to stay away because we don’t want any problems.”
He shows me where the stash house is located, down a distant caliche road. “But don’t go down there. They know what’s happening in this area. They keep watch.”
“They’re still here?”
“Of course. They’ve got two or three more houses just like it, right down the street,” he says.
I turn around to look.
“Don’t!” he hisses. “They are watching. Get in your car and don’t come back. And don’t use my name. Or identify my house. Please.”
After thanking him profusely, I climb back in the Honda to confer with Greg. Whatever nerve I had to investigate further evaporates when a shiny new Ford Expedition with chrome grilling approaches from the opposite direction. Though Greg will later say it didn’t, I am (almost) positive it pauses when it passes us. I try to sneak a glimpse at the driver, but the windows are impenetrably tinted. We watch as the Expedition cruises down to the caliche road, then makes a right.
SOMEHOW SHE SURVIVED THE STASH HOUSE STAY. The coyote might have crammed her in with fifty others and the toilet was clogged and there was no place to shower or even to sleep and she ate only tortillas for four days straight, but Immigration never came, so early one morning she got corralled into a dark-windowed van with some other travelers and glided down the street. At first the signs were in Spanish—Casa De Empeño, Yusma Paleteria, Iglesia Rosa de Saron—but gradually the buildings grew taller and the signs got fancier and started saying things in English, too. Wendy’s, KFC, Domino’s, Subway, Family Dollar. Then came the restaurants with flashing neon signs, the multileveled stores, the impossibly glamorous shopping malls. So this is El Otro Lado, she might have thought. No street vendors selling helado, no mothers carrying babies on their backs or groceries in their fists, no pack animals, hardly even anyone on their feet. Just an onslaught of trucks and eighteen-wheelers, plus palm trees in the medians.
Soon enough, she exited the city. Now the landscape consisted of a narrow strip of road ahead and a narrow strip behind with nothing along the sides but brush. Well, sometimes a fruit stand. A vacant restaurant called El Luzero. An abandoned Hop N Shop. Remnants of burst tires and bits of raccoon and deer. The grass grew darker and thicker. She settled into the drive. She knew she should nap, but she felt too anxious. So long her journey had been, but surely it would be ending soon.
Perhaps an hour had passed when the driver slowed and turned down a gravel road. He followed it far from the highway, stopping to open and close gates along the way. He finally parked beneath a mesquite tree and everyone climbed out. The pinche checkpoint is up ahead, the coyote might have said. We have to go around it, just a few miles, no problem.
No matter how far she walked to avoid the first border crossing, no matter how many blisters she formed or how badly she sunburned or wind-burned or dehydrated or overheated, she needed to do it all over again. Probably no one told her this. But the chokepoint at Falfurrias was notorious for catching immigrants, upward of 10,000 a year. She’d come so very far. The next one couldn’t be her.
So she was hiking again. Just a few miles, the coyotes said (when in fact it was nearly thirty). She carried, at most, a gallon of water, when what she actually needed was three. She’d packed, at most, a granola bar, when what she really needed was a cache of protein. She wore, at most, a cap, when only a beach-size umbrella and SPF 50 sunscreen would do. She was profoundly unprepared, but she didn’t know that yet. Houston, the coyote said, was just a few miles away. But really, it was more like three hundred.
LAVOYGER DURHAM IS STRAIGHT OUT of central casting for an old Western flick. Everything about him is big: his voice, his earlobes, his cowboy hat, his smile, his white Ford Excursion with the Super Duty extended cab. His starched button-down shirt is monogrammed with his initials on the cuffs and topped by a silky black vest. He grew up roping cattle on the King Ranch and has been managing the 13,000-acre El Tule Ranch in Brooks County for twenty-two years. His chief responsibility is entertaining high-end hunters, which have included Bushes Senior (who was his best man at his wedding) and W., as well as Dick Cheney (with whom he lunched the day after Harry Whittington got shot). But Durham also devotes considerable time to dealing with “the situation,” as he puts it.
He invites me aboard his boatlike Ford one morning to show me “the little spot where illegals trash me up.” I take a seat between a rolled-up Wall Street Journal, a pair of silver spurs, some Elvis CDs, and multiple boxes of 9mm Luger 100-round Winchesters and .22 Long Rifles bullets. Not far from El Tule’s main gate, we turn onto a dirt trail that leads into a blur of huisache and live oaks. Almost instantly I lose my bearings. In every direction, the scenery is identical, with nothing long or tall enough to gauge distance. That’s probably why once or twice a month, Durham hears a thump at his door and opens it to find a hopeful or desperate immigrant on his step.
