Interviews with asylum seekers--Gabriel and Magdalena

© 2019 Christy K Robinson

This is a comment I see daily in social media: “They aren't fleeing persecution. They are fleeing poverty and crime. They’re coming here for money. Even your hero president, Obama, said crime and poverty were not valid grounds for asylum.”

"Poverty and crime." THAT IS PERSECUTION.

Asylum seeker released (minus shoelaces) with ankle monitor.
Source: Texas Tribune.

I work with Central American asylum seekers released by ICE. They have no land for crops of their own, and no employment to be found working for the mega-corporation fruit and coffee agrobusiness because of the five-year (so far) severe drought in Central America. The palm oil plantations pay about $1 per hour if they can even get a 3-month contract to work. The plantation owners have killed peasants who resist having their land confiscated.

The governments and police are hand-in-hand with the corporations and organized crime, not the people. If they try to start a business like a fruit stand at the outdoor market, the local gangs extort protection money from them, or just steal it. They could find jobs in the narcotics trade, but choose not to for both moral reasons, and because the narcos are death squads in which they'll be trapped until they die in a hail of bullets. The women are under constant threat of rape from said gangs. The children—yes, children—are kidnapped by gangs for extortion; the girls are raped and killed or left for dead, and the boys are impressed into gangs, also with the possibility of rape.

“Why do they have so many children that they can’t support?” is another comment I’ve heard. Central American women have numerous children because their own fathers can no longer support them, and must marry off their daughters to get them out of the house. Then the girls, as young as 15 or 16, start having babies because they have no money for birth control, and abortion (even a natural miscarriage) is grounds for a murder charge.

These stories have been told to me by refugees in different groups over many months.

Magdalena

Magdalena is 30 years old, but her plain, leathery face looks 40. She was born in Guatemala in 1989.

Google Maps--Central America

Guatemala is a war-torn Central American country through which refugees from war-torn Nicaragua, war-torn Honduras, and war-torn El Salvador must pass when fleeing torture, rape, poverty, and death in their native countries.

In 1970, Carlos Arana assumed the presidency [of Guatemala]. He is famous for saying, ‘If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so’ – and this phrase was a largely accurate characterisation of his time in office. … According to Amnesty International, over 7,000 civilian opponents of the security forces were ‘disappeared’ or found dead in 1970 and 1971, followed by an additional 8,000 in 1972 and 1973. 
Source: The Devastating Effects of American Intervention in Guatemala: The Panoptic.

Another 3,000 Guatemalan peasants were massacred by their own government in 1979 and 1980. Before the mid-80s, villages were bombed and looted by soldiers, and villagers raped, tortured, and executed. The Panoptic writer, Billy Perrigo, said that children were taken outside after their parents were executed, and beaten to death against rocks. The result was that 150,000 more Guatemalan civilians were exterminated and a quarter-million fled to Mexico. Magdalena was born four years later.

Magdalena says she’s an evangelical Christian who has 10 siblings. Her father had a small piece of land, but had nothing to pass to so many children, particularly daughters who could marry and be supported by a husband. She has never “studied,” and cannot read or write because there was no money to send her to school. Magdalena could not know that Guatemala was a neo-feudal economy with only two percent of its resources owned by the indigenous people of her country.

The 1970s saw expansions in cattle ranching and mineral mining as well as oil, industries which all required Maya be forced from their land in order to make way for ‘progress.’ And to which economy were the cattle, minerals and oil (all in their unrefined, and therefore cheap, forms) sold in their majority? The United States, of course.
Source: The Devastating Effects of American Intervention in Guatemala: The Panoptic.

She married as a teenager and had her first child at age 17. After she’d borne seven children, Magdalena was abandoned by her husband. She doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead, in Guatemala or the United States or somewhere else. There were no jobs, no work to support her children, and she said the government would not help her.

One man told a USA Today photographer, “There are people who will kill you for a quetzal [13 US cents] or your cell phone. People board the bus with a gun and rob everybody. It’s hard to live there.”

