When Deportation Is a Death Sentence

Part 2

Protections have also evaporated for many refugees seeking resettlement in the U.S. Trump has portrayed refugees from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Somalia not as candidates for humanitarian assistance but as national-security threats. In his first days in office, he banned many of them from travelling to the U.S. The ban is being contested in ongoing litigation. Several asylum and refugee officers told me they worry that the ban, and the inflamed discourse about refugees more generally, misrepresents their highly comprehensive vetting process, and undermines core American values.

“We have a great mission characterized by extreme caution and care,” Michael Knowles, a U.S. asylum officer for the past twenty-five years, told me, speaking as the president of Council 119, a union representing refugee and asylum officers and other staff of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Ours is a dual mission—to identify people who aren’t refugees and who, worst case, might wish us harm, but also to identify and protect refugees.” At a meeting in March, 2017, with John Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, Knowles warned that asylum and refugee officers are “deeply concerned” about the future of the program. Knowles told me what he wished he could have said to Kelly: “You’ve already unshackled Border Patrol. Please, don’t put the shackles on us.”

In the hours after Laura’s deportation, Elizabeth drove across the border to meet her. “Ay,” Laura joked, after Elizabeth arrived at her grandmother’s house, in Reynosa. “What’s going to happen to my birthday party?” Maria and the kids came soon afterward, and they set up an inflatable pool in the back yard so that the boys could play while the adults discussed what to do.

Sergio soon learned of Laura’s return. He began driving by the house, shouting obscenities. A few days after her arrival in Mexico, Laura went to the pharmacy with Elizabeth and her youngest child. As she pulled the car out of the driveway, another vehicle T-boned her, blocking her exit. Sergio leaped out of the car and dragged Laura from her seat through the window, shouting, “You bitch!” He bit off a chunk of her ear and tried to strangle her, as their child cried in the back seat. Elizabeth grabbed a fallen tree branch and hit Sergio on the head. He stumbled, muttering, “You better not get involved.”

“I’m calling the cops,” Elizabeth told him, flipping open her phone. The gesture was a ruse—her U.S. cell phone didn’t work in Mexico, and, anyway, the local police were known to collaborate with the cartels. But it worked. Sergio staggered back to his car and drove off.

The incident gave the cousins new urgency. Elizabeth emptied a coffee can and wrote “Help bring Laura back!” on it. She took it to friends and family members, asking for money to pay a coyote to smuggle Laura into the U.S. Laura’s trailer in Texas was only a twenty-minute drive from Reynosa, but it would take hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, and a risky crossing, to get her there.

The next day, Laura left the house in her mother’s Ford Contour to buy food for the kids. By evening, she had not returned. “We called the Red Cross, we called the hospitals, we called the police,” Elizabeth said. The following morning, Maria turned on the local news, and a grisly image flashed across the screen. It was an incinerated vehicle, with a charred human skeleton in the front seat. The car was a Ford Contour.

Sergio seems like the kind of immigrant few Americans would object to deporting. In speeches, Trump has often warned the country about “bad hombres,” emphasizing the spectre of violent men to justify his deportation policies. Obama, whose Administration deported more immigrants than any other, also divided undocumented immigrants into neat categories: the longtimers versus the newcomers, those keen to “get right with the law” versus those trying to skate beneath it. “We’re going to keep focussing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security,” he promised, in 2014. “Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.”

But even some immigrants who have committed felonies or other crimes have stories that are more complicated than they first appear. At a law office in San Francisco, I met the surviving family members of a woman named Yadira. She’d come to California from La Lima, Honduras, in the early two-thousands, to escape an abusive boyfriend. In 2010, she was deported on a drug-possession charge, despite articulating her fear of return. After she was back in La Lima, her brother, who was confined to a wheelchair, was murdered by the Mara 18 gang. (He had left a competing gang more than a decade earlier, after being shot and paralyzed.) Together with her grandparents, Yadira’s fourteen-year-old daughter discovered his body. Yadira began speaking out publicly against the gang, and became a target. Afraid for her life, she went north, hoping to get back to San Francisco.

