AMERICAN VALUES 

On June 9, 2009, just after 2 a.m., Laura S. left the restaurant where she waitressed, in Pharr, Texas, and drove off in her white Chevy. She was in an unusually hopeful mood. Her twenty-third birthday was nine days away, and she and her nineteen-year-old cousin, Elizabeth, had been discussing party plans at the restaurant. They’d decided to have coolers of beer, a professional d.j., and dancing after Laura put her three sons to bed. Now they were heading home, and giving two of Laura’s friends a ride, with a quick detour for hamburgers. Elizabeth said that, as they neared the highway, a cop flashed his lights at them. The officer, Nazario Solis III, claimed that Laura had been driving between lanes and asked to see her license and proof of insurance.

 

Laura had neither. She’d lived in the United States undocumented her whole adult life.

“Do you have your residence card?” Solis asked.

 

“No,” Laura said, glancing anxiously at her cousin and her friends. Solis questioned them, too. Only Elizabeth had a visa, which she fished out of her purse. Solis directed the others to get out of the car. “I’m calling Border Patrol,” he said—an unusual move, at the time, for a small-town cop in South Texas.

 

Laura panicked. At five feet two inches and barely a hundred pounds, she looked younger than her age. She often wore tube tops and short shorts, and styled her hair in a girlish bob. Her affect was “attached to childhood,” her older brother told me; she collected porcelain dolls, and loved Japanese anime and Saturday-morning cartoons. Laura’s friends saw her trembling. Like her, they had kids who were U.S. citizens and steady jobs they didn’t want to lose, but they knew that Laura’s fear was distinct. She had an ex-husband across the border, in Reynosa, Mexico, who had promised to kill her if she returned.

 

“I can’t be sent back to Mexico,” Laura told Solis, beginning to cry. “I have a protection order against my ex—please, just let me call my mom and she’ll bring you the paperwork.”

 

Laura’s two-year-old had an operation scheduled for later that week, to remove an abscess in his neck, and Laura also told Solis about that. “I need to be here,” she begged, in Spanish. In English, Elizabeth detailed the threats from Laura’s ex, Sergio. “You can’t do this,” Elizabeth said. “He’ll kill her.”

 

“Sorry,” Solis replied, shrugging. “I already called.” (Solis could not be reached for comment. He was later sent to prison for unrelated convictions, including bribery, extortion, and drug conspiracy.)

 

Laura had started dating Sergio when she was eighteen, and he soon became physically abusive. After a particularly horrific night the previous spring, when Sergio assaulted her, Laura had finally called the police, and coöperated with them to secure his arrest. He was later deported. In the year since then, Laura had tried to create a normal childhood for her sons. She shared a small trailer with Elizabeth and the boys near the Sharyland Plantation, a gated community of houses with lima-bean-shaped swimming pools and Roman-pillared porches which advertised its “delicate scent of hibiscus and bougainvillea flowers.”

 

Sometimes she’d dress the boys in cowboy outfits, and use the neighbors’ sheep and horses as their personal petting zoo. At night, she’d sneak into the citrus groves and pick oranges for breakfast, humming her favorite song, “Single Mom”: “A single mother who does not worry, who will always fight to be a mom. Tell him she can be a mother without him.” Still, Sergio haunted her. In Mexico, he’d reportedly joined a local drug cartel. He often texted Laura death threats.

 

Laura and her friends waited by the roadside until a U.S. Border Patrol agent named Ramiro Garza arrived and ordered the three of them into his vehicle. Laura pleaded with Garza as he drove them to a nearby processing center, where Laura’s friends saw her, under pressure, sign paperwork for a “voluntary return.” Three hours later—after holding off until dawn “for safety reasons,” Garza later explained, “since there were females involved”—he drove them to the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge, which crosses the Rio Grande and leads to Reynosa, a city so violent that the U.S. State Department forbids its employees there from venturing out after midnight.