Magdalena said her oldest child, a daughter, “escaped” Guatemala. The girl is 13 and walked 2,400 miles from Guatemala, across two national borders, over mountains and rivers, through deserts, without either parent. She’s staying in a southern state with a friend she met somewhere in a Mexican desert. The girl was an unaccompanied minor, but may have eluded capture at the US border, because she’s not being held in a detention camp.

As Magdalena answered questions and told her story, a one-year-old boy nursed at her breast and five other children played with a plastic ball and blew soap bubbles from the bottles we gave them. She bore her children at a rate of one every 17 months.

She borrowed money from an American family to get her to the United States where her 13-year-old could babysit while Magdalena worked. She did not know that a 13-year-old in the United States would be required to attend school and not be able to babysit during school hours.

What kind of work could Magdalena hope for? She didn’t know. But she has to pay back the loan, she said. She was adamant that she had been loaned US $9,800, but she also gave a figure of 100,000 Guatemalan quetzales, which is US $13,700.

Since Magdalena hasn’t been to school and would not be able to calculate money values, she is sadly vulnerable to exploitation by the American “friend,” or employers, or the people who got her and her family out of Guatemala. She could be forced into a modern form of slavery.

How did she move six young children 2,700 miles? By bus, she said. How did she cross the border between Guatemala and Mexico? She paid a coyote, a trafficker of migrants, and he paid the border patrol guards in both Mexico and the United States to look the other way. American border agents take these bribes.

Migrants who cross at Gracias a Dios, Guatemala, typically pay coyotes to arrange transport all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border [at Texas] — 1,800 miles away. The going price is $5,000 to $7,000 for a package deal for an adult and a child.  NPR: Coyote Boomtown

Despite the high price of transport and bribes, Magdalena and her children slept on the bus over eight days and nights, and she bought food along the way. She kept her spending money in her backpack, which was stolen in Mexico.

When they reached the US-Mexican border at San Luis, a small town near Yuma, Arizona, where the dry sands of the Colorado River are not fenced, it was the end of the line for Magdalena and her children. They walked about half an hour to a building where the trafficker bribed the United States Border Patrol officers to allow them across the linea, the borderline. Once inside the US, they were arrested and could surrender and claim asylum.

Bus route from Guatemala to Yuma suggested by Google Maps

From there, the little family, penniless and with only a plastic trash bag to carry the children’s few clothes and the baby diapers, was taken by bus to the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) migrant detention center in Yuma, 30 miles to the north. She said that the Border Patrol agents confiscated her bag of belongings.

CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) put the detainees in a very cold room, supposedly for quarantine, to “kill the germs” migrants might carry. Several journals speculate that the cold rooms are punitive in nature, since the detainees are not allowed to shower and change clothes from their journey, and a 60- or 65-degree temperature doesn’t kill germs or stop disease. The room has a single toilet in it, with no screen around it.

Migrants call the very cold room the hielera, or icebox. Border Patrol has these cold rooms at stations across the Southwestern border, from Texas to California. In the small room, it’s so crowded that people can only stand, not sit or lie down on the cold concrete floor. They’re given flimsy Mylar foil blankets to try to hold in body heat, but when the detainees are already freezing cold, what will the foil do?

After 10 hours, Magdalena said they were taken to a place where they had mats to sleep on. They were fed three meals a day, which consisted of “instant noodle soup” (probably ramen), crackers, juice, and “very small burritos” containing refried beans.

ICE or for-profit detention?

CBP and ICE centers are not the same as the for-profit detention centers run by corporations such as GEO, Southwest Key, and CoreCivic. The former are funded and administered by Department of Homeland Security, while the latter are contractors with Homeland Security and the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The contractors take children separated from their families and unaccompanied minors, as well as single adults and small families.

In 2018, federal spending on immigration detention and processing reached $7.4 billion, compared with total expenditures of $5.3 billion four years earlier. Over that period, CoreCivic’s take rose by $85 million; GEO’s went up by $121 million, according to an analysis of contract data by Bloomberg Government.
Source: QZ.com: As US communities resist ICE, private prison companies are cashing in

In the tent cities of Texas for unaccompanied juveniles, the per diem paid by our government to the private, for-profit contractors is $775 per child per day. For a “family bed” for mother with children or babies, the cost is $319 per day. They serve ramen noodles and small bean burritos three times a day to adults, children and toddlers. Toothpaste costs $11, though.

