The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

by Sid Holt

  When Villanueva expressed to me his hopefulness about his asylum claim, I was dubious. He had already been deported, after all, and that decision is seldom rescinded. Later, with Villanueva in the room, I called his attorney in Kansas City and asked him myself what he thought was the likelihood that the Board of Immigration Appeals would both consider and grant the appeal. The attorney, Allan Bell, told me: “The direct answer to your question is the chances are slim. I did not say slim to none. The chances are slim. I’ll use the word ‘remote.’” I asked what other options there might be for Villanueva to return, and Bell asked to speak in a few days, with Bueno conferencing in.

  In fact, there were no options. An estimated 4.5 million American-born children have undocumented mothers or fathers, and every year tens of thousands of them lose at least one parent to deportation. In November 2014, President Obama took executive action to institute a series of reforms that would have granted temporary work permits to some parents of United States citizens and residents. Texas and twenty-five other states promptly filed a lawsuit arguing that the order was unconstitutional, and a federal judge in Brownsville—a major crossing point for migrants and asylum seekers on the Texas border—issued an injunction against the programs. For now, citizens can petition for their parents to obtain green cards only after turning twenty-one. For Haley, the older of Villanueva’s two biological children, that would be in seventeen years. Moreover, because Villanueva had been deported once before, he was subject to a pair of ten-year “time bars.” This required him to spend a minimum of two decades outside the country, as punishment, before he could become eligible to apply for permission to reenter.

  When Villanueva and Bueno next spoke to Bell, Bell asked that I not be present for the conversation. I obliged, but Villanueva recorded it. The tape is disturbing. Bell, now dim on the appeal, suggests that Villanueva seek something called humanitarian parole and offers to steer the process for $3,000. Although Villanueva and Bueno—leery of spending more money on a long shot—press him about the likelihood of success, Bell fails to give them a straight answer. (I later spoke with several other immigration attorneys, all of whom held that humanitarian parole—which typically provides a temporary visa valid for family emergencies—was not a viable option for Villanueva.) At one point, exasperated, Villanueva stops using his interpreter and tries to speak directly to Bell in English. “I want to make sure, because I don’t want to spend more money, more time,” he says. “Because I want to be with my family over there. You know? I want—”

  “Well, I know. The whole thing is terrible, I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  “Don’t tell me that, man,” Villanueva says, raising his voice. “I know it’s terrible. I’m in Honduras right now, far away from my family.”

  “Right, right, right.”

  “What I want to know is something clear, man. Do you think it’s possible we going to win this case, or are we going to lose it?”

  “I personally think it’s possible…” Bell trails off, seems to walk away, comes back and then says: “Now hold on, please, I have to explain something. Let me explain to everybody. I know none of you know this, and I’m sure none of you care—but the Kansas City Royals baseball team is playing the championship for the American League right now. It’s a big thing here. I think Suelen knows. Am I correct, Suelen?”

  After a pause, Bueno says, “Yes.”

  “It’s on national television,” Bell continues.

  “I don’t care about the Royals right now, man,” Villanueva says, again in English. “I’m worried about my case, about my family.”

  “I’m here,” Bell says. “I’m not going to the game because of you. I gave my tickets away so I could help you. It’s on world television right now. The Kansas City Royals against the Houston team. But anyway, I’ll help you, don’t worry.”

  After the call, I took Villanueva out to lunch. He ate and spoke little. The resilient cheerfulness that I had marveled at was gone, and for the first time, it occurred to me that the difference between Villanueva and his brother Oscar might not be constitutional, after all. Maybe the only difference was that Oscar had been stuck in Honduras, away from his family, longer than Villanueva had.

  I asked what he was thinking.

  Villanueva looked up, shook his head and said, “I’m thinking I have to make the trip again.”

  • • •

  The last time Villanueva made the trip, he very nearly died. In 2008, after his first deportation—he was arrested at a party where someone else was caught with cocaine—he spent a month riding the trains by himself through Mexico and then waded across the Rio Grande with a group of some twenty other migrants. In the middle of their second day of following a coyote through the Texas desert, a small plane buzzed overhead and the rev of four-wheelers approached. Everybody scattered. Villanueva found a narrow, dry arroyo and hid beneath a rocky outcrop. Five hours later, he climbed out and started walking. He walked through the night and in the morning fell asleep. Around noon, he was woken by the heat. He had no backpack or supplies. The coyote had told him to keep the sun on his left and the shadows on his right—when it got dark, Villanueva guessed which way was north. Five days after crossing the border, and his third day alone, half-starved and in dire need of water, he came upon a skeleton. It was small, probably an adolescent. The skull was clean bone. Several of its teeth had fallen out. Nearby lay a blue denim knapsack. Villanueva emptied it. Inside the knapsack was a bag of bread—black with mold—but also a can of beans and a can of peaches. Villanueva used a sharp stone to pierce a small gash in the can of peaches. He downed the sweet syrup and pried the can open and ate the sweet pieces. He chugged the beans.