“I ask where they are going, I find out what is the deal, and then I say, ‘I’ll give you a ride up to the highway,’” he says. “I send them on a pipeline so it’s easy to follow, and then I call the Border Patrol. I just get rid of them and that’s it.”
We are driving parallel to the highway now, perhaps 250 yards away. A gallon jug of water comes into view, uncapped and on its side, gleaming in the sun. Then another. Then a third. Then a sweatshirt and a shoe. Then a dozen jugs of water and a pile of sweatshirts and shoes. We pull up to a massive live oak tree that has been draped in plastic bags and hoodies as if it were a demented Christmas tree, with baseball caps, squashed energy drinks, backpacks, bottles, and plastic jugs strewn beneath. Footprints crumble the dirt.
“That’s about a year’s worth,” Durham says. “I don’t clean it up because I bring people like you out here to see it.”
While a somber sight for me, it must be a welcome one for the immigrants, as it means they have successfully evaded the chokepoint. Hanging a hoodie could even be a celebratory act. I won’t be needing this anymore; I’m going to Houston! From here, they just have to wait until their driver honks, then dash through the brush and into the getaway van. Assuming, of course, a driver does indeed come for them, and that they are still capable of dashing when he does. Durham points out a spot where two bodies were recently discovered.2 “You only find 25 percent of the bodies before the javelinas and the vultures get hold of them. They start to eat, and then you might find one bone over here and another two hundred feet over there.”
Right on cue, a pack of javelinas waddle out from the brush. Pepper-black and prickly, they resemble wild pigs with sizable tusks. They have a reputation for meanness.
Horseshoeing at the live oak, we start heading back to the gate. After a time, a Border Patrol SUV appears in the rearview mirror. Durham pulls over and rolls down the window.
“We got the bodies,” an agent announces.
“They were dead?” Durham asks, surprised.
“No, we got the subjects,” the agent corrects himself. “We got eight, but four or five scattered by the creek.”
“Shit, they’ll probably be coming by my house next,” Durham says. With a sigh, he rolls up the window and taps the accelerator. He wishes the Border Patrol would shut down that Falfurrias checkpoint altogether and beef up security at the border so more immigrants would get caught the first time around. That way, whoever made it through could just hop on 281 and cruise on into Houston, waving at Brooks County through the rearview mirror. Durham thinks immigration is too grave a problem to handle locally. “The piglets have outnumbered the teats on the old sow around here,” he says.
THE FIRST HOUR PASSED QUICKLY. She believed the coyotes. Houston was just a few miles away. The sun prickled her skin and the burrs ripped her jeans, but her energy was ample. She clutched her bottle of water, and every now and then she sipped from it.
At some point in the hike, her group probably met up with another coyote and his travelers. She likely felt grateful for the additional company—until someone collapsed. Maybe he was older; maybe she had a bum knee or heart condition. Whatever the case, their coyote probably made a face and said We’re already late and Do you think you can manage? The traveler gasped yes but could barely hobble. The coyote made a show of placing a call on his cell phone. A van is coming for you, he said, so stay right here. The rest of you, come with us.
She exchanged glances with the other travelers. How could they know for certain? It seemed they should wait, to be sure. It wasn’t right, abandoning someone in the brush with only half a jug of water.
And yet, the future of their families depended on whether or not they made it to Houston—and Houston was just a few miles away.
When the coyotes turned to walk deeper into the brush, she followed close behind.
THE GUATEMALAN CONSULATE OF MCALLEN, Texas, has no distinguishing features, neither a flag nor a sign, and hardly any windows. Unlike the Mexican Consulate a few blocks over, which is so overpopulated that mothers and children spill into the street, this beige brick box seems vacant. But when I knock upon its mirrored door, a sharp-dressed man whisks me inside to the office of Consul Alba Caceres. In her early thirties, she wears a silky floral blouse and dangly earrings. Smiling warmly, she invites me to sit. When I say that I am researching immigrant deaths in Brooks County, she shakes her head slowly, as if remembering each one by name.
