Enrique's Journey (21 page)

Santo Antonio Gamay, hoping to make it to Toronto, shows the fatigue and tension from fifteen hours of riding a train. He has been arrested and deported three times before. In minutes, he will jump off to again try to outrun law enforcement officers.

         

Riders sit atop a northbound freight train as it rolls through lush Veracruz state in Mexico. Enrique's experiences in Chiapas taught him to fear the worst from people, but here he was stunned by kindness. People in many villages streamed toward the tracks with gifts.

         

The hands of migrants and food givers meet as a train passes through Fortín de las Flores in Veracruz. A World Bank study found that 42.5 percent of Mexicans live on two dollars or less a day. In rural areas, the people who live along the tracks are often the poorest.

         

Enrique washes a car in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. He needed to earn one hundred pesos to call Honduras to get his mother's phone number, which he had lost during a beating by train bandits.

         

Lourdes breaks down as she talks about her life and her separation from her son. Her nine-year-old daughter, Diana, who was born in the United States, offers comfort.

         

Central Americans emerge from the Rio Grande in Texas after wading across. In the plastic bags are dry clothes. Before Enrique entered the water, he tore up a scrap of paper with his mother's phone number on it and scattered it on the bank. This time, he had memorized the number.

Some are shot by ranchers as they try to beg or steal food or drink. A few weeks after Enrique arrived in Nuevo Laredo, Mexican immigrant Eusebio de Haro Espinosa, twenty-three, went up to a rancher in Bracketville, Texas, forty miles from the border, and asked for water. The rancher, Samuel Blackwood, seventy-five, shot him in the leg with a .357 Magnum. He didn't seek medical help. Espinosa bled to death.

Texas ranchers have become increasingly riled by immigrants who trespass. “There are two kinds of wets,” says retired trucker Jake Smith, who lives in a trailer on a ramshackle ranch in Martinez, near Cotulla, Texas. “Good wets. And bad wets.” When immigrants are near, the dogs bark. Smith sits on the front porch with a pistol in his lap.

Bad immigrants pack drugs, break into your place, and steal things, he says. Even the good ones, who are in search of honest work, leave the gates open, let the cattle out, or break into your place looking for food and water, says Smith, a crusty, white-haired man who occasionally gets his glass eye cleaned by a nearby large-animal veterinarian.

Ranch owner Joe Crisp has installed three locks on each window of his home. Immigrants have broken in eight times. Once they rammed a hole in his wall to get inside. Another time, they broke through the roof. Such intrusions are so common that Border Patrol agents advise ranchers to leave water and food outside, beside their doors. Every rancher near the Crisp and Smith homes has heard about the incident when a rancher turned down an immigrant who asked to use his telephone. The immigrant tied the rancher to a chair and stole his pickup truck.

Some of Enrique's campmates say they were apprehended when a rancher pointed a pistol at them, told them to freeze, and then dialed the U.S. immigration agents on his cell phone. Many migrants trying to enter are caught by the INS: 108,973 near Laredo in 2000, the year Enrique is trying.

Enrique will have to outsmart Border Patrol agents on the other side who are skilled and dogged.

Tracker Charles Grout can spot a footprint from a moving Ford Bronco. His partner, Manuel Sauceda, can tell, within a range of a few hours, how old it is.

They are agents for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service based in Cotulla, halfway along a seven- to eight-day walk between the Rio Grande at Nuevo Laredo and San Antonio. Their job is to arrest immigrants who enter Texas illegally.

Salary increases for Grout and Sauceda are based partly on how many migrants they catch. They work together, along railroads and in the desert, taking turns tracking on foot and driving ahead in the Bronco, sometimes for days.

One Thursday in September 2000, Sauceda discovers footprints near a cattle trough southwest of Encinal. He knows immigrants drink from the trough, although the water smells like rotten eggs and is laced with green scum. He circles the footprints and draws closer.

If footprints are not windblown or caved in, they are recent. If no animals, such as centipedes, snails, birds, or snakes, have crossed them, they are fresh. If there are discarded food wrappers nearby and if the wrappers are not covered with ants, the tracks are brand-new.

Sauceda circles the water trough, sweat trickling down his face, searching among piles of cow manure for clues. He faces the sun and looks for tiny shadows.