 

As the sun rose, Laura stepped onto the bridge and into a much larger story, one that has launched a major legal battle over the U.S. government’s duty to protect prospective deportees who plead for their lives. The lawsuit, and others like it, has implications for the treatment of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have found refuge in the United States, and for whom deportation can be tantamount to death. Some, like Laura, are survivors of domestic violence seeking safety in the U.S. Others, like Elizabeth, are Dreamers, undocumented youths who were granted relief from deportation under President Obama, only to have their status imperilled by his successor. Still others are asylum seekers from Central America, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere, who have fled gangs, climate crises, and armed conflicts, and then been misinformed or turned away by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, some of whom have been emboldened under President Trump.

 

In the final moments before Laura crossed the bridge, she turned to Agent Garza. “When I am found dead,” she told him, “it will be on your conscience.”

 

When Donald Trump announced his bid for the Presidency, he made anxieties about whiteness under siege a signature part of his platform. On the campaign trail, he promised to “deport all criminal aliens and save American lives.” After his Inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security created an office for the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, called voice—Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. The office is compiling an online database to track “illegal alien perpetrators of crime.” (Data show that immigrants actually commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.) There is, however, no White House initiative to track a more sprawling set of legal violations involving immigrants—violations for which the U.S. government is largely responsible.

 

In the past decade, a growing number of immigrants fearing for their safety have come to the U.S., only to be sent back to their home countries—with the help of border agents, immigration judges, politicians, and U.S. voters—to violent deaths. Even as border apprehensions have dropped, the number of migrants coming to the U.S. because their lives are in danger has soared. According to the United Nations, since 2008 there has been a fivefold increase in asylum seekers just from Central America’s Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—where organized gangs are dominant. In 2014, according to the U.N., Honduras had the world’s highest murder rate; El Salvador and Guatemala were close behind.

 

Politicians often invoke the prospect of death by deportation in debates about the fate of these immigrants and others with precarious status, like the Dreamers. In February, 2016, in a speech criticizing the lack of legal representation for Central American children seeking refuge, Harry Reid, at that time the Senate Minority Leader, warned Congress, “Deportation means death for some of these people.” That summer, Senator Edward J. Markey, of Massachusetts, told the press, “We should not be sending families back to situations where they can be killed.” He added, “That’s just un-American.”

 

These conversations have been largely theoretical, devoid of names and faces. No U.S. government body monitors the fate of deportees, and immigrant-aid groups typically lack the resources to document what happens to those who have been sent back. Fear of retribution keeps most grieving families from speaking publicly. In early 2016, as the director of the Global Migration Project, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, I set out, with a dozen graduate students, to create a record of people who had been deported to their deaths or to other harms—a sort of shadow database of the one that the Trump Administration later compiled to track the crimes of “alien offenders.” We contacted more than two hundred local legal-aid organizations, domestic-violence shelters, and immigrants’-rights groups nationwide, as well as migrant shelters, humanitarian operations, law offices, and mortuaries across Central America. We spoke to families of the deceased. And we gathered the stories of immigrants who had endured other harms—including kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault—as a result of deportations under Obama and Trump.

 

As the database grew to include more than sixty cases, patterns emerged. Often, immigrants or their families had warned U.S. officials that they were in danger if sent back. Ana Lopez, the mother of a twenty-year-old gay asylum seeker named Nelson Avila-Lopez, wrote a letter to the U.S. government during Christmas week in 2011, two months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accidentally deported him to Honduras. Nelson had fled the country at seventeen, after receiving gang threats. He’d entered the U.S. unauthorized and been ordered removed, but an immigration judge then granted him an emergency stay of his deportation so that he could reopen his case for asylum.

 

An ice agent told his family’s legal team that Nelson was deported because “someone screwed up,” and ice alleges that the proper office had not been notified of the judge’s stay.

