The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

by Sid Holt

  Over the last five years, the United States has deported more than half a million Hondurans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans, many of whom, like Villanueva, have had to leave their children behind. Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, says it exercises discretion to target lawbreakers for removal, a majority of Central American deportees have no criminal record. Among those who do, about half are guilty of either a traffic violation or an immigration-related crime—entering the country illegally, for instance. At Ramón Villeda Morales, most arrivals I met were captured while crossing the border. This meant they had recently endured two distinct but often, in their telling, equally arduous ordeals: their voyage through Mexico (sleeping in shelters; trekking through deserts; evading bandits, kidnappers and rapists) and ICE detention.

  As soon as they enter the processing center, the deportees are given coffee and baleadas, a Honduran dish of tortillas and beans. The staff members call them “ma’am” and “sir,” make jokes, say “please” and “thank you.” It is as if the staff is trying to convince the deportees that they are not the people they’ve been treated as for the past several days or weeks or months. The deportees undergo brief interviews with interlocutors who are all volunteers. One day, I sat at a table beside Dennis Abraham, a thirty-year-old singer-carpenter with wide-open eyes and shoulder-length hair tied up in a samurai bun. Abraham wore a laminated ID card around his neck that featured his photo beneath a logo for the Geo Group, the international corporation that operates a facility in Texas where he himself was detained just two months ago. When new arrivals sat down across from him, Abraham showed them the ID and said, “I’m like you.”

  Abraham first left for the United States when he was sixteen, with his mother, Maria. For two months, they clung together to the tops of northbound freight trains. Then, while fording a deep section of the Rio Grande, they were separated by a swift current. Maria made it to the other side; Abraham, a weak swimmer, was carried downstream. Uncertain what to do, he turned himself in to the Mexican authorities. Back in Honduras, Abraham had no way to get in touch with Maria and no one to take care of him. He decided to try to find her. He was apprehended and deported from Mexico seven times attempting to make the trip. “The eighth time, they did this to me,” Abraham said, holding out his forearms and showing me a latticework of scar tissue. While on the trains, he had fallen into the hands of the Zetas, one of the largest drug cartels in Mexico and among its most prolific practitioners of abduction and extortion. Disinclined to believe that Abraham had no one to contact for a ransom, his captors tied him up in a dark room, beat him, urinated on him, cut him with machetes, threatened to castrate him, and forced him to endure mock executions. In the end, they let him work off his debt, and for eight months, Abraham slept in the streets of their town, cleaning their cars.

  This all happened almost a decade ago; since then, Abraham had reached the United States, found his mother, married an American, had two children, and been deported.

  “I have no choice,” he said, scrolling through pictures of his children on his phone. “I have to take the trains again.”

  I watched Abraham interview half a dozen deportees. What he said was true: They were like him. To a middle-aged farmer who had three daughters in the United States and was on his way to his mother’s town, Abraham said, “Is there someone where you’re going who might hurt you?”

  “Yes,” replied the farmer, removing his hat and rubbing his face with his hands. “But I have to risk it. I have nowhere else to go.”

  “So you’re afraid to go there?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re going there?”

  “Of course.”

  The farmer, like everyone else from the plane, looked both exhausted and disoriented. In general, I had the sense that the deportees were not entirely convinced by the staff’s overt exhibitions of decency. A wariness lingered; the transition was too abrupt. Of course, there was an additional dissonance at play: deep relief at having been liberated from ICE custody and, simultaneously, deep dismay at being back in Honduras.

  Later that day, in a pulpería across the road from the processing center, I met a man named Bayron Cardona, who was a nervous wreck. He told me that he and his wife, Belky, had managed to cross the Rio Grande but were so intimidated by the Border Patrol presence in Texas that they decided to reverse course and were arrested while trying to get back to Mexico. Cardona and Belky were recent college graduates, still in their twenties, and last year they opened a computer-repair shop in a building owned by Belky’s father. Their neighborhood was entirely under the control of the MS-13; members of the gang soon confronted Cardona, demanding an impuesto de guerra, or war tax. Impuestos de guerra are a common source of revenue for gangs throughout Honduras, and in Cardona and Belky’s area, every business paid. The amount the gang wanted far exceeded what Cardona could afford. When he failed to produce the money, the MS-13 threatened to kill him. Cardona and Belky went to the United States Embassy, applied for visas and were denied. Then they alerted the police—“our big error,” Cardona told me. That same day, after the couple closed their shop, someone slid a piece of paper under the metal shutter, a printed letter that read in part: “We know everything you do. We can kill you in your house or when you’re walking out of church. Call home to see what happens.” Cardona and Belky called Belky’s father, with whom they were living. Minutes earlier, he told them, two gunmen on motorcycles had driven by, shooting up the front porch with handguns.