At the U.S. border, she told officials about her brother’s murder but was detained nevertheless. “They’re going to deport me,” she told her father, in a call from detention, saying that she had begged for protection. (The C.B.P. stated that Yadira “did not claim fear of persecution.”) She stepped off the tarmac in Honduras wearing her favorite “California” sweatpants, hoping to go unnoticed. Her father, a trucker for Chiquita bananas, drove her home. A few days later, her youngest daughter found her body in front of the house, riddled with bullets.

Under Trump, ice arrests of undocumented immigrants—including those accused, but not convicted, of minor crimes—have gone up by nearly forty per cent. Trump describes these roundups to the electorate as a public-safety measure, but many law-enforcement leaders argue that they can have the opposite effect, lowering the rate at which crimes are reported. In February, a group of sixty law-enforcement officials warned, in a letter to Congress, that Trump’s policies “could harm community trust and make it harder for state and local law enforcement agencies to do our jobs.” In March, Los Angeles’s police chief noted that reports of sexual assault among the city’s Latino population had declined twenty-five per cent in the first three months of 2017, Trump’s first months in office. Domestic-violence reports dropped ten per cent. (The decline was not found among other ethnic groups.) In April, Houston’s police chief noted that the number of Hispanics reporting rape was down more than forty per cent.

My team and I filed public-record requests in the twenty U.S. cities with the highest populations of undocumented immigrants, in order to determine the extent of this change. We obtained sexual-assault and domestic-violence reports from heavily Hispanic neighborhoods, and contacted more than a hundred police departments, district attorneys, legal-services providers, and domestic-violence shelters.

The results were striking. In Arlington, Virginia, domestic-assault reports in one Hispanic neighborhood dropped more than eighty-five per cent in the first eight months after Trump’s Inauguration, compared with the same period the previous year. Reports of rape and sexual assault fell seventy-five per cent. Meanwhile, in Chicago, domestic-incident and sexual-assault reports from Hispanic victims dropped seven per cent. In Denver, the city attorney, Kristin Bronson, told us of more than a dozen Latina women who had dropped their domestic-abuse cases since Trump took office, citing fear of deportation. She estimates that the number of women who have avoided pursuing legal action against an abuser is far higher.

Many local law-enforcement officers are also concerned about state-based legislation, including bills requiring local cops to act as subsidiaries of ice. A Texas law called SB4, known as the “show me your papers” law, threatens to jail or fine sheriffs who don’t coöperate with immigration holds. The law, which was supposed to go into effect in September but is in litigation, would make routine the process by which Laura was turned over to Border Patrol. Last July, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a group of police chiefs and sheriffs representing dozens of large cities, joined with two other groups condemning SB4, warning the court that the law “will dangerously impact local communities by eliminating law enforcement discretion of how to effectively serve public safety needs.”

On June 17, 2009, a week after Laura’s return to Reynosa, a coroner confirmed that her DNA had been found in the Ford Contour, and the police delivered her remains to Maria. The next day was Laura’s twenty-third birthday, and Elizabeth kept her promise to throw a party. She and Maria got balloons, prepared a cake, and hired a mariachi band. The birthday also served as a burial. At the gravesite, Laura’s family called her Texas friends on video chat. Laura’s eldest son brought his mother a gift, a figurine of his favorite cartoon character, and placed it in the coffin.

That week, Sergio was arrested by the Mexican police and confessed to Laura’s murder. He’d strangled her, according to the local press, then doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. Maria and Elizabeth testified at his trial. He was sentenced to forty years in prison.

Grief, for Maria, was soon subsumed by the challenge of caring for Laura’s sons. A teacher called her to complain that one of the boys had told his class that his dad had killed his mom. “He cannot do that!” the teacher said. Maria told her, “He’s a child, and he’s in pain.” One day, Laura’s middle child Googled his mother and discovered disturbing details about her murder. He threw a fit, smashing furniture and crying, “I don’t want to be here without my mom!” At home, the youngest boy asked his grandmother, “Can you make her again, so that I can see her?”