 

“His life is in danger,” Ana Lopez wrote, begging U.S. authorities to reverse her son’s deportation. Her efforts proved fruitless. Two months later, Nelson died in a prison fire, along with more than three hundred and fifty other inmates. His lawyer told me that Nelson had been detained by the Honduran government without charges, in an anti-gang initiative. Survivors of the fire alleged that it was set intentionally, perhaps as an act of gang retaliation, and that the guards had done little to help the men as they screamed and burned to death in their cells.

 

We discovered, too, how minor missteps—a traffic violation or a workplace dispute—can turn lethal for unauthorized immigrants. At eighteen, Juan Carlos Coronilla-Guerrero was deported from Texas to Mexico. He later returned and settled in Buda, Texas, with his wife. He worked as a carpenter and raised three kids. In January, 2017, someone in his neighborhood reported him for a domestic dispute; police found him in possession of a quarter of a gram of marijuana.

In March, Coronilla went to the Travis County courthouse for what, before Trump’s election, would likely have been a quick misdemeanor hearing. Travis was a “sanctuary jurisdiction,” meaning that the sheriff there declined to honor most federal detention requests for undocumented individuals without a warrant or an allegation of a serious crime. But Trump, within days of his Inauguration, had ordered a crackdown on sanctuary jurisdictions, and ice agents in Travis County had suddenly appeared in the courthouse.

 

After Coronilla left his proceeding, his lawyer noticed two men who, he recalled, were “dressed like hunters.” The men followed Coronilla into an elevator, then identified themselves as ice agents and arrested him for reëntry after deportation, a felony.

 

Coronilla’s wife begged a federal judge to spare her husband. Gangs had overrun his home town in Mexico, and deportees were prime targets for crime, since they were presumed to have money. Coronilla was deported in June. Three months later, gunmen woke him from the bed where he slept with his young son. According to the Austin American-Statesman, he tried to soothe the boy, saying, “Don’t worry, my love.” His body was found about forty miles away, filled with bullets. When I spoke to Coronilla’s wife shortly after his death, she told me that she’d returned to Mexico to claim his body. She now fears for her own life. “He was a good man,” she said. “Now I have to prepare for his funeral.”

 

In the years following the Second World War, the United Nations established a principle of international law known as non-refoulement, or non-return, which forbids the removal of asylum seekers to countries where they are likely to be tortured or killed. The principle was enshrined in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, formalizing the concept of the “refugee” and insuring safe harbor for people who could show “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” No one with a credible fear of persecution could be expelled “in any manner whatsoever to a territory where he or she fears threats to life or freedom.”

 

For the U.S., the effort to protect refugees was also an act of atonement. In 1939, the government had rejected a boat carrying more than nine hundred Jewish escapees from Nazi Germany. At least two hundred of them were later killed in the Holocaust. As the refugee crisis worsened, countless more were refused entry. President Franklin Roosevelt had warned the public that Jews posed a national-security threat, and argued for tighter restrictions on their numbers. “In some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies,” he said at a press conference. Among those denied entry was Anne Frank, whose father applied for refugee status for his family in 1941, unsuccessfully. “What is done cannot be undone,” Anne wrote in her diary, “but one can prevent it happening again.” She later died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

 

In 1980, Congress incorporated the idea of non-refoulement into the Refugee Act. The act established protocols for vetting and resettling refugees and assured asylum seekers that they would not be treated as criminals, even if they arrived unauthorized in the U.S. The act, which had bipartisan support, was also meant to bolster relationships with allies and to provide a humanitarian model of resettlement for the rest of the world.

 

Today, the first screening of asylum seekers at the border often falls to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, who attempt to separate out candidates for asylum and other forms of protection. Many agents treat the task with great care. In the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas, several told me that they view the work of identifying individuals who may have fled serious harm as one of the most rewarding parts of their job.

