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Lost in the Desert

They come toward the tents clutching plastic bags containing their possessions, including shoelaces and belts that immigration agents require them to remove while in detention to prevent them from hanging themselves. Sometimes they don’t get their shoelaces back, perhaps because they don’t know to ask for them, perhaps because when you’ve almost died in the desert you aren’t thinking about shoelaces. Up to a thousand a day, they are Mexican refugees returning home from the Promised Land.

This reception center for returned migrants at the U.S./Mexico port of entry on Mariposa Street in Nogales, Mexico consists of two tents that people can sit under to rest and receive assistance. “El Profe,” Professor Jose Antonio Rivera Cortes, Director of the Direccion General para la Atencion a Migrantes Internacionales (Commission for Attention to International Migrants), tells us that he wants this space to be circular, to feel embracing in order to offset the dehumanizing experience of standing in line after line upon being apprehended, detained and returned.

As people enter the tent, three volunteers, themselves returned migrants, take down the name, age, and Mexican state of each person who comes for assistance. They do this because so many people are missing, separated from each other or lost in the desert. If someone comes looking for you, they will know that you have passed through here.

The migrants are hungry and thirsty and gratefully accept Gatorade™ and bean sandwiches. They tell us “Gracias,” and “God will repay you for your kindness,” but we are only one small link in a chain of people who want to help them. A local woman comes nightly carrying a large casserole of Spanish rice. DIF, a Mexican social service charity headed by the mayor’s wife, donates packages of Cocoa Krispies™. Migrants waiting to go home prepare bean sandwiches for newly arrived migrants.

The people who really need our help are not hard to find. They are the ones who can hardly walk from blisters and dehydration or who cannot keep the tears from flowing. One of these people is Gerardo, father of five from Guadalajara. The bottom of Gerardo’s feet appear burned, with large blisters on the balls of both feet. Ground temperature in the desert may be 160 degrees or more in summer. When he first comes for treatment under one of the tents, his feet are the focus. But soon Gerardo begins to weep and we move him into the Mexican Red Cross van. Out of public view, Gerardo spills out his grief and his story.

He began his journey about a week before in Guadalajara on a broken-down bus crammed with migrants on their way to Altar, Sonora, a staging area for crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. In Altar Gerardo and a friend joined a small group of eight migrants to trek through the rugged Arizona desert. They began the journey late in the afternoon the day after their arrival. Each migrant carried a gallon jug of water and one large bottle of water. On the second day, Gerardo and his friend could no longer keep up with the rest of the group and their guide who left them behind. When their water ran out, Gerardo and his friend drank their urine. When he could no longer produce his own urine, Gerardo drank his friend’s. The friend told him to think of it as water and not to be ashamed. On the third day, the men realized that they were going to die if they didn’t find someone to help them. They reached a road and put their hands together to pray as they waited for someone to help them.

The first vehicle to come was a Border Patrol van. They watched in desperation as it passed them by, until a ways down the road the driver slowed down and turned around. A female Border Patrol agent got out of the van, saw the men’s condition and began to give them emergency medical treatment.

“She was kind to us,” Gerardo stressed as he recalled their rescue. Gerardo’s condition was not critical, but his friend’s was. The agent took his friend to a nearby hospital and brought Gerardo to the detention center. There border agents gave him more food and intravenous fluids while they processed his deportation. Gerardo doesn’t know what happened to the friend who saved his life.

Gerardo tells us that he drank three gallons of water since his rescue, but he still shows signs of dehydration. He has not urinated for 24 hours. He is also severely traumatized and cries while we treat his feet. We use Florida Water and chamomile tea to help with his stress and fright. We tell him that he’s safe now, that he did what he had to do to survive. Gerardo grips a picture of the Virgin Mary as he talks about his family. He is distressed because he told the Border Patrol to throw away his backpack. He forgot that inside the pack was a cross his mother gave him. His wife didn’t want him to go to the U.S., but he wanted his children to have a better life, even though he knew they would miss him, especially his four-year-old.

After his feet are treated, Gerardo receives a new pair of socks and a lightweight flower print shirt to replace his torn flannel one. Gerardo seems calmer and somewhat at peace when he leaves to spend the night in a shelter for migrants. Before he leaves he tells us, “It’s as if I died in the desert and I am beginning a new life now. I will never try to cross again. My dreams for a better life for my children have been broken. We will not have much to eat, but we will be together.” The next day El Profe takes Gerardo to the Western Union office to pick up money that his sister has wired him for the bus back to Guadalajara.

The same day a young woman about 26 years old walks into the camp. She looks dazed and has blisters on both feet. Her feet are too injured to walk any distance, so she can’t try to cross the border again. But she is also too scared to try again because she was robbed along with others in her group. Gina wants to go to Anapra, one of the poorer neighborhoods of Juárez where relatives live. It’s close to the U.S., which is the only home she knows. Gina has lived in the U.S. since she was 13 and has a husband and two young children at home in North Carolina. She is bilingual and works as a translator in a factory where 90 percent of the workers are Mexican women. Her children are U.S. citizens. After many years, she was missing her mother who lives in Durango and took some vacation time to visit her. Now she can’t get back to her children in North Carolina. Gina spends the night in a shelter and returns the next day to the tents to help feed some of the 500 to 1,000 Mexicans and Central Americans who pass through that day. In the evening we hug goodbye as she leaves to take a bus to Juárez.

