by Don Winslow
Then he stepped under the spray.
He’d never had a shower like this. The few he’d ever had were cold trickles from old, rusty pipes. This water smelled like boiled eggs, but Nico didn’t care—it was wonderful.
This was El Norte.
This was America.
The champú bothered him, though. The lady told him the word, but he didn’t know what it was and was afraid to open the little plastic bottle. He soaped his hair down, though, until it was clean, and let the hot water run down his body.
He got out, toweled himself dry and then put on his new clothes. It was still unbelievable, this place where they give you clothes and shoes.
Donna was waiting for him in the hallway and took him to the doctor.
The doctor made him take his shirt off, then had him cough and ran a cold metal thing over his back and his chest. He made Nico open his mouth and put a stick in it, told him to make a noise. He had Nico step on a scale and then lowered a little metal bar onto his head.
“Four foot six,” the doctor said. “Fifty-three pounds. His growth is stunted and he’s extremely undernourished. Residual contusions on his chest and rib cage. Does he report having been beaten?”
Donna asked the boy about the bruises.
“I fell off the train,” Nico said.
“Does he report sexual abuse?” the doctor asked.
“No.”
“Should I do a rectal exam?” the doctor asked.
“I don’t think that’s necessary right now,” Donna said. “If he opens up about something later, maybe.”
“He can put his shirt back on,” the doctor said. “He shows symptoms of respiratory distress, probably from breathing in dust and smoke. Same cause for what looks like a chronic eye infection, but some eye drops should clear it up. He’s also displaying sinusitis, but I think a nasal wash instead of antibiotics and we’ll see how it goes. Mostly, this kid needs food and rest. Donna, could I have a word with you alone?”
Donna walked Nico out of the examination room to a bench in the hallway and went back in.
“The kid has a gang tattoo burned into his ankle,” the doctor said. “Calle 18.”
“Could you leave that out of the report?”
“You know I can’t.”
“Didn’t hurt to ask.”
Back out in the hallway, Donna asked Nico, “Do you know what a cafeteria is?”
“No.”
“It’s sort of like a restaurant.”
Nico was worried. “I don’t have any money.”
“That’s okay. The food is free.”
Nico couldn’t believe his ears. Then his eyes. They walked into this big room where some migrants were sitting at long tables, eating, while others were in line with trays and people behind the counter were heaping rice and beans and meat onto their plates.
“Take a tray and a plate,” Donna said. “And there are the forks, knives and napkins. Then get in line.”
“They’ll just give me food?”
“They’ll just give you food,” Donna said. “But say thank you.”
Nico said gracias again and again as the people behind the counter put rice and beans and meat on his plate. At the end of the counter there were glasses with juice, punch or water. Nico looked at Donna.
“Take one,” she said.
He took a glass of punch and sat down at a table with her.
Then he couldn’t believe his ears again because he heard people complaining about the food—the rice was undercooked, the beans were overcooked, the meat was stringy, there wasn’t enough.
It’s free food, Nico thought.
They give you food.
He started to shovel his down before they changed their minds.
“Slow down,” Donna said, smiling. “Nobody’s going to take it away from you, m’ijo.”
Nico wasn’t so sure. He ate ravenously with his right hand, his left wrapped protectively around the plate.
“I have some more things I have to tell you,” Donna said while she watched him tear into the food. “Because you’re an unaccompanied minor, we can’t house you in a dormitory with adults who aren’t related to you. So we have to put you in a room by yourself.”
Nico had no idea what she was talking about.
He didn’t care.
A room to himself? He literally couldn’t imagine it.
“But hopefully by tomorrow,” Donna was saying, “we can move you to a group home. It’s like a regular house. There’ll be like a mom and dad, and you’ll have other kids to play with. And if you’re there long enough, you’ll go to school. Would you like that?”
Nico shrugged. How would he know?
“Now go up and get an apple and a cookie,” Donna said, “and then I’ll take you to your room.”
The room was a small rectangle, painted in a bright blue, with murals of zebras and giraffes. A single bed was set by the wall. The window was barred.
“Here you go,” Donna said. “There’s a bathroom down the hall you can use if you need it. But, Nico, you know you can’t leave the building, right?”
Nico nodded.
A room of his own, a bathroom, a shower, free food and drink, clean new clothes, a pair of sneakers . . .
Why would he ever want to leave heaven?
Donna went back to her office and called the number Nico gave her.
A man answered.
“Is this Señor López?” Donna asked in Spanish.
“Yes.”
The voice sounded tentative, suspicious.
“Señor López,” Donna said. “My name is Donna Sutton, I’m from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Do you know a boy named Nico Ramírez?”
“Yes.”
Now he sounded frightened.
“May I ask,” Donna said, “what is your relationship to Nico?”
“He’s my nephew,” López said. “My wife’s sister’s son.”
“We have Nico in our custody,” Donna said. “We want you to know he’s perfectly safe.”