 

A field manual for C.B.P. agents lists a series of questions that agents must ask an unauthorized immigrant before subjecting him or her to immediate deportation. “Do you have any fear or concern about being returned to your home country or being removed from the United States?” one reads. “Would you be harmed if you were returned?” another asks. C.B.P. agents are not authorized to evaluate the validity of the fear expressed. Instead, anyone answering yes to these questions must be referred to an asylum officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and given a chance to explain his or her fear. “The inspector should err on the side of caution,” the field manual reads, and “apply the criteria generously.”

 

Nevertheless, my team and I heard stories from more than a dozen women who say that they were never asked the required questions, or were ignored, mocked, or even sexually propositioned by U.S. agents after expressing their fears—and then deported to harm. In Queens, we met Rosaleda, who had worked as a police officer in Comayagua, Honduras, until her investigation of a cousin’s murder revealed a high-ranking colleague’s involvement in the crime, which Rosaleda reported to the department. Menacing phone calls began, followed by a drive-by shooting while she worked the overnight shift. “This is a warning,” read a note bearing her name that was left at the scene. “Leave things alone or we will kill you and next time we won’t miss.” Rosaleda asked a supervisor to transfer her; he said he’d consider it only in exchange for sex. In a second attempt on her life, while she was on patrol, two of her colleagues were killed. Rosaleda decided to risk the journey north. Her situation is surprisingly common, in some ways. In a recent study conducted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, ten per cent of the women interviewed, who had fled El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, or Mexico, indicated that “the police or other authorities were the direct source of their harm.”

 

When Rosaleda arrived in Texas, she was apprehended and deported without seeing a judge or a lawyer. She hadn’t shared details of her escape from Honduras, fearing that it would further endanger her. She attempted to cross the border again, and was kidnapped by a cartel and held for ransom. Eventually, she made it to New York, where she found pro-bono legal help. But, because of her earlier—and, her attorney argues, unlawful—deportation, she is now ineligible for asylum. (She was granted a “withholding of removal,” which has allowed her to remain in the U.S. but offers no path to permanent legal status.)

 

Allegations abound of Customs and Border Protection officers dismissing asylum seekers more brazenly. According to a 2014 American Civil Liberties Union report based on conversations with nearly a hundred people who were removed without seeing an immigration judge, “Fifty-five percent said they were not asked about fear of persecution or torture,” while “forty percent who were asked and said they were afraid were ordered deported without seeing an asylum officer.” For years, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has documented Customs and Border Protection’s noncompliance with asylum-seeker protections, including, in more than fifty per cent of cases, officers at ports of entry neglecting “to read the required information.” More recently, after Trump’s election, civil-liberties groups began documenting an apparent increase in rejections in some places on the border. According to a recent lawsuit, C.B.P. officers have told prospective asylum seekers, “The United States is not giving asylum anymore,” and “Trump says we don’t have to let you in.”

 

On the night Laura was sent back across the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge, her mother, Maria, put her grandkids to sleep and lay down on Laura’s bed. Lately, she’d been helping Laura with childcare. After her daughter got back from her waitressing shift, she would often get into bed next to her mom and tell stories from her day before falling asleep. When Maria noticed, around sunrise, that her daughter hadn’t returned, she began to worry.

 

Maria had raised Laura and her brother as a single mother while working at a Black & Decker plant in Reynosa, on the assembly line. She’d also done a stint at a laundromat, where Laura kept her company. Laura grew into a mischievous preteen. Once, she riled her brother by shaving off half his mustache while he was sleeping. At eighteen, Laura started seeing Sergio, who lived on her grandmother’s block. Sergio had a buzz cut, a square jaw, and an awkward sense of humor. He and Laura talked on the phone for hours, until Maria complained, “My phone bill—it’s a whole year’s salary!” Sergio had Laura’s name tattooed on his arm. After a year, Laura, who had a son from a previous relationship, gave birth to their first child. When Sergio later moved to Texas to work in construction with his father, Laura joined him. In 2007, the couple had another boy. Laura found work as a waitress and sold homemade candied apples door-to-door, while also taking care of the children. They were a handful, and, Maria recalled, “her partner was like a fourth child.”