Then he finds more tracks. They have been made that morning. He detects patterns: one track is waffled, another has fine lines, and another is shaped like the pointed toe of a boot. “I see at least four here,” he says. He smiles. Like a bloodhound, he leans over and picks up his pace.

Changes at the Cotulla office show how much harder it has become to sneak past agents like Grout and Sauceda.

In 1994, Cotulla had 20 agents. Now, in Cotulla alone, Enrique will face 70 agents. Cotulla is one of eight INS stations north of Nuevo Laredo. In all, the INS has hired more than 5,600 additional agents since 1993 to expand its forces along the southern U.S. border.

In addition, agents use a growing arsenal of technology: helicopters, night-vision goggles, thermal imaging that picks up body heat, and seismic sensors that detect footsteps along immigrant trails. One INS officer's only job is to move the sensors to outsmart smugglers who try to plot their locations.

Earlier on this day, alerted by sensor 53, agents caught eleven Mexican men who had been walking across the desert for four days.

Grout and Sauceda are particularly dogged, partly because it means saving lives. Every two weeks or so, Sauceda says, he has to call an ambulance for an immigrant who has been bitten by a rattlesnake or hit by a train or has grown so dehydrated in the Texas desert that he is nearing collapse.

Sauceda follows the footprints at the water trough. He comes to a trail, climbs into the Bronco, and drives, opening and closing gates with keys from a ring that holds scores, given to the agents by ranchers.

The temperature climbs to 100 degrees—cool compared with the highs of 112 to 118 the week before, which had partially melted the asphalt on Interstate 35. The Bronco has a range-fire-prevention reminder on the dashboard:
DO NOT OPERATE OFF THE ROAD IN DRY GRASS OR BRUSH
. Sauceda ignores it.

By 2
P.M
., Grout and Sauceda have lost and found the tracks several times.

Whoever is leaving them seems to be angling toward a tower with an antenna. The two trackers search every big tree and water source. They come to a barbed-wire fence. Marks in the dirt show that their quarry has crawled under it. Grout picks up the tracks on the other side. “There they are, the same ones,” he says. “Bigger than Dallas.”

The track makers are headed for Encinal. If they reach town, it will be virtually impossible to find them, and the agents' half day spent in the cactus and the searing heat will be wasted.

Sauceda, dripping sweat, trots alongside the footprints. Grout drives ahead, to the edge of town. He spots an odd-looking dirt driveway. The right side has been dragged clean. It leads to a ramshackle house.

He parks. There, in soil leading to the driveway, are the footprints: waffle, fine lines, the point of a boot…

“I got 'em!” he says into a walkie-talkie.

“Where?” Sauceda asks.

“Same place as the last time.”

Grout takes three paces toward the house. A rottweiler lunges from behind a tree. Grout reaches for his .40-caliber Beretta. A chain stops the dog a few feet in front of him.

Carefully, Grout presses forward seven more paces, then swings open the door to a yellow shed. Jammed inside are five surprised immigrants. He handcuffs them.

Back at the Bronco, he inspects their footwear. Waffle, fine lines, pointed boot. He smiles.

Many immigrants are glad to be tracked down. Isaías Guerra, from Veracruz, Mexico, looked relieved when Grout found him. Guerra had been lost in the wilderness for two days. He had survived by eating cactus. The first day, five coyotes had followed him. The animals got so close that Guerra hit two of them with a stick to force them to back off. That night, he slept in a tree. The next day, a large mound a dozen feet away from him that at first looked like cow dung started moving. A rattlesnake, coiled, as thick as his upper arm, prepared to strike. He saw three more snakes. At dusk, he spotted a bobcat nearby. He quietly backed away. Guerra gladly crawled into the back of Grout's truck, dubbed “the cage.”

Migrants deported by the United States often return to the San José church. Enrique sees some of them. A tall man arrives at the church one evening with a vacant, dull look in his eyes. He hasn't eaten in five days. His brown shirt hangs in pieces on his body, torn to shreds by the cactus. His arms are cut up and bleeding, pinpricked with thistles and thorns. He is caked in mud. The bottoms of both feet are covered by gargantuan yellow blisters. His toes are swollen like sausages. The nails have turned black. He stumbles forward on his heels, barely able to walk. He's done seventy miles in the past six days, killing five rattlers along the way. He begs for a glass of water and a shower.