I went to Texas to meet Maria, and she welcomed me into her darkened apartment wearing black. She had the same deep-set eyes and velvety brows as her daughter, whose photograph hung above an overstuffed couch. “What I’m most proud of is what she left me—my grandsons,” Maria said, as she made coffee, gesturing toward the boys’ grade-school portraits in the living room. She added, “There’s a reason they’re alive.”

She showed me a cigar box on a shelf by the front door, the boys’ Mom Box. “If they find something girly outside, they bring it home and put it in the box,” Maria said. We looked through the contents: pink ribbons, a Disney Birthday Princess pin, a Mr. Potato Head ring, a Peter Pan figurine, and assorted trinkets that reminded the boys of Laura. Underneath was a copy of Laura’s emergency protection order, carefully folded.

When Maria realized that the boys would soon be home from school, she told me that there was one last thing she wanted to show me. “You know how usually, when you box up someone’s clothes, and then you take them out, they smell bad?” she asked. “Well, my daughter’s clothes, they don’t smell that way. They’re still fresh.” She went into the bedroom and returned with an armful of clothing. At her urging, I pressed my face into one of Laura’s red satin blouses. A gentle scent lingered—unobtrusive, vaguely floral, verging on nothingness. I found it strange, after so many hours spent searching for Laura, to find her here.

Maria told me that shortly after Laura’s death she began encountering problems raising the boys. She wasn’t their legal guardian, and doctors wouldn’t allow her to make decisions about their medical care. Signing off on school activities and therapy dates was complicated. So, one day in 2013, she packed up the boys and took them to the law offices of Jennifer Harbury, a civil-rights attorney.

Harbury told me that, in the meeting, the boys “were a wreck.” She explained, “The older one was rocking back and forth, and the middle child looked scared—crying and hyper and desperate—and the little one was very upset.” The whole family, Harbury said, showed “every sign of post-traumatic stress you can think of.”

Maria told Harbury that she needed help getting custody of her grandsons, and then recounted the circumstances of Laura’s death. “When a woman is afraid,” Maria asked, “why can’t you give her the opportunity to show her documents, to show her evidence?”

Harbury was stunned. Her team could help Maria get custody of the kids, she said. But, as the pair discussed the case, another idea emerged: filing a lawsuit against agents of the Border Patrol.

Harbury, who is sixty-six, has made a career of challenging alleged abuses of immigrants, including refoulements. She grew up in Connecticut and California, in a family that had fled Nazi persecution in Holland during the Second World War. After graduating from Harvard Law School, in 1978, she moved to the Rio Grande Valley to defend farmworkers’ rights. In the early eighties, she noticed an alarming trend: thousands of Salvadorans and indigenous Guatemalans were crossing the Rio Grande, fleeing civil wars. Most were denied asylum and forced to return—often, she said, “to face torture chambers and death squads,” some of which were funded in part by the U.S. government.

In 1990, Harbury went to Guatemala to conduct research on indigenous women rebels fighting in the country’s civil war. Atop a volcano, she met a young Mayan rebel commander, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, who went by the war name Everardo. They fell in love and travelled back to rural Texas, where they married and, in the tradition of leftist guerrilla fighters, exchanged silver spoons. A few months later, with Harbury’s support, Bámaca returned home to fight the Guatemalan Army. Then he disappeared.

At first, the Army claimed that Bámaca had been killed in combat. But Harbury grew suspicious when she reviewed the autopsy report. “Everardo was a walking war museum,” she said, explaining that he was covered in scars—and yet the report noted none of them. Later, a rebel fighter who had been captured by the Army escaped, and claimed to have seen Bámaca alive, being tortured on a Guatemalan military base.