 

Maria told me that Sergio had been abused as a child and had struggled with addiction. “He came from a tough psychological background,” Laura’s brother said. One time, Maria told me, Sergio dragged Laura across the floor by her hair. Another day, in March, 2008, when Laura said she was going to leave Sergio, he grabbed a knife and threatened to commit suicide. As Laura protested, he shoved her to the floor and kicked her in the ribs. He beat her so badly that she called the police and prepared to file charges against him. A judge signed an emergency protection order forbidding Sergio from going within two hundred yards of Laura’s home, but the order seemed only to enrage Sergio. After multiple threats against Laura, he was arrested, charged with assault, and deported to Mexico.

 

In the years since Laura and Sergio had left Reynosa, the town had become a cartel battleground. In 2008, at least five thousand Mexicans died in the drug war, more fatalities than the United States suffered during the Iraq War. That year, a drug kingpin was captured in a shoot-out near Laura’s childhood home, and the military seized five hundred and forty rifles, a hundred and sixty-five grenades, and fourteen sticks of TNT. A turf war began, to determine his replacement. After Sergio returned to Reynosa, he reportedly started working as a cartel grunt. Maria told me that he continued to threaten Laura, saying that if she ever returned to Mexico he’d set her on fire, and texting, “I’m going to smoke you.”

On that Tuesday morning in June when Laura didn’t come home from her waitressing shift, Maria considered the dark possibilities right away. Then the phone rang. It was Laura, from Reynosa. “I did everything I could,” she said, crying. “I even told the police, ‘Arrest me, and I’ll show you the documents,’ ” referring to the emergency protection order.

 

Laura called Elizabeth, too, and the cousins made a plan to meet in Reynosa. Elizabeth, trying to lighten the mood, asked whether the border agent who deported Laura was cute. Laura said that he was, and Elizabeth asked if she had tried to flirt. Laura replied, “I told him, ‘You’re sending me straight to the slaughterhouse.’ ”

 

For years, most undocumented immigrants facing deportation in the U.S. were given a chance to go before a judge—to show evidence, call witnesses, and make a case for why they should be allowed to stay. In 1996, Congress revoked that right for tens of thousands of immigrants, expanding forms of “summary removal,” which can take place without a hearing or judicial input. By 2013, more than eighty per cent of deportations were nonjudicial, with the result that life-or-death decisions now routinely rest in the hands of immigration authorities at the border.

 

Even when asylum seekers get the opportunity to see a judge, it can be difficult to prove that their fears merit legal relief. Asylum seekers aren’t entitled to lawyers, and children as young as three have been told to represent themselves in immigration court. According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, at Syracuse University, asylum seekers who find legal representation are five times more likely to win their cases. Geography is a strong determining factor in their fates. When the Government Accountability Office studied the outcomes of asylum cases in courts nationwide, it found significant geographical disparities in the responses to nearly identical situations. Between 2007 and 2014, some sixty per cent of asylum applicants won their cases in New York City, while in the courts of Omaha and Atlanta less than five per cent did.

 

Perhaps the most formidable challenge for asylum seekers is that the Second World War-era categories of protection aren’t well suited to immigrants fleeing modern gang violence.

 

Courts resist recognizing the asylum claims of people who have been targeted by MS-13, for instance, because the motive for violence rarely fits the criteria. For victims of domestic violence, the legal protections, including the Violence Against Women Act, are slightly more favorable. If Laura had gone before a judge, she could have had multiple options for potential relief, including a U visa, for crime victims. Still, the legal scholar Blaine Bookey writes, “Whether a woman fleeing domestic violence will receive protection in the United States seems to depend not on the consistent application of objective principles, but rather on the view of her individual judge, often untethered to any legal principles at all.”