“That’s the biggest mortuary in the United States,” she says, adding that the remains of forty-seven Guatemalans were recovered there in 2012. That’s why they decided to open this consulate in November 2011 in the first place: so many were dying in South Texas, they could hardly keep track of them all from Houston. They processed 1,393 cases of missing persons during their first eleven months of operation through this one office alone. Their biggest obstacle isn’t logistics or resources but rather gaining the trust of the families they serve.
“Say someone dies and goes to the mortuary,” Caceres says, sliding her hands across the top of her desk as if to simulate a battlefield. “The coyote will still make the family believe he is still alive. The coyote will call and say he needs money for medical attention. We try to fight the situation, we call the family and try to explain it to them, but then the coyote will call and say we are lying. The families need to believe their relative is still alive, and so they do. They believe the coyote.”
Consider what happened two months ago. A rancher found the body of a Guatemalan man, and as soon as he was identified, the consulate called the family to deliver the news. Yet two days later, the family wired $3,000 to his coyote, who had convinced them that their father/husband/son wasn’t dead but injured and accruing medical expenses that needed payment.
When I ask how anyone could trust a coyote over a consul, Caceres points out that families tend to know the first coyote their relative hires. He is usually not only a community member but also one “with status,” meaning a nice home and a large truck. Yet this coyote escorts his clients only across the Guatemalan border. From there, they are transferred to someone else to guide them across Mexico and over the U.S. border, to a third to sidestep the checkpoint in Falfurrias and continue on to Houston, and to a fourth to transport them to their final destination. With so many people in multiple nations, it is easy for the original coyote to shrug off responsibility when something goes wrong.
When it comes to finances, however, the coyote is more fastidious. The full transaction for Guatemalans costs $5,000 a head, plus a 9 percent interest rate every month, Caceres says. Many take out loans against their property to raise the funds, meaning their families could go homeless if they don’t make it to the United States. And coyotes generally grant travelers only two chances. With stakes that high, you’d think only the very reckless or the very desperate would try it, yet through this single consulate, some 12,000 Guatemalans were apprehended, processed, and sent back home last year.
“The problem is, they know someone from their same town who came to the U.S. for one year, and they made enough to buy a house and a car all in one year. They know they would need to work twelve years in Guatemala to have those same things. So Houston is like Israel. It is the promised land,” Caceres says, her large brown eyes growing moist.
She can relate to this sentiment because she was once an undocumented worker herself, in Spain. Her boss there was so lecherous, she quit—then realized how privileged she was to do so. Her family back home was politically connected and financially solvent; no one needed her income for survival. She started working for the consulate with hopes of helping those less fortunate. Yet the tragedies she witnesses here daily—the frantic cell phone calls fielded all hours of the day and night, the corpses to process, the mothers to console—eventually become so devastating, she will resign from her post in 2014.
As I exit the beige brick building, I notice the Guatemalan Consulate has a distinguishing feature after all. The vacant office next door retains the imprint of a sign removed long ago. WORKFORCE, it says in ghostly script.
AT SOME POINT IN THE HIKE—after a few whiffs of white powder, perhaps—the coyotes might have separated the men from the women and the women from each other. Undoubtedly the men protested as their wives and girlfriends and sisters and daughters were led into another section of the woods, but the coyotes reasoned that men walk faster and could make better time without them. Yet the coyotes grinned when they said this, and when the wives/girlfriends/sisters/daughters soon began screaming, they laughed. This mortified the men, but what could they do? Each coyote carried a Glock in his pocket. They controlled the GPS system. They alone knew where they were, where they were going, and how to move between the two.
The women, meanwhile, tried to dissuade them. They appealed to the coyotes’ lapsed Catholicism, their buried-but-beating belief in La Virgen de Guadalupe. They told them they were menstruating. They told them they had a rash down there—warts, a disease, anything. If they were remotely young or pretty, these tactics probably did not work. Especially not for her. Her body was so small, her hair so long.
She must have known this was a possibility. She must have prepared as much as a woman could—sliding on tights beneath her jeans, swallowing tiny pills. She took these precautions because she heard it might happen, and a few miles into her hike to Houston, it possibly did.