Harbury began a series of hunger strikes, sleeping on the pavement in front of Guatemala’s Presidential palace for thirty-two days, demanding answers. She attracted the attention of U.S. news shows and celebrities like Bianca Jagger and Charlie Rose. “If you kill him, I’m going to die on your doorstep with convulsions in front of every camera in the world,” Harbury said, addressing the Guatemalan government. “You’re going to be seen.” CBS reported that the C.I.A. knew that Bámaca had been captured alive and tortured, and Harbury moved her hunger strike to the gates of the White House. On the twelfth day of her fast, the congressman Robert G. Torricelli revealed that a Guatemalan Army colonel being paid by the C.I.A. had been involved in Bámaca’s torture, as well as in the earlier killing of a U.S. citizen, in 1990. President Clinton’s Administration ordered internal investigations into the United States’ role in the murders and their coverups.

Along the way, Harbury became something of a celebrity herself. The writer Chris Kraus centered part of her cult hit “I Love Dick” on her, describing Harbury’s pre-fasting aesthetic as “Hillary Clinton on a budget”—“a well-proportioned face with good WASP bones, blonde tousled bubble-cut, a cheap tweed coat, clear gaze”—and noting that, mid-fast, people looked at Harbury as “a strange animal.” Ted Turner bought the film rights to her life story, and a Times reporter suggested Madonna for the role, writing, “It would take a certain controlled irreverence and mad gusto to get Jennifer Harbury on the screen.”

In 1995, Bill Clinton suspended covert C.I.A. funding to the Guatemalan Army after the agency admitted to making mistakes in Bámaca’s case. To Harbury, this was far from sufficient. By then, she’d learned that her husband had been killed by men on the C.I.A.’s payroll. The next year, she sued officials from the State Department, the C.I.A., and other government bodies for denying her access to information that might have helped prevent her husband’s killing.

The case was filed as a “Bivens” claim, so called because of the case of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, which, in 1971, established that citizens could sue federal officials if their rights had been violated. Harbury’s claim was simple: if the government hadn’t lied about her husband’s whereabouts, she could have petitioned for his rescue. Her case eventually went to the Supreme Court, where, in an unusual move, Harbury argued it herself. The Court acknowledged “appreciating Harbury’s anguish” but ruled against her.

In Maria’s story, Harbury saw a grief similar to her own, and a chance to hold the government accountable for another family’s anguish. “The U.S. government should not be free to submit people to torture and murder,” she said. “They did it in my husband’s case, and they did it in Laura’s case.”

Maria worried about antagonizing the authorities, but she was desperate for ways to draw meaning from her daughter’s death. Recently, she had given Laura’s porcelain-doll collection to a center for abused girls. “In the case of my child,” she said, “there are many lessons that could be useful for other women.” Maria decided to press ahead with a lawsuit.

They had to work quickly, because the statute of limitations in Laura’s case had nearly expired. Harbury partnered with the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit that often pursues civil-rights cases on behalf of immigrants, and she was soon joined by one of the group’s attorneys, Efrén Olivares. On June 5, 2013, they filed Maria S. v. John Doe, on behalf of Laura’s three sons. U.S. immigration agents, they alleged, had arrested Laura, then “violated her procedural due process rights” and “refused to consider her clear eligibility for relief from removal.” Laura had the right to a full and fair hearing before a qualified immigration judge, and the right to counsel at her own expense, as afforded by the Fifth Amendment. Instead, the complaint claimed, agents had sent Laura back to “extreme danger, resulting in her battery and death.” Their decisions, the complaint said, “shock the conscience.”

Holding U.S. Customs and Border Protection legally accountable is difficult but not impossible. The day before Maria S. v. John Doe was filed, the A.C.L.U. brought a class-action case against officers from Border Patrol and ice in Southern California, alleging the widespread use of coercion, threats, and deception to get immigrants to sign their own expulsion orders, including a form called the I-826. In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security and other defendants agreed to a settlement. A long list of reforms resulted, including a stipulation that prospective deportees could use a phone to call a family member, a legal-service provider, or a Mexican consulate before removal. The reforms, however, applied only to Southern California.

Other suits are pending. Last July, a nonprofit called Al Otro Lado sued officials at the Department of Homeland Security and at Customs and Border Protection, alleging that asylum seekers are being “systematically turned away at ports of entry.” Last year, the city of Chicago sued Trump’s Justice Department over a plan to withhold federal public-safety funds from sanctuary cities.