 

Not long ago, I met a young mother who asked to be identified by her middle name, Elena. In Honduras, where she grew up, her teen-age brother was murdered by MS-13 for being gay, another brother was killed for refusing to join the gang, and her sister was shot for ignoring a gang leader’s sexual advances after he’d raped and impregnated her. A different gang member began pursuing Elena, and fired shots at her house after she turned him down. She reported the crime to police, and then learned that he was planning further retaliation against her.

 

In 2012, Elena crossed the U.S. border near Eagle Pass, Texas, and told a Border Patrol agent that she feared for her life. He logged her possessions: a black sweater, a hairband, gray shoelaces, and a key chain with photographs of her two children, whom she’d left behind in Honduras. He asked, “Would you be harmed if you are returned to your home country?” He wrote down a single word: “No.”

 

In detention, Elena fought back against this supposed denial, and won a hearing with an asylum officer, who corrected the record. Here she encountered a new obstacle. After she related her experiences, the officer asked her whether she was persecuted on account of her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group—the refugee criteria created by the United Nations to reflect the political threats of 1951.

Elena answered no on all counts, and the officer determined that she did not qualify to apply for asylum.

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Elena appealed, requesting a hearing with a judge. Asking to go before an immigration judge often means a long stint in detention, and detention can mean poor food, minimal medical care, and scant access to legal counsel. In the past, federal policy has encouraged releasing asylum seekers while they await court hearings, sparing taxpayers the cost of detention. But in the last year of Obama’s Presidency, and then under Trump, the percentage of asylum seekers who were granted parole plummeted. Government data obtained in a civil-rights lawsuit showed that, in one New York facility, fifty per cent of parole requests were granted in the months immediately before Trump’s Inauguration. In the months after, twelve per cent were.

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After three months in detention, Elena was granted a rare hearing before an immigration judge. The hearing took place virtually, with the judge appearing on a video monitor. He asked Elena one question.

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“Did you move to any other city in Honduras before coming to the United States?” he inquired.

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“No,” she said.

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“Well, the government of the United States doesn’t afford you protection for this type of reason. I affirm the asylum officer’s decision. Nothing further.” Elena was deported two weeks later.

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Back in her home town, Elena was assaulted at gunpoint by the man she’d fled. He tortured her, holding a lighter to her skin. Other gang members cracked her thirteen-year-old son’s skull. She fled, with her kids, to a tobacco-farming town in western Honduras, where the man who’d been pursuing her found her again. Once more, she escaped to the U.S. This time, authorities agreed that Elena’s fear—and the threat to her kids’ lives—was credible.

 

But, like Rosaleda, she is barred from receiving asylum because of her prior deportation.

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Many immigrants, after being deported, never get a second chance to prove their claims. Constantino Morales was a cop in Guerrero, Mexico, until he tried to break up a drug cartel and became a target of violence. He escaped to the U.S. and worked at a Cheesecake Factory in Des Moines, Iowa, and then became a popular laborers’-rights advocate. As with Laura, a minor traffic stop led to his removal, which he initially fought. At a community meeting with Tom Latham, at that time a Republican congressman, Morales said, “If I am sent back, I will face more violence, and I could lose my life.” Morales had applied for asylum a month earlier. He was denied. At the time, the U.S. State Department called Guerrero “the most violent state in Mexico.” Seven months after Morales’s deportation, he was shot and killed.

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In October, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decried the “rampant abuse and fraud” in the asylum system and said that “the system is being gamed.” The Trump Administration has called on Congress to crack down, which federal immigration judges may be doing already. For the past several years, asylum grant rates have declined. In 2017, judges rejected some sixty per cent of asylum seekers, the highest denial rate in more than a decade.

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Protections have also evaporated for many refugees seeking resettlement in the U.S. Trump has portrayed refugees from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Somalia not as candidates for humanitarian assistance but as national-security threats. In his first days in office, he banned many of them from travelling to the U.S. The ban is being contested in ongoing litigation. Several asylum and refugee officers told me they worry that the ban, and the inflamed discourse about refugees more generally, misrepresents their highly comprehensive vetting process, and undermines core American values.