Five new American citizens were stunned to be naturalized at a White House ceremony during the Republican National Convention. Some said they did not know they were being broadcast until friends called to tell them.

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Michael D. Shear

WASHINGTON —

President Trump moved within weeks of taking office to prohibit immigrants from Sudan from entering the United States, citing terrorism threats and including it in his travel ban on some predominantly Muslim countries — restrictions that remain partly in place today. But on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump wanted to portray himself as pro-immigrant, he invited Neimat Abdelazim Awadelseid, a Sudanese woman who had just qualified to become a U.S. citizen, and four others to a White House naturalization ceremony that his re-election campaign featured prominently during the Republican National Convention.

The president’s willingness to use the trappings of presidential power during a campaign convention was a striking departure from previous presidents who avoided so blatantly blurring the lines between official actions and political activity. And Mr. Trump’s declaration that “we welcome five absolutely incredible new members into our great American family” stands in stark contrast to his anti-immigrant policies, often fueled by xenophobic language.

His decision to preside over the naturalization ceremony appeared aimed at suburbanites, people of color and women put off by his usually strident talk.

Ms. Awadelseid, 66, a substitute teacher who works with Sudanese children in her suburban Virginia community, said in an interview that “it is hard for my country” to be subject to travel restrictions but that it was an honor to visit the White House.

“It is a special moment, to get it from a president of the United States, to give me the citizenship,” she said. Ms. Awadelseid, who received a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Wyoming, has lived full time in the United States since 2000. She said she did not like to talk about politics and did not say whether she was surprised that her ceremony was broadcast during the convention.

But others, including Sudha Sundari Narayanan, 35, who was also among the five people sworn in at the White House, said they had not been told.

“I was surprised and shocked and excited,” said Ms. Narayanan, who immigrated to the United States in 2007 from India.

Ms. Narayanan, who said she did not have an opinion about Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, said she found out that the ceremony aired during the convention only when an excited friend called her later that night telling her she was on television.

“I never dreamed that something like this would happen,” Ms. Narayanan said. “I’m just a very simple girl trying to get my family running.”

Salih Abdul Samad, a Ghanaian chef, also did not know that the event would be broadcast during the convention. By Wednesday morning, he had received messages from friends around the world about his new fame.

“When you call me, you have to go through security background checks because I’m a star,” Mr. Abdul Samad, 44, joked. He added that he was thankful for the United States, particularly the Affordable Care Act, which he said saved his life when his kidneys failed six years ago.

“I’m so ever grateful to this country for what they’ve given me,” Mr. Abdul Samad said.

The decision by Mr. Trump’s campaign to feature the naturalization ceremony angered some senior officials with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees the naturalization process. Several expressed frustration with what they described as a politicized event.

Some asylum officers confronted senior agency officials during a virtual town hall on Wednesday about whether Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had violated rules prohibiting political activity by presiding over the ceremony.

“It’s one of the things that shouldn’t be politicized, and you can hardly get more political than your partisan political convention,” said Barbara Strack, a former chief of the refugee affairs division at Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Bush and Obama administrations.

White House officials said Wednesday that the ceremony, which featured Mr. Trump arriving to “Hail to the Chief,” was an official government event because it was taped Tuesday afternoon and publicly made available on the White House website. A White House spokeswoman said the president’s re-election campaign had simply decided to use it once it was on the website.

Planning for the event began early last week when White House officials reached out to the Washington office of the citizenship and immigration agency with a request to organize a naturalization ceremony at the White House, according to a senior administration official. Naturalization ceremonies have been held at the White House under previous presidents and Mr. Trump himself, but this appears to be the first time one has been broadcast during a political convention.

As the weekend approached, the White House officials requested information about the potential candidates for the ceremony and suggested the agency find immigrants from Mexico — something of a turnaround from Mr. Trump’s usual messaging on Mexico. When he announced his candidacy in 2015, he warned of Mexican “rapists” coming to the United States, and he has spent nearly four years trying to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. As it happened, no one from Mexico was at the ceremony.