She heard him yell, “Consuelo!,” then heard him tell her that “they” had found Nico. When he came back on the phone he was crying. “We were afraid that . . . we hadn’t heard . . .”
“Are you in touch with Nico’s mother?”
“She calls when she can,” López said. “She doesn’t have a phone.”
“The next time she calls,” Donna said, “will you please tell her Nico is safe and give her this number? She can call collect.”
“Can we speak with Nico?”
“I’ll call back tomorrow and put him on the phone,” Donna said. “I hope he’s asleep right now.”
“What happens next?”
She walked him through the process. She would send them the Family Reunification Application, which they would have to fill out and get back to her. Then there would be an interview, and if everything checked out, Nico could be released to their custody until a deportation hearing, usually within ninety days, would determine if Nico could stay or would be returned to Guatemala.
“He can’t go back,” López said. “They’ll kill him.”
“We’ll take it a step at a time,” Donna said.
She got their address and told them she would call them in the morning. Then she called ICE and told them—as she had to by law—that she had a UAC with a gang tattoo on his ankle.
“We have to pick up the file,” the agent said.
“I know, Cody,” Donna said. “But could you step lightly on this one? He’s a ten-year-old.”
“You know the environment right now, Donna.”
“I know.”
“I’ll do what I can, but . . .”
Yeah, she thought as she hung up. It’s the story of our lives—Border Patrol agents, ICE, case managers with more files than we can really digest, volunteer lawyers who might get minutes with their “clients” before a hearing—we’re all doing our best, but . . .
It wasn’t as bad as it was back in 2014, when UACs surged from thirty t
housand the year before to almost seventy thousand, overwhelming the system from top to bottom. The number of kids fleeing Central America dropped earlier in 2015, but now it was on the rise again and threatening to once again flood the system.
Her desk was overloaded—so were the case files of every child advocate and of all the pro bono attorneys who had come and volunteered their services.
Donna left the facility and drove up Highway 35 to Pearsall and pulled into Garcia’s Bar and Grill.
Alma Baez was right at the bar where Donna thought she’d be, sipping a bourbon and branch water. Donna plopped down on the stool next to her and raised one finger to the bartender, signaling her usual, a scotch with two rocks.
“Has it been a day?” Alma asked.
“The usual flood of misery,” Donna said. “I’m glad I found you. I have a UAC who’s going to need an advocate.”
Donna worked for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which contracted with a private business, Corrections Corporation of America, to run the migrant detention center. CCA ran eight other detention centers, but its main business was prisons. It housed sixty-six thousand inmates in thirty-four state and fourteen federal prisons as well as four county jails.
As a case manager for ORR, Donna had the right—in fact, the duty—to call in an advocate for a child when she deemed it necessary.
She deemed it necessary for Nico and told Alma his story.
“Was he trafficked?” Alma asked.
“No, but I’m classifying him ‘vulnerable,’” Donna said. The classification would get the boy an advocate, and he needed one. “There’s a problem. I want to group-home him until we can find him a sponsor—”
“Is there one?”
“An aunt and uncle in New York.”
“So what’s the problem?” Alma asked. “You want to share some nachos?”
“Yeah. He has a gang tattoo,” Donna said. “Calle 18.”
“But he’s ten, did you say?” Alma asked. “Chicken or beef?”
“Right, but they still might try to ‘threat’ him,” Donna said. “Chicken.”
In unaccompanied-minor cases, a judge holds a bond hearing as quickly as possible and 90 percent of the time releases the child to a group home. But the problem with Nico was twofold, Donna knew. Thanks mostly to the upcoming presidential election, the country was virtually hysterical about Central American gangs like MS-13 and Calle 18, and “gangbangers” coming across the border. So judges like the one who would preside at Nico’s hearing were extremely reluctant to let anyone with any kind of gang affiliation out of custody.
The second issue was business.
Dollars and cents.
The Corrections Corporation of America wouldn’t make any money on Nico Ramírez if he got transferred, as he should be, into a group home. But if the judge deemed Nico a “threat” because of a gang tattoo, he would be sent to a “secure facility,” which would make sixty-three bucks a day on the boy.
CCA was a publicly traded company.
It had to show a profit to its stockholders. To do that, it had to fill beds and cells. CCA wasn’t in the business of releasing inmates, it was in the business of retaining them.
Nico was money on the hoof.
But, hell, people have to live, and the CCA was now the biggest employer around here. Dilley was once the “Watermelon Capital of the World,” but the watermelons rolled south across the border. Then “fracking” was going to be the savior, except that turned out to be a bust, too.
Prisoners were a more reliable source of money.
You never ran out of them.
But if Nico got deemed a threat and sent to a secure facility, it would be that much harder to get him reclassified and released to his aunt and uncle, assuming they passed the application process.
He could linger in the facility for months, if not years, before a final decision was made, and that decision would likely be to deport him, in effect to deliver him right back to the gang he had fled.
“We should get him a lawyer,” Alma said.
“How about Brenda?”
“She has files stacked up to her eyebrows.”