At the ICE detention centers, mothers and children were kept in detention for three days, then given an ankle monitor and court papers, at which point they are no longer undocumented aliens—now she’s a documented asylum seeker. The Homeland Security buses delivered Magdalena and 70 others to a host church where they received donated clothing, showers in a parked trailer, overnight accommodation in the church, a nourishing hot meal made by volunteers, and snack bags to feed them on the next phase of their journey.

Magdalena's future

Magdalena’s plan was to travel by bus to reunite with her daughter, get a job, and support her children. I asked how she managed to keep six little children, including a nursing infant, together and behaving on an international bus trip, and the five additional days she’ll need to be reunited with her teenager. She said that the children are obedient and sense the importance of what they’re about.

She needs to earn enough money to pay back her benefactor, and she’d like to save money to return to Guatemala and buy a piece of land for a farm. Because she’s illiterate, speaks no English, has no money and no work permit, she and her seven children are at the mercy of her sponsor. If the oldest girl was an unaccompanied minor who entered this country without claiming asylum, she could be deported, or placed in a detention center anywhere in the country, separated from her mother.

Without knowing if her husband is alive or dead, Magdalena can’t marry or divorce or hope for child support. Her best hope would be for a faith group to take her on in mercy. The Bible defines “pure religion” as caring for widows and orphans—the most helpless of society.

She will have to find (and pay for) legal representation, and meet her asylum court dates. Grants of asylum are rare, about 10 to 15 percent of cases. Magdalena’s family journey is likely to end in deportation. Back to hell.

Gabriel

Gabriel, who chose his name for this story because he’s a Christian, is a young man in his late 20s or early 30s. He’s married and left his wife and three-year-old daughter at home in Honduras, and brought his five-year-old, Angela, with him on his month-long 2,700-mile trek to the Arizona-Sonora border. He wants to find work so he can send money home to his wife and bring her here, if possible. He broke into tears when he spoke of his wife.

He said that his daughter walked most of the way, but he carried her across his chest when she was tired. He also carried water, but they had little food. What did he do when his daughter was hungry? He gave her water to drink. Sometimes they walked up to 48 hours at a stretch.

Gabriel must have walked for longer than a month, or he found rides at times, because he and Angela would have had to walk nearly 100 miles a day, expending thousands of calories. Neither father nor daughter appeared emaciated. Some asylum seekers have mentioned that they rode freight trains when they could.

Some of his answers were unclear because of the background noise and confusion of where we were interviewing, his Spanish, perhaps reflecting regional dialect, differed from our Arizona bilingual volunteers. 

Several times, Angela ran up to her Papi and pulled his arm to go play with her. Their love and shared experience made it obvious that Angela was no "prop" or trafficked child that was his ticket to Paradise.

Jobs: hazardous agricultural or narco gangs 

Gabriel described employment conditions in Honduras. A few times, he’d had three-month contracts to work as a laborer on “palmas” (palm oil) plantations. But with the end of the contract, he’d be jobless for six months or more, with no income.

He didn’t know about the economic or climate impact of the palm oil industry, nor did I enlighten him. The palms that are native to West Africa displace the native tropical forest, and contribute to climate change—and palm plantations destroy habitat of endangered species, including orangutans in Indonesia and Malaysia, and animals and birds in Central and South America. The business of palm oil is also dangerous to humans, as large companies deliberately and violently drive out small landowners. Palm and palm kernel oil is used in 50 percent of foods and personal care items on American supermarket shelves.

Dinant, which produces about 60 percent of the palm oil in Honduras, is at the center of what has been called “the most serious situation in terms of violence against peasants in Central America in the last 15 years.”