  A few weeks later, the couple climbed out of a small boat onto the banks of Texas. It was nighttime. There were bushes and then a road and then a fence and then a highway. Their coyote told them there was a gap in the fence that they should run for. Cardona and Belky hid in the bushes. White and green SUVs drove up and down the road; officers patrolled on foot with dogs. Others rode on horseback. A helicopter appeared and hovered low. The rotor wash from its roaring blades flattened the tall grass and exposed the migrants hiding there.

  Through the rest of the night and all the next day, Cardona and Belky watched one migrant after another make a dash, get caught. Sometimes, as the migrants ran, the dogs latched onto their pant legs. They were sleep-deprived and dehydrated. Belky told Cardona she wanted to go back. They had Mexican visas; they would stay there or find another country to flee to. Cardona called the coyote and asked him to send a boat. He and Belky were down by the water, waiting to be collected, when a skiff motored up and flashed a spotlight on them. From the bank, an officer on horseback galloped over and told them not to move.

  At a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Cardona and Belky were separated. Cardona was put in a cell with other men that was shockingly cold—a hielera, or icebox, as migrants call them. The men positioned a trash can under the ceiling vent to capture the frigid air; that way, huddled together, they could lie on the concrete floor. After two days, Cardona was transferred to a detention center, where he told an ICE official that he and his wife wanted to request asylum. The ICE official asked for Belky’s name. The next day, she was deported. The next week, so was Cardona. When I met him at the airport in San Pedro Sula, he had not seen Belky since their apprehension.

  A few days later, I visited the couple at Belky’s father’s house. I met Cardona at a nearby restaurant so he could guide my driver through his neighborhood. He was anxious and fidgety. His father-in-law had paid half the war tax that they owed the MS-13 and told the gang that he and Belky were in America; Cardona didn’t know what would happen when the gang discovered they were back. He had changed the way he wore his hair, grown a beard and replaced his contacts with prescription glasses. We passed the building where his business used to be—it was now a barber shop. As we turned onto Cardona’s street, an MS-13 lookout, a teenager in a tank top, eyeballed us as we drove by. We rolled the windows down, a rule throughout Honduras when entering gang territory.

  Climbing the front steps of his house, Cardona pointed out the divots in the walls where the bullets from the
drive-by had struck. He went inside and returned with the death-threat letter that was slid into his shop. His father-in-law had found a nine-millimeter shell, he told me, and probably still had it. I said that was fine, I didn’t need to see the shell. Belky came out, and we sat in the driveway between two huge barking dogs tethered to short chains. One had a painful-looking knob protruding from its brow. Someone had hit it with a bat or a pipe, Cardona explained, while stealing their propane tanks.

  Belky cried several times as she spoke. In McAllen, she told me, she was also put in a hielera. She was in it for three days, with many other women and young children, including a newborn and her mother, who had undergone a cesarean. The detainees were issued thin Mylar blankets for warmth; they all slept on the floor. There were no showers, and the only toilet had a camera aimed at it. Every twenty-four hours, each detainee was given two bologna sandwiches.

  Belky said that when she told the guards she wished to claim asylum, they advised her that she did not have that right. “They make you sign all these documents in English,” she said, “and we just don’t know what we’re signing.”

  Neither Cardona nor Belky believed that they could safely remain in Honduras. But Belky, who had not left the house since she had arrived more than a week ago, was against returning to America. For her, more than anything, the whole experience had been profoundly humiliating. Before we said goodbye, she described being called into a room in McAllen where officers studied a bank of monitors showing video feed from cameras that surveilled a section of the border. “They laugh at us,” she told me, her face compressed with resentment. “One officer was celebrating all the people they’d caught. They watch the people crossing—and they laugh at us.”