WHITE VIGILANTES HAVE BEEN TORMENTING ethnic Mexicans since the borderline was first drawn. Well into the twentieth century, lynch mobs hung Mexicans3 from trees for crimes ranging from cattle theft to suspected murder, often with the approval of local law enforcement. Vigilantes also helped U.S. military and the Texas Rangers persecute suspected sympathizers of a 1915 uprising called the Plan de San Diego. So many Mexican corpses4 were found rotting in Texas fields—some burned, some decapitated—scholars have since deemed it some of the worst state-sanctioned racial violence in U.S. history.5
So it was disconcerting when, in April 2005, headlines announced a new breed of vigilante. Cofounded by a Vietnam veteran and a former kindergarten teacher, the Minuteman Project urged citizens to take out their shotguns and stage watch posts to “do the job our government refuses to do” along the border. Likening themselves to white Martin Luther Kings with a new civil rights agenda, they claimed to have recruited more than 1,300 volunteers nationwide (including, according to an early website, “17 American Mexicans, 5 American Armenians . . . 4 wheelchair-bound paraplegics, and 6 amputees”). The bulk of participants observed by the media, however, were white men over fifty. Then-president George W. Bush denounced their tactics, but they found support in right-wing Republicans like Representative Tom Tancredo and CNN anchor Lou Dobbs after (dubiously) claiming to have helped the Border Patrol thwart “thousands” of illegal crossings.
These days, the Minuteman Project is mainly a publicity machine for its founders, but one offshoot still runs operations: the Texas Border Volunteers. Its spokesman, Mike Vickers, might be the best-known immigration critic in South Texas—or at least the one who garners the most newsprint. After a year of playing phone tag, I land an interview with him in Falfurrias, the same day I witness the recovery of the woman in the woods. When I arrive at his workplace, Las Palmas Veterinarian Hospital, his secretary says he’s still in surgery.
“You could check out our fancy city,” she chirps, brushing away a wisp of bright blonde hair with a manicured fingernail. “You could get a frappé at McDonald’s, a mini-Blizzard at Dairy Queen, or a Red Velvet Bluebell Ice Cream at H-E-B.”
I plop on the sofa instead. The end table features a stuffed and coiled rattlesnake baring its fangs and wearing a sign that says PROTECT YOUR DOG WITH RATTLESNAKE VACCINE. As if to prove it, a dog in a distant room howls so mournfully, it echoes off the Saltillo tiling.
An hour later, Vickers emerges. In his early sixties with Mark Twain hair, he wears knee-high work boots over dark blue jeans and a ball cap that says TEXAS DEER ASSOCIATION. I follow him into his office, where my eyes fall upon a poster of a cartoon cowboy kicking a caricature of President Obama square in the butt, alongside the slogan DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS. Fourteen sets of antlers festoon the walls, along with photos of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl beaming her way through puberty.
“Well I was out hunting nilgai—which is really fine meat—on Saturday morning when I found this guy at 7:15 A.M., dead on the road,” he says, whipping out his digital camera and clicking through the images. He leans over to reveal a man stretched out on a county road. “His buddies left a marker on the fence. He was Salvadoran, number thirty-four this year.”
Number thirty-four, or the one directly preceding the woman discovered earlier that afternoon. Could they have been part of the same group? Did this mean she was Salvadoran too?
No time to ponder: Vickers is already launching into the history of the Border Volunteers. He got riled up listening to Minuteman Chris Simcox on the Bill O’Reilly show one evening, and when some frustrated folks in Goliad reached out to him, he decided to host a border watch on his property (1,000 acres in Falfurrias and 3,000 acres south of Hebbronville). Nearly 200 people showed up with their motor homes and pup tents. Initially a branch of the Minuteman Project, they seceded when the group’s “standard operating procedure” of no fewer than three monitors to a stationary post proved unsuitable for Texas’s feral terrain. Plus, they wanted to align themselves with local law enforcement.
“It took a while for the Border Patrol to respect and trust us, but now, it is really good. We’re not going to get shot at when we call,” Vickers says, still flipping through his digital images and pausing now and then to show me the gory ones. “We report a lot of traffic they don’t see.”
Here’s how it works. Once a month or so, Vickers reaches out to his membership, currently 300 strong. They don Gen 3 night vision equipment and camouflage hunting gear, drive out to one of fifty participating ranches, spread out over the most heavily trafficked trails, and then hunker down and wait for someone to emerge from the mesquite.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” I ask. “I thought coyotes were armed.”
“We’ve had gun encounters, but there has never been a shot fired,” he says. “We present ourselves in large numbers.”