Harbury has become involved in still more cases. After Trump’s election, she began interviewing recent deportees in Reynosa about their experiences with U.S. immigration authorities, and gathered accounts of asylum seekers who’d been kidnapped or otherwise harmed after being turned away. She compiled her findings in a sworn legal declaration, and shared it with a national network of civil-rights attorneys. In September, she filed a suit against officers from ice and other government entities on behalf of a group of “young civilians who were forced to flee their homelands due to the ongoing violence.” These asylum seekers had come from places as diverse as Ghana, Guatemala, and Sierra Leone, but faced the same “danger of severe persecution” if deported. Although they had committed no crimes, the suit alleged, they had been “wrongfully denied parole and subjected to prolonged and arbitrary detention in prison-like conditions.”

The case of Maria S. v. John Doe, filed on behalf of Laura’s kids, ended up on the docket of Judge Andrew Hanen, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, in Brownsville. His rulings on immigration are infamous. In 2015, he accused the Obama Administration’s Department of Homeland Security of “criminal conspiracy” after the agency chose not to arrest and deport an undocumented mother who had paid a smuggler to bring her child to the States. Hanen said that the decision set a “dangerous and unconscionable” precedent.

Government lawyers argued for the dismissal of Maria’s suit, saying that U.S. Border Patrol agents enjoy wide immunity from civil lawsuits. It seemed likely that Hanen would side with the government, but, in 2015, in one of his first decisions in the case, he took a surprising position. He refused to dismiss the suit, writing, “Even aliens who have entered the United States unlawfully are assured the protections of the Fifth Amendment due process clause.” The case, he said, could move to discovery, which would have to focus on a single issue: whether, and how, Laura’s deportation had been coerced.

At a pretrial hearing of Maria S. v. John Doe, Hanen clarified this critical question. Laura, he noted, had signed an I-826 form in the hours before her removal, checking the box giving up her right to seek asylum, which reads, “I admit that I am in the United States illegally, and I believe I do not face harm if I return to my country.” Why? If Laura really feared for her life, had she signed under duress? Or did she check the box voluntarily?

Harbury tracked down one of the friends who had been in the car that night. She was frightened but agreed to testify. While seated at the processing station, the woman recalled, Laura wept and begged the border officer—Ramiro Garza—not to send her back. The officer, she said, had a gun and an “annoyed” expression. He put the paperwork in front of Laura, and ordered her to sign. “This is an injustice!” Laura objected, according to the friend. Garza, she said, “mocked” Laura, and pressed again. The pair went back and forth until Laura caved. (Garza denied this version of events, and said that he would never force anyone to sign the form.) Laura’s friend said that her own decision to sign was influenced by the prospect of the long detention that often accompanies fighting deportation. “I didn’t want to be locked in,” she said, “because I have children.”

In July, 2017, Hanen finally handed down his ruling. “This case presents one of the most lamentable set of circumstances that this Court has ever been called upon to address,” Hanen wrote. It left the court with “a profound sense of sadness about the disastrous chain of events that ended in the defendant’s murder.” But he said that he couldn’t overcome the problem that “the only person who can truly reveal Laura S.’s motivation” in checking the box—Laura herself—“was killed.” As a result, coercion was hard to prove. Perhaps she was coerced, Hanen said, or perhaps she signed the I-826 so that she wouldn’t be in detention during her son’s surgery, or for some other unknown or unknowable reason.

“Despite their best efforts,” Hanen ruled, “Plaintiffs have failed to clear the evidentiary hurdle created by the death of Laura S.” The case was dismissed.

Harbury felt heartsick, but she’d always known that the case might have to wind its way through higher appeals courts. Last August, Harbury and the other lawyers filed with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the case should be heard by a jury. They noted that the lawsuit’s outcome “directly affects ongoing life and death situations” for other immigrants. Harbury is hopeful that, if success eludes them in the initial appeals, the case will eventually reach the Supreme Court. And if no justice emerges there? Harbury and her team will turn to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. There, they can draw on treaties meant to protect immigrants like those the United States failed in the Second World War.

