‘We Got Kidnapped Again’

Casa de la Misericordia, or the House of Mercy, is one of four migrant shelters in Nogales, a city in Sonora, Mexico. It sits on the top of a hill in the Bella Vista neighborhood, about four miles from the US border. The property is spartan: a series of dorms, huts, and playgrounds; a mess hall, an outdoor kitchen, and a garden. Some 150 people are housed there. That might seem like a big number, but across the city, hundreds more asylum seekers rely on short-term rentals and safe houses run by smugglers. Others sleep on the streets. More arrive each day. 

I visited Casa de la Misericordia in August 2023. It was evening, a few hours after dinner. Moths fluttered around the outdoor lights, children ran about, and a handful of adults sat on truck tires, painted in pastels and half-buried in the dirt­ to form a guardrail around the parking lot—as in many migrant shelters, rainbows are the artistic theme. I was there to meet Esme, a Guatemalan woman who, with her sons, sixteen-year-old Beto and three-year-old Samuel, had been at the shelter for over eight months. The four of us sat down in a cracked corner of the basketball court and Esme told me her story. 

It began in Quetzaltenango, a city in the western highlands of Guatemala, which a Colombian criminal organization had been terrorizing for years. In 2021 its members began extorting Esme, who owned a pet store and ran a small restaurant as well as a sports bar. Soon she “was basically just working to give them money.” They also threatened to sell drugs from her bar. In the fall of 2022, when they murdered some of her neighbors, Esme knew it was time to leave. She fled with her sons to Tapachula, a town on the Mexico border, and applied for asylum there. While the process dragged on, Esme found work in a local restaurant; she and the boys slept in an apartment next door. They made do like that for more than a month, when Esme heard that the Colombians were nearby and looking for them. A man she knew, a supplier for her pet store, offered to take them further north, only to hand them over to the Sinaloa Cartel, which, like other gangs, blurs the distinction between human smuggling and trafficking. 

Esme expected to travel north on a series of bus or combi rides. Instead they were kidnapped and shoved into a dank, guarded warehouse with scores of other migrants. The pet store supplier then called to inform Esme that the fee she had paid up front was no longer enough—and that she was being taken to the US border. She and her sons were locked up in a different, cramped room with dozens of other people, where guards occasionally singled her out and screamed at her until she handed over money that, after much pleading, her sister wired her. Then the journey to the border began. 

At one point they were stuffed for more than twelve hours in a cattle truck trailer with about a hundred other migrants. Beto, who is tall, was put with the men in the back of the trailer that was less ventilated. As they motored north, a problem with the truck’s brakes sparked a fire, frightening the migrants; they jammed even closer together. By the time the driver extinguished it, a number of them in the back had passed out. Hours later, Esme, with Samuel in her arms, stepped over bodies, not knowing whether they were dead or alive, to get out of the truck. She was terrified that Beto was among them. She felt both relief and shame, she told me, when she spotted him sitting, stunned and trembling, in the dirt next to the trailer. 

Later they and a crowd of migrants—from Brazil, India, China, Russia, Africa, as well as the Americas—were crammed into an empty dirt lot somewhere in central Mexico, where they stayed for about a week. There were ticks, scorpions, and spiders—and recently covered pits that Beto and Esme took to be graves. “It smelled so strong of rot,” Beto said. The smugglers warned them that if they lost their identification bracelets or forgot their assigned code names—Esme’s family’s main one was “Corita”—the consequences would be “al hoyo” (to the hole). 

They barely ate. Esme barely slept. The guards charged them for everything: 100 pesos for the bathroom, 100 for water, 250 for four tortillas and a scoop of bad meat. Beto heard the men, who were following the news on their phones, cheering on El Chapo’s son, Ovidio, who had recently been arrested but was still jockeying for control of his father’s cartel: “Qué viva el ratón!” (Long live The Mouse!) Men in bulletproof vests and balaclavas arrived and loaded them into a truck for the last leg of the journey. Before the departure, they ordered the migrants to text their family members “Estamos bien” (We’re good) and then turn off their phones. 

They reached the border west of Nogales, just north of the town of Altar. The smugglers didn’t give them the option to go to a port of entry, where they could have asked for protection from US border guards, and instead shoved them across at a spot where there was no border wall. They waited in mesquite shade and waved down the first Border Patrol truck that drove by. Esme pled that they were in danger both in Guatemala and in Mexico, but the agents were unmoved. A day later—on Beto’s sixteenth birthday—they were deported to Nogales. 