  I went back to visit Cardona and Belky a couple of weeks later. As we drove though their neighborhood, we passed a group of young men surrounding someone in a crouch. The men were knocking on the top of his head with their knuckles—not violently, but with odd restraint. This was the gang’s way, I later learned, of issuing one of their own a symbolic reprimand, a warning.

  Belky told me that she still had not set foot outside the house.

  • • •

  When I spotted him at the airport, Villanueva was in the pulpería, sitting at a wooden table with a Pepsi. As he raised the bottle, I noticed a tattoo across his hand—the name “Haley.” He wore a blue Kansas City Royals hat. At his feet was a gym bag.

  After we spoke for a bit, I asked whether anyone was coming to get him.

  Villanueva laughed self-consciously. “I don’t think so,” he admitted. He had loose curls, a sparse beard and a slight overbite that seemed to facilitate his tendency to mumble. I offered him a ride, and he accepted.

  A striking characteristic of San Pedro Sula is the intimate proximity of ostentatious wealth and extreme poverty—a multistory mall with valet parking on one side of a river, squalid slums and jungle on the other. On our way to the place where Villanueva’s family lived, we passed block after block of ornate adobe mansions ensconced behind tall walls. Atop the walls was razor wire; atop the wire, electric fencing. Men with rifles manned the gates.

  “Look at that,” Villanueva kept saying as we drove. He was deported once before, in 2008, and spent two weeks in San Pedro Sula before heading back to Kansas City; still, a lot had changed since then. We pulled onto a rocky side street that turned off the pavement into an undeveloped area, lushly overgrown. Here and there, shanties had been patched together using salvaged tin. Villanueva had arranged to stay with his aunt Marta in a one-room plywood structure that stood in an open field amid boulders, thick weeds, and mango trees. By the time he stepped out from the car, he was smiling again.

  “Man,” he said in English, looking around, shouldering his bag. “It’s weird to be here, you know?”

  I stopped by a few days later and found Villanueva sitting on a boulder, talking on a cell phone to his younger son. “No, my love, you can’t come,” he was saying. “Behave, OK? Don’t fight with your sisters, understand?” When he hung up, Villanueva told me, “I don’t know how to explain it to them.”

  “They don’t know?”

  He shook his head. “They think I’m on a job.”

  A sheet obstructing the entrance to Marta’s shack was pulled back, and a young man with gelled hair and a tight T-shirt stepped out. It was Villanueva’s younger brother, Oscar. After being arrested on a DUI charge, he had recently been deported as well. Back in Colorado, Oscar told me, he had a wife, a daughter, and a son. All of them were citizens.

  While Villanueva had been surprisingly good-humored at the airport and remained so that day (sort of grinning at his situation even as he lamented it), Oscar was morose. He spoke so softly that I had to lean in to hear, and when I asked how his kids were holding up without him, he hung his head, sighed, “Those kids,” and wept.

  Altogether, five people were living in Marta’s shack. Tacked-up bedding divided the sleeping area from the kitchen area. At night, Oscar and Villanueva laid a mattress on the floor. They rarely left the property. Neither had acclimated to the dangers of the city of their youth; the daily slaughter to which most of San Pedro Sula’s residents were by now inured still distressed the brothers as it might a typical American. One morning when I invited them to breakfast, we encountered a taped-off crime scene a few blocks from their house. A body was sprawled facedown on the sidewalk, and there was another in the street. You could see solid pieces in the blood around their heads. Forensic experts in white coats placed numbered markers near the bullet casings—forty-seven of them, so far. The few people who had gathered looked mostly unimpressed. Many passers-by didn’t bother stopping.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that,” Villanueva said.

  “Welcome to Honduras,” Oscar said.

  When I took them home several hours later, we passed the scene again. The crowd had dispersed, and the forensic experts were gone. The bodies, though, remained.

  Nobody had covered them. Traffic carried on.