Ms. Narayanan, from India, had traveled to the United States with her husband, who came on a student visa. Ms. Narayanan accompanied him on an F2 visa that allows spouses and dependents of foreign students at American schools to temporarily stay in the United States. Last July, the Trump administration proposed stripping international students of their visas if they exclusively took online courses during the coronavirus pandemic, but after an outcry from colleges and universities, the rule was rescinded.

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Ms. Narayanan, who has two children born in the United States, obtained lawful permanent residency in 2013. She said she took her citizenship test and had her required interview just a week before she received a call about the ceremony at the White House.

“It was very warm and welcoming,” Ms. Narayanan said of the event with the president. “I told him it was such an honor to meet him.”

Ms. Awadelseid, from Sudan, studied at the University of Wyoming twice, first to get her master’s in the early 1980s and then her doctorate in 1994. She said both degrees were in animal nutrition. She arrived in the United States permanently in 2000, and eventually got a green card through sponsorship by her brother, who had already become a citizen.

“The situation in Sudan was really not good politically and economically and everything,” she said. “When we found the chance to be a permanent resident here in the U.S.A., we stayed.”

She said she planned to quickly register to vote in the 2020 election.

“I’m excited about that,” she said.

The other attendees included Rima Gedeon, 46, from Lebanon, who works at a preschool in Virginia, and Robert Alcocer, 32, from Bolivia, who works at a construction company.

While the administration highlighted the ceremony at the White House, employees with the citizenship and immigration agency say future naturalizations are likely to face delays. On the same day as the ceremony, the administration canceled furloughs for more than 13,400 agency employees by cutting costs that would slow down future naturalizations.

The Trump administration also moved late last month to raise the cost of naturalization applications by more than 80 percent and to substantially tighten eligibility requirements for a subsidized application.

Of all the contradictions about a White House naturalization ceremony during the Republican National Convention, the starkest of all may be that Mr. Trump himself started an initiative seeking to potentially strip the citizenship status of thousands of people — a departure from the past several decades of practice and Supreme Court precedent.

Mr. Trump’s Justice Department announced in 2018 a goal of filing 1,600 denaturalization cases, a major acceleration of the previous use of denaturalization. Fewer than 150 people had been denaturalized in American courts in the previous 50 years, almost all of them Nazis, war criminals or people who were convicted of federal crimes tied to large-scale immigration fraud.

The president has largely blocked asylum seekers and refugees fleeing persecution, war and violence. He has built nearly 300 miles of border wall (though without persuading Mexico to pay for it, as he once insisted). He has made it harder for poor people to immigrate to the United States, imposed travel bans on predominantly Muslim countries and separated migrant children from their parents at the border.

At times, he has used racist messaging, condemning “shithole countries” and complaining that people from Haiti “have AIDS.”

Mr. Abdul Samad said Wednesday that he found the president’s comments about African nations as “very painful,” but he was “very very honored and grateful” to Mr. Trump for inviting him to the White House.

“That doesn’t mean that I can’t criticize him or I won’t criticize him when he does something bad or something I feel is not good,” Mr. Abdul Samad said.

At the ceremony, Mr. Trump listened to the five immigrants take the oath of citizenship, then approached the lectern to briefly share each of their stories.

“Congratulations,” he said. “That’s fantastic. That’s really great.”

Last week, during a briefing from border officials in Yuma, Ariz., the president had similar praise for a very different achievement.

“That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic,” he told border officials about the completion of nearly 300 miles of the border wall. “So, it’s a great — it’s a great feeling to have closed up the border.”

Caitlin Dickerson contributed reporting from New York.

Source: Trump Takes Night Off From Anti-Immigrant Talk to Swear In U.S. Citizens

Even as the Republican convention tries to soften his image, President Trump has made it clear that the extreme immigration policies of his first four years will be central to his re-election pitch.

