The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

by Jose Orduna

  At dusk a meeting is called, and as I’m waiting on a folding chair around an extinguished campfire for the rest of the group to gather, I feel utterly overwhelmed by the desert. I’d expected to see something barren, reflective of death and dying, but everything is fecund, verdant—teeming. Just beside me, shooting up through the hard earth, are a few long stalks punctuated at their ends by bursts of purple and yellow flowers smaller than an infant’s pinky nail. Beyond the edge of the clearing the brush is so thick it seems impossible to walk through without a machete to clear a path. In the middle distance, perhaps a thousand yards from the edge of camp, rise two hills in black silhouette against an indigo, cerulean, and fuchsia sky. This is the first time I see the group together—a motley collection, mostly white women, two women of Mexican lineage, me, and three or four white men. One of the young white women facilitates the meeting. Mostly it’s about how the water drops are done and protocols for situations we may encounter. She finishes by saying it’ll be important for us to stay in larger groups this week because a PBS program that used NMD footage aired last night.

  Just over two months ago, on the morning of May 14, a camera placed by volunteers captured three agents in bulky green gear walking along a trail at the edge of a cliff. There are six plastic gallons of water visible. The middle agent, who appears to be a blonde white woman, kicks the gallons off the ledge one by one. Some explode when her boot meets them, their tops bursting off, and some survive the initial kick only to tear open on the jagged rocks below. The agent in front, also white, stops to watch and smile. The third agent’s face is obscured by his movements.

  The kind of cruelty captured on the video isn’t an anomaly. NMD conducted a study in which they found that denial of food and water is common, even when migrants are in custody for multiple days and even though most people taken into custody are already experiencing some form of dehydration. Ten percent of interviewees, including teens and children, reported physical abuse, and “of the 433 incidents in which emergency medical treatment or medications were needed, Border Patrol provided access to care in only 59 cases.” One interviewee, a woman who said she had lived in the United States for seventeen years with three children, said agents had made her strip naked. “Then they took her clothes and touched her breasts.” A man from Chiapas reported being kicked to the ground while being apprehended and having a cactus needle lodged in his eye. He was held in custody for forty-eight hours and did not receive medical attention before being repatriated. One female interviewee reported seeing a pregnant woman with a fever requesting to go to the hospital. The guards didn’t believe she was pregnant, and she suffered a miscarriage. A sixteen-year-old boy from Guatemala reported being struck in the back of the head with a flashlight and being held in custody for three days, during which time he only received a packet of cookies and one juice box each day. Several men recounted being hit with the butt of a gun during apprehension. One man reported that migra corridos, macabre songs about death and killing in the desert, were played twenty-four hours a day at extreme volumes, and that every two hours shouting guards would rush their cells and make them line up for inspection. The report concluded:

  It is clear that instances of mistreatment and abuse in Border Patrol custody are not aberrational. Rather, they reflect common practice for an agency that is part of the largest federal law enforcement body in the country. Many of them plainly meet the definition of torture under international law.

  That night it was impossible for me to fall asleep. I lay awake looking up at the camouflage fabric of the single-person tent I’d borrowed, the moon illuminating the lighter patches. I analyzed every snap of mesquite branch and crackling in the brush, having no firm walls to give me a false sense of security. Before coming to the desert I’d been traveling in California, staying with friends and friends of friends, basically anyone who would let me sleep on their couch or floor. In one of those coincidences that are so eerily fitting people usually imbue them with significance that isn’t there, I’d ended up staying in the home of a former Army Ranger sniper, who was currently interning at the Department of Homeland Security and hoping to become an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. I learned this information my first evening in his home when we were making small talk, and I tried not to react visibly when he told me. There was no significance to our meeting. He lived near the border, was ex-military, and needed a better job than the security gig he currently had. He set me up in his son’s bedroom, while the kid stayed with his mother. He let me borrow a tent and gave me an old MRE. On one of the walls of his son’s bedroom hung a green felt banner with the famous Hemingway quote: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”