  • • •

  The contrast between the reality of San Pedro Sula and the insular world that Villanueva’s family had created on their little side street struck me every time I visited. More than fifteen relatives occupied three different houses there. They often gathered in the evenings on an old musty couch and a few metal benches outside Marta’s shack. A yellow school bus belonging to their church sat nearby—“God Bless Honduras” and “Never Give Up” colorfully decaled across the windshields. Children pushed one another around in mop buckets and on dollies over a square of cracked foundation in the grass. Usually, Villanueva’s grandmother would be cooking baleadas or pots of rice and beans over a wood fire in an outdoor grill fashioned from a chunk of concrete. Dogs and kittens begged for scraps. Everyone was always laughing.

  One night while chatting with Villanueva and Oscar, I heard a violinist playing a classical concerto I didn’t know—I don’t know any classical concertos—but whose beauty was astonishing. Villanueva led me past the bus and through the trees to a small house set back from the road. There, his twenty-two-year-old cousin stood on a dilapidated porch beneath a naked bulb, immersed in her performance. As she played—the composer, she told me later, was Mozart—her two younger sisters emerged from the house with their own violins.

  One of them also played the keyboard in the family church’s band. Some nights later, I went with Villanueva to a service. When it was over, another cousin took the worshipers home in the school bus. It was so crowded that many had to stand. As we left behind the heavily fortified entrances to private communities and continued into the ramshackle barrios where the congregation lived, there was a raucous, joyful energy. Each person who got off kissed or hugged every other passenger onboard. So incongruous, all that good will. It took a couple hours to circumnavigate the city, and during that time we passed two taped-off crime scenes, as well as an assault: about a dozen teenagers kicking someone on the sidewalk curled into a squirming ball.

  Bes
ides attending church, Villanueva had little else to do. Each day’s main event was his afternoon phone call to Bueno and the kids. Neither he nor Bueno had told them yet that he’d been deported. Briana, who turned ten the day before Villanueva was flown back to Honduras, and Jesse, who was eight, were coping with his absence better than their younger siblings. Haley, who was four and whose name was tattooed across the back of Villanueva’s hand, had always been the most attached to Villanueva. She used to wait up for him with Bueno whenever he worked late. Now Haley refused to go to sleep, determined to be awake if he returned. Villanueva’s three-year-old son, Jordi, had grown uncharacteristically introverted and lethargic, sleeping most of the day and rarely speaking.

  Bueno, who had remained home with the children after she and Villanueva moved in together, had gone back to work, cleaning an office building seven nights a week while her mother babysat. She returned to the apartment around two a.m., woke at seven to get the kids ready for school, picked up Haley at noon, made lunch for her and Jordi, met Briana and Jesse at the bus stop at four-thirty, cooked supper at six, and left for work again when her mother arrived at eight.

  Villanueva was desperate to find out whether there was any possibility of reuniting with them legally. His first few days in Honduras, he seemed optimistic. The immigration attorney Bueno hired to help him with his asylum claim had filed a petition with the Board of Immigration Appeals. The petition was still pending, and after consulting with the attorney, Bueno believed that their odds were good. The appeals process was going to cost them an additional $5,000, on top of the $4,750 Bueno had already paid and the $8,000 she still owed in monthly installments; if there was a decent chance, though, they would find the money.

  That meant borrowing. The legal fees, along with the $1,000 phone bill Villanueva had racked up during his two months in the county jail ($1 per minute talking to Bueno and the children), had depleted all their savings. To pay the attorney, Bueno had taken out a series of loans from an informal moneylender, who charged 5 percent interest every week. Villanueva’s employer, meanwhile, had stopped answering his phone. Earlier in the year, Villanueva’s team had built out the kitchens of more than a hundred new apartment units in Kansas City’s River Market neighborhood; the contractor still owed Villanueva $28,000 for the job. Before he was arrested, Villanueva had planned to use the payment to buy a neglected house at auction, fix it up in secret, take Bueno there when it was ready, and propose. Now he knew he’d never see the money. Although he filed taxes every year and reported to the IRS all the wages that he paid his team (the IRS doesn’t investigate the citizenship of taxpayers), there was no recourse to collect the debt.