 

WASHINGTON — Fifteen days before the 2018 midterm elections, as President Trump sought to motivate Republicans with dark warnings about caravans heading to the U.S. border, he gathered his Homeland Security secretary and White House staff to deliver a message: “extreme action” was needed to stop the migrants.

That afternoon, at a meeting with top leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection officials suggested deploying a microwave weapon — a “heat-ray” designed by the military to make people’s skin feel like it is burning when they get within range of its invisible beams.

Developed by the military as a crowd dispersal tool two decades ago, the Active Denial System had been largely abandoned amid doubts over its effectiveness and morality. Two former officials who attended the afternoon meeting at the Homeland Security Department on Oct. 22, 2018, said the suggestion that the device be installed at the border shocked attendees, even if it would have satisfied the president. Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of Homeland Security told an aide after the meeting that she would not authorize the use of such a device, and it should never be brought up again in her presence, the officials said.

Alexei Woltornist, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said Wednesday that “it was never considered.”

But the discussion in the fall of 2018 underscored how Mr. Trump’s obsession with shutting down immigration has driven policy considerations, including his suggestions of installing flesh-piercing spikes on the border wall, building a moat filled with snakes and alligators and shooting migrants in the legs.

The dark warnings of a looming invasion had little impact in 2018, when a Democratic wave swept Republicans from control of the House. The Republican convention on Tuesday night featured a small citizenship naturalization ceremony at the White House clearly designed to try to soften the president’s image as a heartless foe of immigrants.

But for his core supporters, Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda is again at the heart of his campaign, and the unrest roiling cities from Portland, Ore., to Kenosha, Wis., could give it more punch. The pitch: He has delivered on perhaps the central promise of his 2016 run, to effectively cut off America from foreigners who he said pose security and economic threats. Through hundreds of regulations, policy directives and structural changes, the president has profoundly reshaped the government’s vast immigration bureaucracy.

His campaign will also concentrate on searing, and often false, attacks against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., telling voters that the president’s rival wants to fling open the nation’s borders to criminals and disease-carrying immigrants who will take jobs from hard-working Americans.

“The public health necessity and the economic necessity of controlling immigration has placed the view of the Democrat left even more radically outside the pale of mainstream American thought,” Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s immigration policies said in an interview this week.

The president tweeted last month, “the Radical Left Democrats want Open Borders for anyone, including many criminals, to come in!”

Mr. Biden’s campaign said such false attacks will be as politically ineffective as they were in 2018, long before the coronavirus and economic recession.

“Doubling down on divisive poison says one thing to voters: that even after all his devastating failed leadership has cost us — and even though Joe Biden has been showing him the way for months — Donald Trump still has no strategy for overcoming the pandemic, the overwhelming priority for the American people,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Biden has not called for “open borders” or embraced getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as some on the Democratic left flank have pushed. He has said he would roll back Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, promising to restore asylum rules, end separation of migrant families at the border, reverse limits on legal immigration and impose a 100-day moratorium on deportations.

But Mr. Biden and Democratic congressional candidates are bracing for what they expect will be a concerted focus on one of the most polarizing issues in American politics — made even more divisive by Mr. Trump’s embrace of ugly, xenophobic language about foreigners.

Some of Mr. Trump’s biggest immigration promises from 2016 have fallen short. No “big, beautiful wall” stretches the length of the southern border, paid for by Mexico. Instead, the president spent billions of dollars of taxpayer money to replace about 300 miles of existing barriers with a hulking wall built of steel slats.

Many of the president’s ideas — including the moat and the “heat ray” — were thwarted by his own officials. Other policy proposals have been blocked by federal judges who have ruled that they violated existing laws, administrative rules or the Constitution.

But even the president’s most fierce critics concede that on immigration, the president can rightly claim that he did much of what he said he would do.

“The Trump administration, unilaterally, without passing laws in Congress, has radically reshaped immigration in the United States,” said Omar Jadwat, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “They have effectively shut down the asylum system at the border. They’ve reintroduced religious, racial and national origin discrimination into our immigration system. These are real, radical shifts.”