  Hours pass in the liminal space between sleep and waking. My body goes numb and I glide just below the surface of sleep, but really I’m just waiting. At one point I think I hear sounds outside the tent, and these sounds merge into the dream I’m having before they become crisp enough to bring me back to waking consciousness. Then a few moments pass before I regain the ability to move. I open my eyes and lie perfectly still, overtaken by fear. It takes a few blinks before I remember where I am, why I’m staring up at patches of green-and-black camouflage fabric. I’m still afraid, but the knowledge that there might be someone injured or dying in the darkness overwhelms my fear. I slowly unzip a corner of the tent to peek toward the sounds. Another volunteer, whose tent is thirty feet from mine, is doing the same. It sounds like someone or something is moving in the brush just beyond the clearing of camp. We listen for several minutes, trying to get a sense of what’s making the noise. Earlier in the day, I’d noticed that sounds don’t carry in the desert. It’s as if there’s a moving wall between you and everything else, so you can only hear what’s in the immediate vicinity. Now it sounds like twigs and dry plant material shifting underfoot. Whenever there’s a loud snap it’s followed by several minutes of silence.

  Each moment of this waiting seems to move thickly, as if it’s clotted and obstructing its own passage. When I decide I need to get out of my tent, I don’t have faith that nothing will happen to me, but I make a calculation and determine that I’m going. I put on my headlamp but don’t turn it on and feel my way toward a long-term volunteer’s tent to wake her. She’s already listening to the sounds. The other volunteer who also heard the sounds joins us, and we decide we’ll light a campfire, sit by it, and call out periodically. We can’t approach the sound too closely because we might cause someone to flee, or a group to scatter. She says people won’t reveal themselves until they know we’re friendly. We stumble toward the edge of camp in darkness, looking out into a valley of black shapes edged in moonlight. Somos amigos, we’re friends. Por favor no tengan miedo, please don’t be afraid. Tenemos agua y comida, we have water and food. Tenemos gente que los puede curar si necesitan atención médica, we have people who can help if you need medical attention. No somos la patrulla fronteriza, we are not Border Patrol.

  We sit by the fire and call out every few minutes. Slowly other volunteers come and join us. One brings his guitar and plucks a few chords while we sit and wait in the small circle of flickering orange light. It’s surprising how cold it gets at night, and everything is covered in fat drops of dew. I watch one small droplet merge with another and then another on the slick metal surface of a bucket until it becomes so fat it falls to the sand. We call out in intervals for about an hour until we hear several vehicles barreling down the only road around camp toward a hill in the distance. A dozen beams of light converge on a hillside, and we hear vehicle doors open and slam, and then screaming and commands, some in English. Several smaller beams appear, cutting into the distance while trembling—flashlights in the hands of running Border Patrol agents—and we can actually hear the sound of bodies colliding. One of the beams tumbles down a hill. There are more screams, muffled, as though the screamer’s mouth is pressed against a body or the
ground, and then someone yells “Viva México, hijos de su puta madre!”

  Things go quiet for a while. People are loaded into vehicles and driven away, and then everything is dark again, no more lights on the hillside. Those who were captured may have been the people we heard in the brush, or the people in the brush may have been others separated from the rest of the group. One of the long-term volunteers tells us sometimes people get away, that they might be hiding in the area, and that if their guide was arrested, tomorrow they’ll be much more likely to walk without direction until they die. She goes to a storage container the size of a tool shed, full of food and water, unlocks it, and turns a sign welcoming anyone to take what they need. We put out a dozen gallons of water at the entrance to camp, and we place another dozen in a wash that runs behind the area where my tent is. The volunteer tells us that most of the individuals they’ve encountered in the last few years have been trying to get back to their families, families from whom they were torn after living in the United States together for years, sometimes decades. The overall number of people attempting to migrate has nearly come to a standstill because of the economic downturn, but the number of people dying in the desert has remained about the same. This means when people decide they need to do this, when they say good-bye to their friends and loved ones and set off, they’re much more likely to be saying their final good-byes. Since the recovery and identification of remains is far from a certainty for people who die in the desert, they may simply disappear. Their families stop hearing from them, and rather than ever reaching a point of finality, the trauma remains ambiguous, open, and ongoing.