Those numbers typically come from gun shows, where Vickers does the bulk of his recruiting, along with presentations at local chapters of the Rotary Club, Republican Party, and Tea Party. He says that every member undergoes a background check and vetting session with a retired naval officer to ensure no one has “a chip on their shoulder.” Members hail from as far away as Wisconsin and Florida, and he claims that a good 10 percent are Hispanic.
“They see it in the same light as we do,” he explains. “A lot of them are first generation American citizens, and their parents came in the legal way. It angers them that these people are just stealing through.”
Whenever the Volunteers spy a group “stealing” across the brush, they ring up the authorities to arrest them.
“We have reported hundreds over the years,” he says. “Thousands!”
I ask how many tend to be women.
“We find a lot of dead women,” he says. “We suspect foul play. These people don’t accidentally get lost. The coyote just dupes people of their money. They tell them they’ll be in the brush for thirty minutes, and twelve hours later they are all cramped up and can’t walk anymore. During the last op, we rescued a woman in labor, and that night she had a baby. A lot of the women we encounter are pregnant.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the woman in the woods might have been pregnant. I had noticed the extraordinary girth of her belly but assumed it was from intestinal bloating. Maybe that was her motivation for crossing. She wanted her child to be a U.S. citizen. According to Vickers, such is often the case. He once found a Guatemalan woman right outside his office door, utterly lost and heavily pregnant.
“She was running a 108 temperature,” he says. “I brought her inside here, put her in a cold bath, and ran a cold IV.”
Then he called the police. When I ask how he could do that, after all she had suffered through, he says, “I feel sorry for them, but you have got to draw the line. This issue has overwhelmed our country. It has broke our own county, our hospitals.”
From his perspective, the Texas Border Volunteers are not derailing immigrants’ hard-chased dreams of a better life; they are saving them from a miserable death. “We’ll probably have a hundred dead this summer,” he says.
At the moment, this comment feels flippant, as if he’s overselling his point. Yet of all the people I interview in the summer of 2012, Vickers’s death toll prediction is the one that is vindicated.
AT SOME POINT IN THE HIKE, calamity struck. If not an injury, a rape. If not a rape, a raid. Men in jalapeño green materialized out of the wilderness. The travelers saw their headlights and heard their Jeeps and the coyotes yelled and everyone scattered.
She managed to follow the coyote for a few hundred yards but then lost him in the brush. Still, she kept on, darting this way and that, beneath prickly pear and thorny mesquite and across rivers of huisache until her heart nearly burst. When she finally stopped, there was no one behind her. This must have seemed impossibly lucky—until she realized how quiet the day had grown. All around her, all she could see was mesquite and huisache, huisache and mesquite.
Which way to Houston just a few miles away?
She probably took out her cell phone at that point. Read the numbers; pressed its many buttons. Of course there was no signal. There probably was no battery. That LG cell phone, the same one she’d used to call her mother and her lover, the one she’d used to coordinate this journey in the first place, was as useless as those twenty-eight dollars in her pocket. Even if she could call someone, what would she say? She had no idea where she was besides Houston a few miles away.
ONCE A BODY IS RECOVERED from Brooks County, it is typically dispatched eighty miles south to a town called Mission, where a family-owned funeral home called Elizondo Mortuary and Cremation Services processes it. In January 2013, half a year after witnessing the retrieval of the woman in the woods, I give the Elizondos a call. The daughter, Dina, agrees to meet with me.
One of the larger cities in the Rio Grande Valley, Mission is also one of the quietest. Its downtown consists of an art pueblo–style cinema called The Border and a long strip of brightly painted fruterías, tortillerías, taquerias, and auto shops with clay tile roofing. Beyond the Best Little Warehouse in Texas, the Mission Boot Shop, the Snow Hut, and restaurants advertising BBQ , MASA, and PAN DULCE is a stretch of housing projects. Between a water tower and a glitzy First Cash Pawn Shop stands a building bedecked with a hearse, a dove, and my mother’s maiden name in floral script.
Inside, I am greeted by the patriarch, Raul Elizondo. A sweet elder, he has a debilitating stutter. “I knew someone who was a mortician, and I thought, well, if I work with dead people, I don’t have to talk to them. They won’t know I stutter.”