“And that was when you came here? I asked. “No,” Beto said, “We got kidnapped again.” He and Esme—as if still in disbelief—both cackled. 

Back in Nogales, they had not walked more than a few blocks, when a man offered to take them to a shelter. Unbeknownst to them, the pet store supplier had sent him. He took them to a safe house on the outskirts of the city and did not release them until Esme’s sister wired ransom money. Just over a week later, a guide led them across the border again, near Sonoyta, a town west of Altar. Again they turned themselves in to Border Patrol, and again their pleas for asylum were denied. Esme and Samuel were put in a family holding cell; Beto slept on the floor in a room with adult men in a different facility. When Esme asked to speak to someone in migration, an agent responded, “I am migration, and you’re going back to Mexico.” They were expelled a few days later, and this time made their way to the House of Mercy. 

Why have Esme and her family been stuck in Nogales? The short answer is that the Biden administration has forced them to stay there. When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he promised to place a temporary moratorium on deportations, restore asylum protections, and implement policies generally welcoming of migrants. But his actions in office have not quite borne those promises out.

In 2020 the Trump administration effectively suspended asylum at the southern border. Early in the pandemic, the government retrofitted an antiquated public health statute known as Title 42, granting Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Border Patrol’s parent agency, the right to deny and expel all asylum seekers crossing into US territory. “From a legal perspective,” as Gaby Del Valle wrote in these pages, the migrants “were never admitted to the US.” In total some 2.8 million people were pushed out of the country under Title 42. 

President Biden made a belated attempt to end the policy, but it was blocked in federal court; the statute finally expired in May 2023, when he declared the pandemic over. In its place, however, the Biden administration implemented a series of measures that, in their way, are as restrictive as Title 42. “Right now we effectively have an asylum ban in place,” Chelsea Sachau, an attorney at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a nonprofit legal organization based in Tucson, told me. (My wife is an attorney at Florence.)

Sachau is hardly exaggerating. In May 2023 the Biden administration issued an order requiring anyone passing through a third country—not their own, and not the United States—to first request asylum there and have their application rejected. Only after that could they plead their case in the US. (You cannot apply for asylum from your home country.) The problem is that Mexico, the most common third country, is not a safe place for migrants, and its asylum and refugee programs do not remotely have the capacity to meet the present level of applications. The same is true of Guatemala, El Salvador, and the other Central American countries from which so many are fleeing. The rule will remain in effect at least until May 2025.

At Casa de la Misericordia, I met Alma, a twenty-seven-year-old from Honduras, who told me about her ordeals in Mexico.¹ In 2022 Alma fled from gangs that were extorting her and threatening to kill her. She crossed the border into the Mexican state of Chiapas with a permiso (temporary travel visa) and was riding a bus north when policemen pulled her and a few other migrants off at a checkpoint. “They took almost all of my cash,” she said. “They ripped up my permiso in my face and said that I was worth nothing in their country.” This rendered her “illegal” and thus subject to arrest and deportation. A few days later, after her family wired her money, Alma continued north. This time members of a criminal organization pulled the bus over, robbed her, and stripped her naked for a full-body search. “It could have gone worse,” she said, then trailed off. 

Such incidents are not uncommon. In 2022 Human Rights First published a report, based on interviews with 2,700 migrants who passed through or were stuck in Mexico, which found that they faced widespread kidnappings and violent attacks. Criminal organizations and the police ostensibly there to fight them are both predatory. Over 40 percent of interviewees had been violently attacked; more than sixty of the interviewees were invasively strip-searched by police. A Médecins Sans Frontières report from earlier this year found that migrants across Mexico and Central America were “in an unprecedented state of vulnerability.” Sexual violence is rife; MSF treated 232 survivors in 2023 alone. The Chiapas-based poet Balam Rodrigo has written movingly about migrants passing through the region:

Those rails were a pair of machetes with the blade
turned upward to the sky:
on them women and men still parade
until the shadow mutilates from their bodies.