  We park the truck on a ridge lined with ocotillos and a couple of spherical sotols, with their long alien-like flowers jutting seven feet into the air. A paloverde punctuates the distance with its chartreuse leaves and green trunk that performs photosynthesis. The three of us set out on foot, and we’re guided by a handheld GPS. I’d been given a laminated topographical map of the area to practice finding our location by physical landmark, but after a few minutes I completely lose orientation. I turn the map again and again, looking out toward endless hills, searching without success for something in the landscape to anchor me onto the lines of the map. I put it in my pocket. A few minutes later we’re hiking in silence on the bed of a broad wash with cragged walls like a reef. I hadn’t anticipated long periods of silence or the strange acoustic quality in the air that makes this endless space sound and feel at times like being in a diving bell. I’d assumed the extremity of the conditions would keep my attention squarely in the work my body was exerting, but as rocks shifted under my feet, I think about the people out here crossing and about my own relation to this place. Simply being out here isn’t dangerous, at least not inherently so. The blue passport in my pocket means the likelihood of me dying out here is close to zero. It means what I’m doing is closer to a workout or a leisure activity than a struggle to remain alive. I think about how, in the past, I’ve rejected claims put upon me by other Mexicans, wanting to assert myself as an individual rather than a member of a group, but for some time now those feelings have shifted, and I’ve felt a solidarity with others who are under attack.

  After five minutes of walking, the woman in front pitches to the right, stumbles, and finally lands hard on the ground, smashing one of the gallons of water she’d been carrying. Her ankle immediately swells, so we collectively decide we’ll help her back to the truck, and then the other volunteer and I will make the drop. After we drop her off and head back out, though, we get lost, despite having the GPS telling us where to go. It’s noon, and the sun is directly overhead. My skin begins to throb, and it becomes imperative that I cover my head. I soak a bandana with some of my drinking water and drape it so that it covers the top of my head and nape. It’s dry in less than five minutes. It takes us a little under an hour to move forward one mile to the drop, and as we’re approaching I spot a flash of movement to the left. When I turn I think I see two figures bound away and disappear between mesquite trees, but I don’t at all know what I’ve seen. My impression is that they were big, about the size of a person or large animal, and that there were two, but even that’s unclear. I begin calling out, saying we have water and food, and that we’re from the church, we’re not BP, we’re friends. We continue walking and make the drop, and I continue calling out for a long time as we make our way back toward the vehicle, but there’s no response.

  In this border region, the horizon between natural violence and state violence has been collapsed. The arid climate, the flash floods, the diamondbacks, the mountain impasses, the distance, and the heat of the sun have all been weaponized. People’s apathy, disregard, and xenophobia have been weaponized. The situation in which death occurs has been manufactured as such. This is murder without a murderer, administered through bureaucracy and policy planning, murder with the most refined form of impunity, where not only is no one held responsible for the killing of an individual, but no one can be held responsible for the individuals who succumb to the journey. The responsibility of having set off into the desert is put solely on the migrants themselves.

  A few days later the reality of being in a militarized zone becomes impossible to ignore. Another humanitarian aid group calls to let us know that after a water drop they found a sign on one of their vehicles saying they were being watched. It was signed “Arizona Border Recon,” the name of a vigilante group that patrols the border and is listed as a “nativist extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. I knew before coming out here that encountering militia or armed vigilante groups was a possibility, especially considering many groups operate in the area with the tacit consent of some local authorities. They’re regularly allowed to make citizen’s arrests, go on armed patrols wearing colors, gear, and identifying patches with logos and names that resemble law enforcement uniforms, and hold people under false pretenses until they can be handed over to Border Patrol. When we take to the trails I try to focus on how it’s statistically unlikely for someone in Arizona to be killed or maimed by a member of one of these groups, but I can’t help feeling that my odds are different as a brown person on the border. A little over two months before I arrived in the desert, I’d read about how Jason Todd Ready, a neo-Nazi, former candidate for state legislature, and founder of two armed border vigilante groups (Minutemen Civil Defense Corps and the US Border Guard), entered the home he shared with his girlfriend, Lisa Mederos, and fatally shot her, her twenty-three-year-old daughter Amber, Amber’s fiancée Jim, and Lisa’s fifteen-month-old daughter Lilly, before killing himself. Authorities retrieved a small arsenal, including six grenades from the home. At the time of his death, Ready was being investigated by the FBI for domestic terrorism charges in connection with migrants who had been found shot dead near the border in southern Arizona.