Brenda Solowicz had come down to Dilley for a couple of weeks at the height of the migration crisis in 2014 and stayed ever since, moving into a double-wide near the Best Western. There were a number of good lawyers working pro bono for the migrants, but in Donna’s opinion, Brenda was the best.
“So what’s one more?” Donna asked.
Alma sighed. “I’ll call her. When can I meet this kid?”
“First thing in the morning?”
“I’ll be there.”
“You’re the best,” Donna said.
“I’ll be even better when I get another drink in me,” Alma said.
Donna knew what she meant—as a child advocate, Alma had orphans, little girls who’d been gang-raped, turned out on the street, kids who’d been beaten or even tortured. And she worked with the knowledge that, in most cases, the kids would be in the country for a few weeks or months and then get sent right back to where they’d come from.
And it was only going to get worse.
Donna’s scotch was gone as if someone had helped her drink it.
She signaled for another one.
Nico drank his orange juice and finished his cereal as the lady named Alma talked to him.
“Listen to me very carefully now,” Alma said. “You can only stay in this country if you have what we call a ‘credible fear’ that you will be hurt or killed if you go back to Guatemala. A judge is going to ask you questions. I can’t tell you what to say or not to say, but understand that you can only stay here if you’re afraid you’ll be hurt if you go home.”
Nico nodded.
“Are you afraid to go home, Nico?” Donna asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?” Alma asked.
“They were going to make me join Calle 18.”
“Did they threaten you?” Alma asked. “Or hurt you?”
“They said they’d hurt my mother.” He didn’t mention that they’d burned a tattoo into him. He’d already forgotten that pain.
But the lady named Alma brought it up. “Donna said you have a tattoo. Can I see it?”
Nico pulled up his pant leg.
Alma winced. “How did that happen? Did you get that on your own?”
Nico shook his head. “Pulga did it.”
“Who’s that?”
“A marero.”
A young woman with a tangle of wild red hair strode into the room, sat down and set a briefcase on the table. “Sorry I’m late. Is this . . . Nico?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Brenda, Nico,” she said. “I’m going to represent you at your hearing.”
“Nico was just showing us his tattoo,” Donna said.
“Can I see, Nico?” Brenda asked. She looked at the tattoo then over at Alma and Donna like something was really bad. Then she said, “So, Nico, in a few minutes we’re going to walk over to another building and talk to a judge. He won’t be there, he’ll be on, like, a television, but he can see you and hear you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to talk a little and then he’s going to ask you some questions,” Brenda said. “You just tell the truth, all right?”
“All right.”
Brenda looked at Donna. “What are the odds on getting a cup of coffee?”
“The odds are good, the coffee is terrible.”
“I’ll take it.”
Brenda got her coffee and they walked over to the other building. Nico sat on a bench between Brenda and Alma and watched as mostly women got up and talked into a camera, answering questions to a judge on a television screen.
It scared Nico.
The women were talking in Spanish and trying to explain why they and their children should stay in the United States.
The judge wasn’t friendly.
Some of the women left crying.
He heard the judge call hi
s name. “Nico Ramírez?”
Brenda took him to a table in front and sat him down in a metal folding chair. “Brenda Solowicz, appearing pro bono for Nico Ramírez, an unaccompanied alien minor.”
The judge said, “I see that ORR requested this bond hearing?”
“That’s correct, Your Honor,” Brenda said. “ORR would like to place Mr. Ramírez in a group home until he can be released to a sponsor.”
“Has a sponsor been identified?”
“Mr. Ramírez has an aunt and uncle willing to take him,” Brenda said, “and they’ve started the application process.”
Nico watched the judge look down as if he was reading something. Then the judge looked up and said, “Ms. Solowicz, I’m sure you’re aware that there’s a problem here. Is the representative from ICE present?”
“Here, Your Honor,” Cody Kincaid said.
“Is ICE maintaining that Mr. Ramírez is a threat to public safety?”
“Mr. Ramírez has an apparent gang affiliation,” Kincaid said.
“As per . . .”
“As per a gang tattoo,” Kincaid said. “Of Calle 18.”
“Do you contest this, Ms. Solowicz?”
“No, Your Honor,” Brenda said. “But, Your Honor, he’s a ten-year-old boy—”
“Well, that’s a guess, isn’t it?” the judge said. “We have no documentation of his age. He could be thirteen, fourteen . . .”
“—fifty-three pounds soaking wet—”
“Is that a bad pun, Ms. Solowicz?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Does Mr. Ramírez speak English?” the judge asked. “I suppose that’s too much to hope for.”
“He doesn’t, Your Honor.”
“Do we have a translator?”
“Your Honor? I’m Alma Baez, Mr. Ramírez’s CA,” Alma said. “I can translate.”
“Nice to see you again, Ms. Baez,” the judge said. “Let me speak to Mr. Ramírez. Good morning, Nico. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Nico. I’m just going to ask you some questions, and you just answer them honestly. Are you a member of Calle 18?”