For Laura’s family, the stakes of the case are profound. But they also have other, more immediate worries. Not long after Laura’s murder, Elizabeth’s purse was stolen from her car. Her visa—her only proof of legal status—was inside. Then, in 2015, she learned about Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or daca, which was intended for people who had come to the U.S. as children and, in many cases, grown up here, who wanted to work legally, get an education, and stay in the place they considered home. Elizabeth decided to apply. She had to prove that she’d come to the U.S. before the age of sixteen, posed no threat to national security, and met a list of other criteria. Not long after submitting her materials, she was notified that she had won legal relief, and officially become a Dreamer.

Politically, Obama’s daca policies have been hugely popular. Recent polls show that more than three out of four Americans support allowing Dreamers to remain in the U.S., and two-thirds of Republicans back a pathway to citizenship for them. But, last September, Elizabeth got frightening news: Trump had ordered an end to the program, and had given Congress six months to extend its protections. Elizabeth had to submit a renewal request before an October deadline, but she couldn’t afford the legal fees. Her immigration attorney, she told me, refused to return her paperwork without a substantial payment.

In December, Elizabeth’s daca status expired. If a legislative solution isn’t reached by early March, nearly seven hundred thousand people in the U.S. will be stripped of their legal status and their protection from deportation. Earlier this month, three former Homeland Security Secretaries, including Michael Chertoff, who served under George W. Bush, wrote a letter to Congress underscoring the importance of a daca fix. “We write not only in strong support of this legislation, but to stress that it should be enacted speedily, in order to meet the significant administrative requirements of implementation, as well as the need to provide certainty for employers and these young people,” the letter read.

Some Dreamers fear for their lives if sent back. Elizabeth testified against Sergio at his murder trial, and she told me that he has called her relatives in Reynosa from prison to make death threats against her. When she lost her legal status, she also lost her work permit, and therefore her job. Some days, anxiety overtakes her. “I’m still trying my best,” she recently texted me, “which is what matters.”

Still, when I asked Elizabeth what she would tell President Trump if they ever met, she immediately thought of Laura’s boys. “Please be conscious of what happens when a woman gets deported,” she said. “It’s not only what could happen to her—it’s the family she leaves behind, in America. Please think of those kids.”

At home last summer, Laura’s boys celebrated what would have been their mother’s thirty-first birthday. Maria decorated a vanilla cake with fresh carnations and hung streamers from the ceiling in Laura’s favorite colors: purple, pink, and light blue. She gathered the family in the living room—the three boys and Elizabeth, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins—and handed out pens. Each person wrote a message to Laura on a piece of notebook paper, which they tied to pink balloons and launched into the sky.

“Hi, mami,” Laura’s youngest wrote, in Spanish. “I miss you.” He said that he hoped to have four careers—as “a basketball player, a Nascar driver, an engineer, and a YouTuber”—so that he could send his earnings to his mom in Heaven, after buying himself a “fancy refrigerator.”

The oldest boy told me of his plans to persuade the rapper Drake to adopt him. He loved Drake’s music, and his style, and his Instagram feed, and he knew Drake would love his, too. “Hey, Mom,” he wrote. “I need you to take care of me.”

Laura’s middle child kept his note secret, but he showed me a poster board he’d made for his mother, with colorful pompoms and photographs glued above a poem he’d written: “Wave after wave / Crushes onto my legs / I remember Mom’s every word / To help me stand on my own two feet.”

At the kitchen table, the boys played with an iPhone. “Siri, what is ten to the thousandth?” the youngest asked. “Siri, who am I?”

“Who is my mommy?”

“Who is Donald Trump?”

“How old is Donald Trump?”

The oldest chimed in, “Siri, can I call my mom?”

Maria sometimes envies the boys’ approach to death. She told me that twice Laura’s eldest son had stood at the bus stop after school, craning his neck, waiting. “What is it?” she asked.

“When is Mom coming?” he replied.

“Mom’s not coming,” she told her grandson. “Remember where we left her?” she asked gently, pulling him close. “We left her on the other side of the border.” ♦