  The food gave him enough strength to walk the rest of the afternoon and most of the night. Still, the next day Villanueva knew he might not make it. He prayed for a patrol to find him, for an airplane or a helicopter. He was staggering forward weakly when he glimpsed a far-off, incandescent spray. He saw a truck and a man squatting near its bumper. The man wore a head shield—he was welding something to the metal. Villanueva squinted. It felt like a hallucination: the vivid, molten shower splashing off the frame.

  “Help!” Villanueva screamed. “Help me!”

  The coyote had warned that ranchers in this part of Texas sometimes shot migrants if they caught them on their land. Villanueva didn’t care. He wanted food. He wanted water.

  “Help me, please!”

  The man continued welding. Eventually, it occurred to Villanueva that perhaps God didn’t want the man to hear. Perhaps God wanted Villanueva to keep going.

  Before night fell, he collapsed. He was lying in the hot dirt while the colors went out in the enormous sky, and he was thinking about the skeleton, its teeth, when he saw tracers streaming through the distant dark. He rose and stumbled toward them. They were the lights of tractor-trailers driving on a highway.

  A wire fence ran parallel to the shoulder. He found a culvert and crawled through it to the other side. For the rest of the night, he stayed to the chaparral; the next morning, he detected a faint rhythmic pounding and recognized it as a jackhammer. The sound energized him with fresh hope. If there was a jackhammer, there was construction. If there was construction, there were migrants. A little while later, he found a team of Mexicans ripping up a driveway.

  The Mexicans lived across the border but had special visas that permitted them to commute for work. They gave Villanueva some of the food they had brought for lunch. One let him borrow a cell phone. Villanueva called his cousin in Kansas, who offered to wire $500 to anyone willing to drive Villanueva to San Antonio. Most of the Mexicans were afraid to jeopardize their visas—but when the team quit for the day, a worker in his early thirties agreed to take him. He took Villanueva in his pickup to a Walmart, where he could retrieve the wired money. Villanueva’s cousin had sent an extra $100 for Villanueva, and after bidding farewell to the Mexican, he bought new socks and underwear, a T-shirt, and a pair of pants. He went into the b
athroom and washed his face and arms.

  When Villanueva walked out of the store, the Mexican was waiting for him. “Come on, let me buy you a hamburger,” he said.

  The man took him to a McDonald’s and ordered him a Big Mac. When they finished, he drove him to a motel and paid for two nights.

  “Rest,” he told Villanueva.

  • • •

  Since then, reaching the United States has become only more difficult. Last summer, while an exodus of Central Americans was overwhelming U.S. immigration facilities, the Mexican government began implementing a host of aggressive enforcement measures on its southern border. Many of the migrants leaving Central America were unaccompanied minors; while the United States is obligated to assess their eligibility for refugee protections, Mexico can simply bus them back. The crackdown has been a boon for ICE and the Border Patrol. So far this year, the number of Central American migrants apprehended in the United States has fallen by half compared with last year. The number of Central American migrants apprehended in Mexico is on track to increase by 70 percent.

  In Honduras, the buses from Mexico bearing adult deportees without children arrive at a processing center just across the Guatemalan border. The center occupies a scenic beachfront property seized in September from a drug trafficker. I spent several days there; nearly everyone I spoke to had been captured in the deep south of Mexico. A vast majority, traveling in passenger vans, had been intercepted at roadblocks manned by the federal police, army soldiers, and immigration agents.

  Juveniles and families with children are sent to a different center, off the highway on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula. Unaccompanied deportees as young as eight have shown up there. One day, I met a mother who had left Honduras with her sixteen-year-old daughter after gang members tried to rape her in her school. Another woman on the same bus had left with her four-year-old son after her brother was murdered. All four were standing on the shoulder of the highway, waiting for taxis to take them back to the neighborhoods they had fled.

  If Villanueva did go north, he would need to hire a coyote. You could not traverse Mexico without one now. These days, the reputable guides were charging $8,000, Honduras to Houston. They gave you three tries. If caught a third time, you lost your money.

  Even if Villanueva managed to get through Mexico, he would face the prospect of felony charges, in addition to deportation, if he was arrested on the United States border. Although entering the country without documentation has always been a crime, as recently as a decade ago public attorneys rarely prosecuted migrants in federal court. That has changed. Today, illegal entry and reentry are the most-prosecuted federal offenses in the United States, and the Justice Department receives more cases from ICE than it does from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives combined. Prison sentences for people with multiple illegal entries, like Villanueva, can last more than ten years.

  Say, though, Villanueva made it to Kansas City. He would still spend the rest of his life there in danger. Because of the twenty-year time bar from his deportations, he would be ineligible for legal status even after Haley grew old enough to petition for him.

  When I talked to Villanueva about this, he said it didn’t matter: As soon as the kids were out of the house, he and Bueno would happily return to Honduras. They would buy some land, build a house. The kids could visit them during school holidays or vacations from work.

  “I just need to raise them,” Villanueva said.

