Border
“Why did you come to the United States?” That’s the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English.
But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.
When the intake interview with a child is over, I meet with lawyers to deliver and explain my transcription and occasional notes. The lawyers then analyze the child’s responses, trying to come up with options for a viable defense against a child’s deportation and the “potential relief” he or she is likely to get. The next step is to find legal representation. Once an attorney has agreed to take on a case, the real legal battle begins. If that battle is won, the child will obtain some form of immigration relief. If it is lost, they will receive a deportation order from a judge.
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As soon as a child is in the custody of Border Patrol officials, he or she is placed in a detention center, commonly known as the hielera, or the “icebox.” The ice box derives its name from the fact that the children in it are under ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody. The name also points out the fact that the detention centers along the border are a kind of enormous refrigerator for people, constantly blasted with gelid air as if to ensure that the foreign meat doesn’t go bad too quickly—naturally, it must be harboring all sorts of deadly germs. The children are treated more like carriers of diseases than children. In July 2015, for example, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) filed a complaint after learning that in a detention center in Dilley, Texas, 250 children were mistakenly given adult strength hepatitis A vaccinations. The children became gravely ill and had to be hospitalized.
By law, the maximum time a person can remain in the icebox is seventy-two hours, but children are often kept for longer, subject not only to the inhumane conditions and frigid temperatures but also to verbal and physical mistreatment. They sometimes have nowhere to lie down to sleep, are not allowed to use the bath rooms as frequently as they need to, and are underfed.
They only give out frozen sandwiches twice a day there, another teenager I once screened told me.
That’s all you ate? I asked. No, not me.
What do you mean, not you? I didn’t eat those things. Why not?
Because they give bellysadness.
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Question seven on the questionnaire is “Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?” The children seldom give details of their experiences along the journey through Mexico upon a first screening, and it’s not necessarily useful to push them for more information. What happens to them between their home countries and their arrival in the United States can’t always help their defense before an immigration judge, so the question doesn’t make up a substantial part of the interview. But, as a Mexican, this is the question I feel most ashamed of, because what happens to children during their journey through Mexico is always worse than what happens anywhere else.
The numbers tell horror stories.
Rapes: Eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north. Abductions: in 2011, the National Human Rights Commission in Mexico published a special report on immigrant abductions and kidnappings, revealing that the number of abduction victims between April and September 2010—a period of just six months—was 11,333.
Deaths and disappearances: though it’s impossible to establish an actual number, some sources estimate that, since 2006, around 120,000 migrants have disappeared in their transit through Mexico.
Beyond the terrifying but abstract statistics, many horror stories have recently tattooed themselves in the collective social conscience in Mexico. One specific story, though, became a turning point. On August 24, 2010, the bodies of seventy-two Central and South American migrants were found, piled up in a mass grave, at a ranch in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. Some had been tortured, and all had been shot in the back of the head. Three migrants in the group had faked their deaths and, though wounded, survived. They lived to tell the complete story: members of the drug cartel Los Zetas had perpetrated the mass murder after the migrants had refused to work for them and did not have the means to pay a ransom.
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I recall every nuance of the first story I heard and translated in court. Perhaps only because it was the story of a boy I encountered again, a few months later, and have ever since kept in close contact with. Or perhaps because it’s a story condensed in a very specific, material detail that has continued to haunt me: a piece of paper that the boy pulled from his pocket toward the end of his interview, the creases and edges worn. He unfolded it gently, slowly, treated it with the same careful precision a surgeon might have when making a decisive incision. He laid it in front of me on the table. As I skimmed through it, still unsure about what he was showing me, he explained that the document was a copy of a police report he’d filed more than a year and a half ago. The report stated, in three or four typewritten sentences, all in capital letters and with some grammatical mistakes, that the subject in question raised a complaint against gang members who waited for him outside of his high school every day, frequently followed him home, and began threatening to kill him. It ended with the vague promise to “investigate” the situation. After showing it to me, he folded the document back up and put it in his pants pocket, rubbing his palm now and then against the denim, like he was activating a lucky charm.
When our first day of work in court was over, my niece and I took the A train back home. As our subway sped uptown, along dark tunnels, through stations, past ghostly strangers waiting on platforms, the image of that piece of paper came back to me, insistently, with the strange power of symbols. It was just a piece of paper, damp with sweat, eroded by friction, folded and tucked inside a boy’s pocket. Originally, it had been a legal document, a complaint filed by a boy hoping to produce a change in his life. Now it was more of a historical document that disclosed the failure of the document’s original purpose and also explained the boy’s decision to leave that life. In a less obvious but equally material way, the document was also a road map of a migration, a testimony of the five thousand miles it traveled inside a boy’s pocket, aboard trains, on foot, in trucks, across various national borders, all the way to an immigration court in a distant city, where it was finally unfolded, spread out on a mahogany table, and read out loud by a stranger who had to ask that boy: Why did you come to the United States?
(Excerpted from 'Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli' with permission from Coffee House Press, USA)