I saw how they left pieces of themselves along the path:

sometimes tatters of flesh, sometimes tatters of fear.²

Another Biden administration ruling involves technology. In January 2023 it ordered all asylum seekers to schedule an appointment on a smartphone application called CBP One, to secure an interview at the port of entry. The app, as more than one expert characterized it to me, is a kind of asylum Ticketmaster. Only 1,450 appointments are made available every day, and in the Nogales port of entry only one hundred per day. In effect, then, tens of thousands of asylum seekers must wait in Mexico before they can make their case. Wait times can be as long as eight or nine months. 

CBP One was plagued with problems from the outset. Frozen error messages on screens, unexplained denials, and phone crashes were common. Earlier this year, in another part of Nogales, I watched the app’s facial recognition software fail to identify an Indigenous woman—it doesn’t do well with Black and Indigenous faces. The Haitian Creole translation was for a long while more than half gobbledygook. Some technical glitches have been ironed out, but plenty remain. In July three different asylum seekers sent me screenshots of “unexpected error” messages that popped up when they tried to make appointments. 

Fussing with CBP One is a daily ritual at Casa de la Misericordia. Each morning, just before 9:00 AM, when the app’s lottery system opens with new appointments, the shelter goes quiet. For a few minutes, everyone is glued to their phones, thumbing away; then they lift their heads back up with the inevitable disappointment. Esme had not yet managed to get an appointment when I met her. 

Even under the Title 42 regime, some migrants were allowed to seek asylum at a port of entry if they could prove “exceptionally compelling circumstances.” This humanitarian exemption is still in place. It applies to people with medical emergencies, people facing “an extreme and imminent threat to their life or safety,” severe trafficking victims, and minors. That last exemption perversely incentivizes parents who, fearing for their children’s safety, send them across alone. In other words, a form of family separation continues at the border. 

The morning after I talked to Esme, I watched a family take this risk. Miriam lived with her two children, fifteen-year-old Edgar and seventeen-year-old Luisa, in Acapulco, in the southwestern state of Guerrero; she ran a restaurant there.³ A local gang had been extorting the family for years, and when she could no longer pay, its members tried to recruit Edgar. They also threatened to kidnap Luisa and burn down the restaurant. In early 2023 the family fled to Nogales; when I met them, they had been stuck there for nearly six months. Each morning Miriam tried her luck on the CBP One app, to no avail. She told me that the decision to separate had been on her mind for months now. “If we go with the smugglers,” she asked, “what might they do to my daughter?” 

We gathered around 9:00 AM. The shelter volunteers said their goodbyes, then made way for Miriam, Edgar, and Luisa. She hugged them so hard they grimaced, then stayed behind and watched them, now both visibly pale, get in the car. I joined them. On the half-hour drive to the border gate, down steeply winding dirt roads, they turned to practical matters and peppered Ismael, the volunteer giving us a lift, with questions: What if they ask where my mom is? What if they ask how long we’ve been in the shelter? What if they separate us from each other? 

There were two lines outside the Deconcini Port of Entry: one for daily travelers—people crossing the border from Sonora to Arizona for shopping or work or to meet relatives—and another for migrants with CBP One appointments. The asylum seekers had laid themselves out on the floor under the roofed waiting area, with suitcases, water bottles, baby bottles, phones, and kicked-off sandals piled around them. At least a dozen were small children or infants.

Ismael told a CBP agent that we were accompanying two minor migrants who were seeking asylum. Edgar handed him a folder with his and Luisa’s birth certificates. The agent told us to wait and slipped off his stool, disappearing out of view. When he came back, he waved at the children: “Adelante.” 

Before heading back to the shelter, I spoke with some of the migrants pleading for a humanitarian exception. Municipal officials in Nogales were, at that point, allowing about forty asylum seekers in this category per day. Of those, sometimes a few were let in, sometimes none. One man, also from Guerrero, had been waiting there for twenty-two days, sleeping in a nearby outdoor market. There was also a family with two small children; the eight-year-old boy had severe autism and was rhythmically shaking his head back and forth. “It’s especially hard for him to wait,” his mother said. They were not yet willing to separate, but they had thought about it. 