Owned by Miguel Facussé, one of the wealthiest men in Honduras, Dinant has been associated with the killings of over 100 peasant farmers, and appears to be involved in a virtual terror campaign to ensure control of a large swath of land in the Lower Aguan Valley near the Caribbean coast of Honduras. 
Source: Palm Oil and Extreme Violence in Honduras: Truthout

…around 60 people have died during the last four years [2008-2012] in the conflict pitting peasants against private security guards employed by the palm-oil barons, according to the National Human Rights Commission.
Source: Palm Oil Plantation Conflict: Costa Rica Star News

Workers apply pesticide to young palm oil trees.
Photo from Tico Times,
https://ticotimes.net/2014/05/10/palm-oil-guatemalas-newest-biggest-cash-crop

An Oxfam report on Guatemalan palm oil plantations

“also disputes the industry’s wage claims, adding that palm oil harvesting is dangerous work, with risk of exposure to injuries, insect bites and pesticides – and often no medical assistance for miles around.”

“Payment depends on productivity, and minimum goals demand a strenuous effort. Most of the men do not earn more than 60 quetzales (about $7.50) per workday, and the women earn less than 40 quetzales (about $5.00),” it says. “The day begins at 6 a.m., and ends at 3 p.m.

Source: https://ticotimes.net/2014/05/10/palm-oil-guatemalas-newest-biggest-cash-crop

Gabriel said that the narcos, the illicit drug industry, were offering jobs. We didn’t know the word for “gangs” (pandilla), but we asked about grupos de gente mala.  Yes, he answered, the narcos were not only unchecked by law enforcement, but the police and government officials were in partnership with them. The various gangs are at war with each other over territory or turf, and there is “lots of death” because of the gangs.

He also said that entrepreneurship was impossible. “If you start your own business, the police and criminals would extort protection money from you, like the mafia.”

What about personal safety, for women? He said that his cousin had been harassed and molested at her job, and was violated (raped) on her way home from work.

He felt relatively safe on the journey through Guatemala and Mexico, he said. They worried about venomous snakes, but not about other animals or people. He said that Angela sometimes cried for her mother, asking why Papi had left her behind.

Google Maps suggested walking path from Honduras to Yuma, Arizona

Some Americans ask why asylum seekers don’t just move into Mexico and stay there, rather than going thousands more miles to the United States. Mexico has a similar history with drug violence, government corruption, and grinding poverty, and they’re as adverse to immigrants as many Americans are. At some border crossings into Mexico, caravan immigrants and their children are tear-gassed. In an eastern state of Mexico, government militia opened fire on a pickup truck of migrants, which ended in the death of a 19-year-old Central American woman.

Arrival at the Mexico-US border

Gabriel said that when he and his fellow immigrants arrived at the Arizona border, they paid coyotes to keep them in a stash house and then bribe the Border Patrol officers to let them cross the border. At that point, they peacefully surrendered and were arrested. But the treatment they received was far from hospitable—it was hostile.

“The American federales said we’re coming here to ruin the United States. They cursed us under their breath. They grabbed and pinched us, physically dominating us. They wanted the last of our money. They know we come with a little money to live on, and they demand whatever we have.”

Drawing of children in detention.
Source: CBS News

Border Patrol’s policy is to put their immigrant prisoners into a very cold room for hours or days, ostensibly to suppress germs. They’ve also said that their agents come in from the burning-hot desert clad in hot uniforms and hot body armor, and they need 60- or 65-degree refrigeration for their own comfort. (Arizona had an unusual extended spring season in 2019, with high temperatures in the 70s and 80s well into late May.) And still other officers have said that the cold detention is one of the deterrents to immigration.

Gabriel described the reception for him, his daughter, and the people he walked with. “In the cold room, it’s a bare concrete floor. There is one toilet for many people. We had to sleep standing up because the room was so full of people. I felt humiliated. Why are we treated like criminals? They want us to give up and turn back because America is tired of receiving people.”

He said that the cell he stayed in was very cold, and they were not fed there. They were told that they could drink water from the faucet but they had no cups—only their unwashed hands to catch water and drink from.

Men jammed into a cell at the El Paso ICE facility.
Photo by Office of Inspector General, May 30, 2019.

The burritos they were given upon release from the hielera were frozen. Not thawed. Not warmed. Frozen solid. When a man in the group asked for the burritos to be warmed, the guards yelled at them, saying that being detained wasn’t the Border Patrol’s fault—that the asylum seekers chose to leave their countries and enter the U.S. illegally and this should be expected.

As Gabriel told his story, the men and women around him nodded solemnly.