The Border Patrol buses keep coming and coming. One of them brings Mateo. He stumbles into the tent with a glazed look on his face and describes symptoms of dehydration: weakness, nausea, muscle cramps and headache. He tells us that he has not eaten for three days. On the first day in the desert he ran out of water. On the second day, he found some water in a stock tank; after that, none. Mateo begins to cry silently and then to sob, hiding his face from the other 50 or so men who arrived on the same bus from the immigration detention center. The Red Cross is closed, so there is no private place for Mateo. The other men are looking at him with curiosity but also with some disdain. “What happened to him?” one asks. The answer is all too familiar: He lost his kids, his job, his home, his friends.

Mateo has three sons who are U.S. citizens. He is the coach of their Little League teams. He has lived for many years in Phoenix. His ex-wife is a U.S. citizen. He has never been in trouble, used no welfare or social services, paid his taxes and is a union member. Unfortunately for Mateo, he also has no papers and was married to an alcoholic. When he filed for divorce, the judge gave him full custody, but his ex-wife retaliated; she called the police. When the police came to the house, Mateo tried to explain that his wife is an alcoholic and showed them his custody agreement. His children told the police not to take their father, that their mother is the abuser, not their father. Nevertheless, the police took Mateo to jail and told him that he would need pictures of empty liquor bottles in the house to prove that his ex-wife is an alcoholic. In jail, officials determined that Mateo was in the U.S. illegally.

Feeling disgraced and fearful, Mateo signed the voluntary removal order instead of staying in jail indefinitely. He was returned to Mexico. Mateo then did what any father would do. He tried to return to his children. But what he thought would be a relatively easy journey, turned into a three-day hike in the Arizona desert, without food and without water for the last day. On the third day he was apprehended by Border Patrol agents and again returned. Mateo has no money. This time his hopes of returning to his children are shattered.

The current U.S. administration maintains that it values faith and family. Gerardo, Gina and Mateo exemplify these values. Gerardo held strong to his faith in God as he crossed the Arizona desert to seek a better life for his children. Gina wanted to see her mother again after a long separation and never dreamed that the price for that privilege was to be unable to return to her children. Victor devoted himself to his family and became a valuable community member. Thousands of people like Everardo, Gina and Victor have passed through the tents at Mariposa Street in 2007. In March alone 19,583 migrants came through the tents; 7,175 of them were women and 983 were minors, many of whom were trying to join parents already in the U.S. During the summer months, the U.S. Border Patrol began to fly migrants back to Mexico City. Those apprehended for the first time were given the option of being flown to Mexico City instead of Nogales. About half agreed. Unfortunately, this program was discontinued. Currently about 300 migrants a day are being returned through the Mariposa Port in Nogales, with some additional migrants returned after 10 p.m. through the downtown Nogales Port of Entry. According to Professor Rivera Cortez, this number will continue to decline through February 2008 after which it will rise again, peaking in late spring.

The Department of Homeland Security reports that apprehensions were down by 30 percent in the first quarter of 2007. Homeland Security provides this statistic as evidence that its border enforcement policies are working. However, research conducted in sending communities by the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California-San Diego, indicates that while apprehensions of migrants on their first attempt to cross increased from 25 percent in 1994 to 38 percent in 2007, after a second attempt, more than 90percent are successful in entering the U.S. The Center concludes that due to the high probability of entering or reentering after apprehension and of finding a job in the U.S., “the cost/benefit ratio still strongly favors migration.” They state: “There is very weak evidence that unauthorized migration is being deterred at the point of origin in Mexico, or at the border, but strong evidence that return migration from U.S. to Mexico is being discouraged.”

As this humanitarian crisis continues and the U.S. presidential election draws near, lawmakers are distancing themselves from the immigration debate. The humanitarian crisis on the U.S./Mexico border makes their inaction reprehensible. It is difficult to imagine that they could maintain their distance if they took the time to travel to the tents in Nogales to meet someone like Gerardo, Gina, or Mateo. Face-to-face with these people they would learn profound lessons about faith and family and see for themselves the pain and suffering caused by their ill-conceived policies.

To learn how you can help, email action@nomoredeaths.org, or contact No More Deaths at 3809 E. 3^rd St., Tuscon, AZ 85716, (520) 495-5583.

Sally Meisenhelder is a nurse and human rights activist with Amigos de las Mujeres de Juarez who has worked with families of disappeared and murdered women in Chihuahua. For over a year Sally has been a regular volunteer at the Mariposa Port in Nogales. Christine Eber teaches anthropology at New Mexico State University and conducts research and applied work in highland Chiapas, Mexico. Christine accompanied Sally to the Mariposa Port in Nogales during three days in May to be able to give a first-hand account of the situation on the border to friends in Chiapas who are considering trying to cross the border to find work.

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