Activists—and asylum seekers—have good reason to be outraged at what they see as the Biden administration’s betrayal on asylum. But viewed from a historical perspective, the picture is more complicated. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group based in Washington D.C., pointed out to me that the current administration had increased port of entry processing of asylum applications at the southern border to its highest-ever level: 45,000 people per month, more than twice the peak it reached during the Obama administration. The issue, Reichlin-Melnick explained, is that “demand vastly outstrips the supply.” More than two million cases are currently working their way through the system. “If we invested in building the humanitarian protection system that we say we have on paper, a lot of these problems would go away,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

Until then, for those desperate enough, the desert beckons. In 2022 at least 853 people died crossing the US–Mexico border, compared to 227 in 2020. While numbers haven’t been officially tallied for 2023, a further increase seems likely.

None of this has prompted a rethinking on immigration within the Democratic Party. If anything, the Biden administration is doing more to push migrants back into danger. In recent months, it has bolstered its partnerships with private, for-profit corporations, inviting them to build four more detention centers in the western border states. The most recent Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, passed this June, funded an increase in border guards and more security technology.

Will Kamala Harris, if she wins, be any different? The signs are not promising. During the September presidential debate, she criticized Donald Trump for successfully lobbying the GOP to oppose the Border Act of 2024, a bipartisan bill that would have allotted a further $20 billion to border protection. It also included new restrictive provisions, such as granting Border Patrol “emergency” powers to expel all migrants who do not show up at a port of entry, if over five thousand arrive at the border in this way on a given day, and making asylum applicants wear ankle monitors until their cases are heard. (This is what Democratic “border reform” looks like.) Almost as an afterthought, Harris said she would, as president, slightly widen the narrow path to citizenship and further protect Dreamers—but neither of those measures were included in the bill. More recently, she has drawn on her background as a former prosecutor, posing before the border wall in campaign ads and promising to pass “the toughest bipartisan border security bill in decades.” Meanwhile, she’s grown silent on family separations, which in 2019 she decried as a “human rights abuse.”

Harris seems to believe that by cracking down on immigration, she will establish the necessary nationalist bona fides to win over right-wingers, which in turn might pave the way for comprehensive immigration reform. But that’s a failed strategy. Barack Obama tried it, deporting migrants in historic numbers—he was dubbed “deporter in chief.” But despite much fanfare, the compromise bill that a group of bipartisan senators hailed as the “Gang of Eight” worked on during his presidency, which would have established paths to citizenship for some of the undocumented population in exchange for employing significantly more border guards and building hundreds of miles of more border wall, ultimately failed to pass in the house. There is even less reason to believe that current Republicans, in a more nativist mindset than before, would negotiate with Harris.

During a recent campaign stop in Arizona, Harris visited the border. Dressed in an khaki jacket, she strutted with Border Patrol agents in the shade of the steel bollard wall. Afterwards, she addressed a crowd in an auditorium in Douglas: “Our system must be orderly and secure,” she said. 

Weeks after they crossed, I was able to track down Edgar and Luisa at a government-funded shelter for migrant children in Florida. Their older brother, who had migrated a few years earlier and is now based in Arizona, can to talk to them for ten minutes a day. He recorded a call with Luisa for me. She said she had been mistreated in the port of entry: a female guard had forced her to disrobe and strip-searched her. She and Edgar were first bused to Tucson, then, without explanation, flown to Atlanta and relocated to Florida. Unfortunately, I lost touch with their older brother after a few weeks, but some months later, one of the kids contacted the shelter in Nogales to say they had been released. 

Last September, while Edgar and Luisa were still in Florida, Beto messaged me. His family had finally gotten an appointment on CBP One. Two days later, I met up with them at a run-down Ramada hotel in south Tucson; a local nonprofit was paying for their room. In a few hours they had a flight to Houston, where they would stay with Esme’s sister, who had bought their tickets. They’d been given an initial court date for January 2024. 

For more than a year Esme and her sons slept on a single mattress in her sister’s living room. They recently moved to a rented room in a shared house. There have been a few ICE check-ins and court visits, and their final asylum hearing—at which they will have to prove that they face persecution if returned to Guatemala—is set for December 2025. Both Esme and Beto are still awaiting work permits. 

I recently asked Esme how much she thinks about their experience in Mexico. “Every day,” she said. “We survived. I think about all the people who didn’t, or who are struggling to survive now.” For his part, Beto wants to become an immigration attorney. “People see some migrants as animals,” he told me. “And I want to help them, so they feel better, so they know they’re not alone in this country.”