  • • •

  A week or so after he got back, Villanueva went with Oscar to visit their mother, Francesca, who lived a couple of hours away, in her hometown, Toyos. In the last fifteen years, Villanueva had seen Francesca only once, in 2008. Neither he nor Oscar harbored any grudges toward her for leaving them when they were young. Growing up, they sometimes went to Toyos to escape the 18th Street Gang. Back then, Francesca lived in a shanty that she built herself from bamboo and cardboard boxes; she made a living washing clothes in a nearby river. With the money her children had sent back from Missouri, Francesca had since moved into a small block house with electricity and running water. When we arrived, she was standing at a portable camping stove, making chicken soup.

  “My son!” Francesca gasped when she saw Villanueva.

  “You look shorter,” Villanueva laughed.

  While the soup boiled, Villanueva sat with Francesca at the table, swiping through the pictures on his phone: Jesse at a lake where they liked to fish for bass, Briana making snow angels, Jordi and Haley riding bumper cars at a family entertainment center. Francesca observed the pictures mutely. She had never been to America, seen snow, or heard of a family entertainment center.

  Oscar sat across the table, drawing designs on a white cloth Francesca had given him. Later, she would embroider the designs with colored thread. Oscar held up the cloth for her to see. Penciled vines and leaves curled around the edges, blooming into roses.

  “Is it good?” he asked.

  “It’s good,” Francesca said.

  When I seconded her opinion, Oscar went into the bedroom and came back with a stack of envelopes. They were from his time in detention. On both sides of each envelope Oscar had drawn intricate images in ballpoint pen. He still had the pen. It was short and made from flexible rubber so as to preclude stabbing.

  From one envelope, I withdrew a sheet of notebook paper with six verses handwritten in Spanish. It was a song Oscar had composed and sung over the phone to his son on his sixth birthday. The last verse read:

  Although you’re young

  some day you will understand

  why I wasn’t there

  on your special day.

  Before we left Francesca’s, I asked about a framed photograph on the wall. It showed Villanueva; Oscar; their brother, Henry; and their sister, Miriam, standing beside a skimpily ornamented Christmas tree, arms draped on one another. Their uncle had taken it in Kansas City in 2004, the only year all four siblings were in the United States together.

  • • •

  I recognized the same photograph a couple of weeks later, hanging in Villanueva’s father’s house. Although he lived a few short blocks away, Javier Villanueva had little to do with the rest of the family—he did not attend the church or share any of his relatives’ evangelical fervor—and Villanueva had seen him only once since arriving in Honduras.

  Javier’s home was one in a crowded row precariously situated on a rocky river bank. It was somewhat bigger than Marta’s plywood shack and marginally better appointed. There was a toilet rigged to plumbing rather than an outhouse—and a television. We found Javier watching a James Bond film dubbed in Spanish. He was skinny, in shorts and a tank top, with a mustache and the same curly black hair as Villanueva. He sat at a cluttered table, upon which numerous white mice scurried about. There were at least a dozen of them, and they appeared to be multiplying. I spotted a box with a hole in its lid through which opposing traffic issued and vanished.

  “You still have the mice,” Villanueva said with displeasure.

  “We want to sell them,” Javier explained.

  “So why don’t you?”

  “We tried. Nobody will buy them.”

  Javier’s girlfriend served up cups of Pepsi and arroz con leche. Three children, Villanueva’s half-siblings, entered the room. He greeted them cordially, impersonally. I asked their ages, and the woman revealed that today one of the boys had turned ten.

  “It’s his birthday?” asked Javier, surprised. He laughed. “And his dad didn’t even know!”

  Javier offered Villanueva a cigarette, and the two of them went outside. It was the first cigarette I’d seen Villanueva smoke. When they came back, they were talking construction. Javier was a tiler by trade. Villanueva told him about some of the carpentry projects he had done in Kansas City. He took out his phone and showed him pictures of the cabinetry he installed in the River Market units.

&
nbsp; Javier said nothing.

  “Where can I get used lumber to leave Aunt Marta?” Villanueva asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How much is half-inch plywood here?”

  “I don’t know, I need some too,” Javier said. “I need to build a bathroom, but I don’t have any money.” An expectant silence followed, and when it became clear that Villanueva was not going to fill it with an offer of assistance, Javier said, “I’ll buy cardboard instead.”

  Eventually, Villanueva stood to leave. He and Javier shook hands. Javier didn’t ask how long Villanueva would be in town or whether he would see him again.

  • • •

  Above all, what had caused Bueno to fall in love with Villanueva was his way with Jesse and Briana. From the moment they met at the soccer game, he seemed as enamored of her kids as he was of Bueno. It was Villanueva who, shortly after they started dating, realized that something wasn’t right with Jesse. The boy was three and hardly talked. Bueno had told herself that he was just a little late, that some kids developed slower, that it was no big deal. Villanueva insisted on consulting a doctor. Jesse, it turned out, was almost deaf. They had him fit for hearing aids and enrolled him in speech therapy. Jesse quickly turned into a different person. He became loquacious, socialized more with other kids, excelled in his classes.