He escorts me to his daughter’s office, which has coffins pushed against the walls and a glass case full of urns shaped like angels and teardrops. Dina rises from the desk and extends her hand. Her cinnamon hair is streaked blonde, and she wears rhinestone-studded jeans and necklaces festooned with heavy silver crosses. A dozen red roses are arranged atop her desk, along with a vase of peacock feathers. Two lines on her office phone are ringing, and when she pauses to answer, her cell phone rings, too.
“Amiga, I am always busy, but I always have time for you,” she coos to one caller. “I’ll be at Chili’s at seven if you want to go.”
Four calls later, she flashes an apology. The funeral business is unrelenting, she says. Not one call can be missed, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, lest a potential client skip down to the next funeral home on the list. She was literally born into this work. Her father used to pick her up from school in their limousine (or hearse). All of her life, there has been a dead person in the next room and a family openly grieving. Only at this funeral home, the family tends to be thousands of miles away.
“The wife lives over there and the husband lives over here, and they die crossing back,” she summarizes the profile of her typical client. “The desert is cruel. It has no mercy on anyone’s soul.”
About 80 percent of her clients are undocumented immigrants, she says, so their stories are often distressing. A couple months ago, they received the remains of a ten-year-old Honduran boy and had to coordinate plans with a mother and father living three countries apart. “How could a mother let her son leave like that?” she asks, shaking her head. “She put her child with a stranger to cross all the way to Reynosa, to cross the water, to cross a field, to cross the desert. Her thing was, ‘Well, he wanted to see his dad.’ But he couldn’t defend himself at ten!”
Then there’s the elderly lady who calls every single day, looking for her brother. “She’ll say, ‘I am so sorry to bother you,’ and we’ll say, ‘No, you are not bothering us,’ and she’ll say, ‘I just wanted to know if you’ve heard anything,’ and we’ll say no, and she’ll say, ‘Hablo mañana.’ She has done this every day for three years.”
I ask how the Elizondos developed their relationship with Brooks County, and she says that bodies used to be dispatched north to Corpus Christi, where they underwent autopsies before being sent back to Falfurrias for burial. “We once looked at one of the bodies, and we found some ID on their belt that they had missed, and were able to send them home to their family.”
She convinced Brooks officials to send the bodies to her in Mission instead, both as a cost-saving measure for the county and—she says—to improve the chances of identifying the bodies (albeit not their cause of death). The Elizondos have since become a sort of clearinghouse for missing immigrants. Not only do consulates send in reports of lost citizens, but families call or e-mail as well. Dina lifts up her desk calendar to show me a stack of Post-it notes beneath, each scribbled with someone’s last known details.6
“The family will call and say, oh, they have a tattoo here and a birthmark there, and freckles, but I’m like, no. They don’t understand that the bodies have decomposed. I need clothes, I need shoe size, I need to know what kind of belt,” she says, counting each item off on her fingers. “You’ll remember details, too, like the body was wearing a certain kind of sweater, and then when you get a call from a family member saying their loved one was wearing a sweater, you’ll connect the two.”
In addition to matching up clothing, the Elizondos also photograph teeth and send them to consulates to check against dental records, she says. Once a body has been identified, a family member based in the United States sometimes shows up and asks to see the remains.
“We say, ‘No, don’t see him,’ and they say, ‘You don’t understand,’ and I say, ‘No, you don’t understand. It’s better to remember the way he was, because if you see him like this, it will stay with you forever.’ But they are insistent, and afterward they usually say, ‘I shouldn’t have seen him.’ It is hard. It is still hard for us. It haunts me. It is overwhelming. But it is life. What isn’t fair is death, and we all go through it.”
I ask what it’s like to receive the bodies from Brooks County, how she manages to unzip those black bags.
“Every day you see something different,” she acknowledges, the epitome of diplomacy. “I don’t do it very much because the smell penetrates your clothes, and I am needed here in the office to visit with the families. But when I do, I just think, what were you thinking out there? What were your last words? Did you ask for forgiveness? I also ask why. Why, why, why.”
These are questions she especially asked in the summer of 2012, when they received upward of four bodies a day—so many, they had to buy a new cooler in October.
“A new cooler,” I repeat.
“Oh yes,” she says, standing up from her chair.