After they had been processed with ankle monitors and given court-appearance papers in Yuma, they were bused by the Department of Homeland Security to a small Hispanic church in the Phoenix-metro area. Those are the lucky people. How many are dropped penniless at the Greyhound station is not known, but it happens regularly all over the Southwest. DHS was dropping busloads of families at a San Antonio, Texas, bus station in the middle of the night with no phones and no money, and they dropped busloads of people in the small town of Blythe, California, on the Arizona-California border.

In the past, hate groups have shown up to harass and threaten the bewildered refugees, so host locations and arrival times are coordinated with ICE and kept secret. But sometimes, volunteer helpers have formed human shield lines to get the refugees safely into the church buildings.

The pastor and some of his members receive between 50 and 100 refugees each week, mostly women with small children and infants, but also some young fathers with children. An ICE officer explains what is required of the refugees during the months while they await their court dates in the United States.

The refugees take showers, some for the first time in weeks, in a shower trailer in the rear of a rented industrial space near the church. They receive help with short phone calls to their sponsors or family members, and arranging transport (usually commercial buses) to the sponsor. At some host churches, the refugees can “shop” for donated clothing, new underwear and socks, new shoes, new backpacks, and hygiene items including baby diapers. Some volunteers have made it their job to buy used stuffed toys and rehab them for the young children. The pastor and staff will hold a religious service while volunteers are setting out supper. Then the refugees sit down to wait.

Homeland Security confiscated shoelaces from all detainees, so if their cheap athletic shoes or boots didn’t have Velcro closure, they shuffled around slowly. When volunteers noticed this, they brought twine, cut it, and burned the ends to stop any fraying. When we announced that shoelaces were available, 100 people immediately moved to the church courtyard to take the strings, lace them into their own and their children’s shoes, and walk normally again. Such happiness, for so little, can both break volunteer hearts and stir them to greater compassion.

The volunteers come bearing beverages, fruit, desserts, and home-cooked foods still hot in their foil pans or crocks. Some churches have fellowship halls with kitchens, and others must serve food on picnic tables in the wind, rain, or heat. Most of the refugees sit at the picnic tables, watching us warily as we set up the buffet of foods, while some of the men will come out to where our cars are parked, and cheerfully help carry in the food, crates of bottled water, pop-up shades, and other supplies. They’re quick to respond to “Ayudame, por favor?” 

But once we’ve served the food that we make as if for guests in our homes, and distribute the snack-filled bags they’ll need for the next leg of their journeys, the refugees relax. If there is leftover food after everyone is served, anyone can come back for a second helping of rotisserie chicken or rice, or try Rice Krispy Treats for the first time. Their children run and play delightedly with their teddy bears or bubbles or coloring books. The nursing moms take a seat on a quiet bench and feed their babies while we clean up and take down our tables or pop-ups.

One week, a refugee gathered the rest of her group in a semi-circle around the volunteers, and she began speaking about how they’d been treated badly after their many difficulties on the road. They worried about the American gringos who knew little Spanish and might have bad feelings or intentions toward them. But they had seen our courtesy and hospitality, and for the first time in weeks or months, felt welcome. She thanked us, and prayed that God would bless us. After she prayed, the guests filed past and thanked us, hugged us, shook our hands, and said Dios los bendigo, God bless you.

That was a bit mind-blowing, the volunteers admitted later. After all those people have gone through and have yet to endure, they prayed for us.   

Gabriel's future

As Gabriel told his story after supper the following week, he stressed that he wasn’t coming to America to harm its people or steal jobs. He just needed honest agricultural labor to provide for his wife and daughters, and safety for his family. He was headed to live with a relative in Central California.

He seemed eager to communicate with us, and when our conversation was done, he hugged us, as did several others who had been listening. After we left, there was an evening religious service, and the refugees slept on cots until morning, when the church would arrange rides to the Greyhound station. They’d have to make their snack bags last them for two to four days. 

*****

Christy K Robinson is author of these books (click the colored title):

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

And of these sites:  

Discovering Love  (inspiration and service)

Rooting for Ancestors  (history and genealogy)

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

Editornado [ed•i•tohr•NAY•doh] (Words. Communications. Book reviews. Cartoons.)