  A year and a half before that, one of Ready’s associates, Jeffrey Harbin, was arrested on a public highway in Arizona while in possession of an explosive device that contained ball bearings that upon detonation would tear into more human flesh, break more bones, and destroy more body parts than an explosion alone could. In May 2009, Shawna Forde, the founder of a group called Minutemen American Defense, planned and executed a home invasion in Arivaca with two accomplices. The target was Raul Flores, a man Forde and her associates believed was a drug smuggler with large amounts of drugs and money in his home. Their plan was to impersonate Border Patrol agents and rob smugglers in order to fund their operations on the border. When they entered the Flores home, they found no money or drugs but shot and killed Raul and his nine-year-old daughter anyway.

  It would be easy to dismiss these events as outliers and the individuals who carried them out as extremist lunatics, but many enjoyed camaraderie and privileged positions at speaking events attended by state officials and members of local governments. Ready even ran for a Mesa City Council seat in 2006 and was called a “true patriot” by former Arizona state senator Russell Pearce. Mainstream elected officials like Pearce, Jan Brew
er (governor of Arizona from 2009 to 2015), and Joe Arpaio (sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County) made careers out of appealing to white supremacists, nativists, hate groups, and their sympathizers, counting them among their voters and donors. They accrued political capital from remaining ambiguous about people like Ready, their racist rhetoric, and the climate of violent xenophobia these individuals have fomented. Their policy initiatives have often been supported by those who identify as white supremacists and, more broadly, by a sizable population of Arizonans who don’t. This kind of crossover between hate groups and the general voters of Arizona is disturbing, but even more disturbing is that liberal policy makers’ calls for a national security paradigm are not so different from a white supremacist wish list. The grim reality is that the manipulation of migrant flows into the deadliest parts of the Sonoran Desert has been a bipartisan affair. This national policy, and how we choose to think of and delineate our political community, has killed and continues to kill more people than Ready, Forde, or any other armed terrorist ever could.

  Five of us are in a pickup truck when suddenly there’s a violent gust of wind and a rushing staccato thuk thuk thuk thuk sound rushing toward us. An all-black helicopter with blacked-out windows and no markings rips across the landscape fifty feet in front of the truck. It’s flying so low it’s framed in the windshield. The driver slams on the brakes, and the helicopter tips forward, kicking up a huge cloud of dust. When it dissipates, the helicopter is gone. After the thuk thuk thuk thuk is in the distance and then gone completely, the driver says that BP helicopters are green and white, and that we may have activated one of the seismic sensors buried in undisclosed locations throughout the desert. “Then why the fuck was this one black?” asks someone in the backseat. The truck has started rolling again, and before anyone has time to posit a theory about the color of the chopper, a BP SUV pops over a hill and cuts down fast in front of our truck, blocking our path and almost causing a head-on collision. Several other SUVs and three men on ATVs wearing dark helmets, clad in body armor, and carrying assault rifles surround us. All of them scream commands at the same time so we can’t understand any of their words. After a few tense moments, when they’ve calmed down a bit and verified all of our identities and immigration statuses, they still remain openly hostile, and a few of the agents duck and peer into the backseat of the car, locking onto my brown face. It all happens too fast for me to become scared in the moment, but later, after we’re back at camp, I wonder how much danger we were actually in. A study conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum examined cases when BP officers discharged their firearms. One scenario they examined was agents shooting into vehicles, and they found that “most reviewed cases involved non-violent suspects who posed no threat other than a moving vehicle.” The study found that, in many cases, agents “intentionally put themselves into the exit path of the vehicle, thereby exposing themselves to additional risk and creating justification for the use of deadly force.” According to the report, “The cases suggest that some of the shots at suspect vehicles are taken out of frustration.” It concludes, “As with vehicle shootings, some cases suggest that frustration is a factor motivating agents to shoot.”