We walk around to the warehouse out back. A massive steel construction has a sign taped to it: PLEASE REMEMBER TO PUT A TOE TAG ON THE BODIES. This newer cooler can hold up to forty-five bodies, she says, whereas the old one barely fit twelve. Some bodies stay here for months (at a rate of $50 a day) while plans are firmed with families back home. The first decision is the worst: casket or cremation. The former is prohibitively expensive. To transport bodies from Brooks County to Mission, fill out and file the paperwork, dress them in a suit if they are full-bodied (or hot-seal them in a bag if they are not), lay them in a casket, and board them on a one-way flight from McAllen to Dallas to Miami to their final Latin American destination costs about $3,600—a considerable percentage of what it cost to cross the border in the first place. Dina tries to convince families to cremate instead, but it’s a hard sell.
“Mexicans don’t believe in cremation. Salvadorans, Hondurans, they don’t want it,” she says. “I know how they feel; I would want all of them home, too. But we have to tell them, he’s not a full body. It’s so much cheaper, and we can send ashes much faster too.”
When we return to her office, I ask Dina about the fate of the woman found July 3, 2012. She consults her records, but no woman is listed from that day. Brooks County had no information about her either when I checked the day before; she remained unidentified, according to their records. This deeply unsettles me. If I cannot, with all of my resources and privileges, track her down, what are the chances of her family doing so?
Sensing my upset, Dina offers in a low voice that she doesn’t see immigrants just at the endpoint of their journeys. She sometimes sees them midway, too.
“Where I live is real secluded, and sometimes I’ll be driving and a truck will stop right in front of me, and people will run out from the bushes and into the truck. When I see them wearing an orange shirt and white socks, I pray to God that I won’t see them again here, and know that I saw them alive just a few days before. I try not to look when I see them in the street, because I don’t want to remember.”
THERE WAS SUN AND MORE sun and all sun and only sun and slowly the sun began to cook her. Her organs roasted inside her. Intestines. Liver. Kidneys. Heart.
What did she think when she collapsed to the ground, when she rolled on her back in surrender?
Who will take care of my family now?
Will someone find me before the animals do?
Where is this Houston a few miles away?
SACRED HEART BURIAL PARK is on the outskirts of Falfurrias. Take Travis Street west until it becomes Cemetery Road and keep going until a burnt-orange brick gate appears beneath the mesquite. Even from a distance, you can tell that Tejanos are buried here. It is awash in color, with far more flamboyant floral displays than you ever see in gringo graveyards. It also has fresher mounds.
After visiting Elizondo Mortuary, I drive an hour and a half north to this graveyard, then slowly tour through it. Gradually the marble tombstones give way to granite markers, handmade wooden crosses, and then plastic flowers sprouting from the dirt. I park the car and step out. Here, on a parched strip of land, is where unidentified immigrants get buried, beneath tiny markers that seem to have been fashioned out of tin cans. Rather than names, they list numbers: Unknown Female, 436663. Male Unknown, 417654. Male 90709 Sep 7 09 Poco Grande Ranch. They form haphazard rows, just inches from each other, with a fake daisy for adornment tied with a purple ribbon.
Chances are, this is where the woman in the woods got buried, her LG cell phone and twenty-eight dollars sealed in a Ziploc bag beside her. Undocumented when she was found, she has plenty of papers now. A death certificate. An Electronic Death Registration number. All buried in a particleboard coffin, six feet down.
That’s the best-case scenario, anyway. In just a few months, visiting forensic anthropologists from Baylor University and the University of Indianapolis will discover body upon body crammed inside these barely marked graves of Sacred Heart Burial Park—up to five deep. Some corpses won’t even have rated coffins but will have been rolled instead in blankets or stuffed in body bags, burlap bags, kitchen trash bags, or even shopping bags. Many of the remains will not have been identified or their DNA samples obtained, despite state laws requiring otherwise. The anthropologists—headed by Dr. Lori Baker of Baylor University in Waco, Texas—will quickly act to change that.7 Beginning in May 2013, bodies will cease being sent to Elizondo Mortuary for processing and will instead be transported to Webb County Medical Office for DNA analysis before moving on to Baker’s lab to await identification.8
In 2014, a widely publicized investigation by the Texas Rangers of the Texas Department of Public Safety will ensue, and all parties involved—from law enforcement to funeral home directors (including the Elizondos)—will plead a lack of funding, personnel, and resources as their defense. No criminal charges will be filed. In 2015, the Texas Observer will publish an in-depth critique of that investigation citing “rampant violations” of the law by all of the parties cleared by the Rangers. In addition to failures in securing autopsies9 or DNA samples and egregious burial practices, reporter John Carlos Frey will discover that Funeraria del Angel Howard-Williams, the funeral home that recovers the bodies from the ranches, was charging Brooks County $145 per body bag—despite the fact that body bags generally run about $30 apiece and that many of the remains were buried in bags that cost a few dollars if not a few pennies each.
On this brisk afternoon in January 2013, however, there are no Texas Rangers or forensic anthropologists or other reporters in sight. There’s only me, walking among the graves in hopes of finding one with the same death date as the woman in the woods. There are no maps for this cemetery, no records whatsoever of who is buried where. I spend an hour bending over the flimsy markers, reading the many labels, searching for a trace of her. Yet I find only ribbons wrapped around fake flowers, blowing in the wind.
1. While awaiting deportation from the United States, many immigrants are held for weeks if not months in a network of more than 250 detention centers that are often owned and operated by private companies like Halliburton in isolated stretches of the country. Even the “better” centers are equipped with not-enough blankets, inedible food, overhead lighting that wards off sleep, and pneumonia-inducing air conditioning. In the worst, immigrants must also fend off physically and sexually abusive guards—and unlike in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees have no guaranteed right to a lawyer. To learn more, watch Maria Hinojosa’s Frontline exposé “Lost in Detention,” which aired on PBS in 2011.
2. Between 2011 and 2014, Durham found seven dead immigrants on the ranch—so many that, with the help of the South Texas Human Rights Center, he started setting up water stations across the property.
3. In their book, Forgotten Dead, historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb document 547 cases of mobs lynching Mexicans from 1848 to 1928, not only in the Southwest but also in states like Nebraska and Wyoming. Many became public spectacles with crowds of thousands watching.
4. Named after the Texas town in which it was supposedly conceived, the Plan de San Diego manifesto was written by Mexican rebels and advocated the killing of white males over sixteen and the overthrow of U.S. rule in the Southwest. While 21 whites are believed to have died in the raids it incited, historians estimate that between 300 and 5,000 people of Mexican descent got killed in retaliation. Subsequent racial tension induced a Jim Crow–style segregation that restricted the voting rights and educational opportunities of Tejanos, despite their U.S. citizenship. It also inspired the founding of groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens and, decades later, the Chicano Civil Rights Movement.
5. Professors John Morán González, Trinidad Gonzales, Sonia Hernández, Benjamin Johnson, and Monica Muñoz Martinez commemorated the centennial of this little- known history by launching a multifaceted project called “Refusing to Forget” that included an exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum, just a few blocks from the capitol, in the spring of 2016. The media called it the state’s first official acknowledgment of this troubled past. Learn more at www.refusingtoforget.org.
6. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time of this reporting, civil rights groups in South Texas were already pressuring Brooks County to send the bodies to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification instead, as it conducts DNA testing free for law enforcement, plus has a computerized database system (as opposed to Post-it notes). Autopsies and DNA samples for unidentified persons are actually required by state law, but Brooks County hadn’t been obtaining either due to its lack of resources. It is unclear whether the Elizondos were aware of this law when they started processing bodies for the county.
7. Since the fall of 2012, Dr. Lori Baker and her students have recovered 168 bodies from Sacred Heart Burial Park and local funeral homes and transported them back to Baylor University. There, the team submits DNA samples to a national database called Codis, sends biological profiles to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, cleans each set of remains by hand, preserves everything in meticulously labeled boxes, and then stores the boxes on a shelf to wait for identification. “It looks like a mass disaster in here, with body bags everywhere,” Baker says when I reach her by phone at her lab. “I am Catholic, as are most of the people who cross over, so I’ve had Catholic priests come in to bless the lab and the bodies and the students, so that at least we can tell the families something respectful is being done for their loved ones.”
8. As of September 2015, two bodies have been conclusively identified and sent back to their families, and a third one seems imminent, thanks to Baker’s efforts.
9. Of the seventy-two autopsies ordered by Brooks County between 2007 and 2013, the Texas Observer obtained fifty-eight reports under the Texas Public Information Act. Frey describes the reports as “scattershot at best,” often lacking critical data such as bone measurements, specificity about distinguishing teeth features such as cavities, and photographs, all of which are part of standard forensic procedure.