Because of president’s policies, Central American migrants fleeing persecution and violence in their home countries now must wait, often for months, in squalid camps on the Mexico side of the border while the United States considers their requests for asylum. For decades, asylum seekers were allowed to remain in the United States while their cases were decided.

Mr. Trump derides that as “catch and release,” which he says allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to fraudulently claim persecution as a means of entering the United States and then disappearing into the country illegally. He repeatedly said it was his top priority to end the practice.

Advocates say he has largely succeeded, aided in part by the coronavirus pandemic. The president has used emergency powers designed for public health crises to turn away all asylum seekers, effectively ending the role of the United States as a place of refuge for those fleeing their homes.

Those deeply-rooted changes are a “bell can never be unrung,” one senior aide said.

Even before the pandemic, he had lowered the annual cap for refugees to a trickle, shutting the United States off from war-torn countries like Syria or Somalia.

“Refugees have been left separated from their families or in the United States they’ve been left without access to critical medical care, or have been left in places where their lives are in danger,” said Eleanor Acer, the senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First. “And for refugees seeking asylum, the asylum system has been totally decimated. Refugees seeking asylum have been turned back to some of the most dangerous places in the world.”

And from the earliest days of his presidency, Mr. Trump has used national security concerns to justify a crackdown on immigration from around the globe, imposing a travel ban on several mostly-Muslim countries just days after taking office in January of 2017. A version of that travel ban remains in place, and served as the template for other travel bans put in place during the pandemic.

Processing of visa applications from many countries around the world had already slowed to a crawl before the health crisis as the administration aggressively implemented what the president called “extreme vetting” of people from countries deemed to harbor terrorists.

The administration has also moved aggressively to reduce the flow of legal immigrants who have for decades sought to live and work in the United States.

They have drafted new regulations aimed at making it harder for poor immigrants to qualify for entry into the United States, arguing that they would be a financial burden on the country. And they have aggressively sought to eliminate programs that allowed American companies to lure foreign workers to the United States for jobs.

Mr. Miller, in particular has argued that such programs put working class Americans at a competitive disadvantage — a potent campaign theme — though experts say that, overall, immigrants do not drive down wages or take jobs from American citizens.

Some conservatives say Mr. Trump has not gone far enough to stop immigrants from working in America.

“There are areas where this administration isn’t as hawkish as they should be,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which pushes for immigration restrictions. He said Mr. Trump has failed to push for a program that would let employers quickly determine if a worker is in the country illegally.

“Where the hell is E-verify?” he asked. He said the president has done to little to end the H2B visa program that allows companies to hire temporary workers from abroad for seasonal jobs. “The H2B program shouldn’t exist. It is harmful, period.”

Still, David Lapan, who served briefly as the top spokesman at the Department of Homeland Security in 2017, said that the president’s success in pushing through his immigration agenda will make it difficult for Mr. Biden, should he win in November.

“If the president is not re-elected, and Joe Biden becomes the president, he and his administration are going to have their hands full on a number of fronts, Covid, chief among them,” Mr. Lapan said. “Trying to undo the damage that has been done to the immigration system is going to be a further challenge. And how much is the next administration able to focus on that, given the panoply of challenges that they’re going to face?”

By Michael D. Shear

Source: Border Officials Weighed Deploying Migrant ‘Heat Ray’ Ahead of Midterms

Feature Roberto Primero Luis set out across the U.S.-Mexico border last year as previous Guatemalan migrants had. But the crossing has changed.

 

The United States border patrol agent found the body, a man’s, on the southern slope of a hill about three miles outside Sells, Ariz., known to locals with long memories as Bird Nest Hill. The man was face down, his head near a rocky outcropping, his legs stretching downhill. He lay with his left hand clenched beneath his chest, his right beneath his cheek, among tufts of buffelgrass and creosote. So inconspicuously did he blend into the landscape, a passer-by might have overlooked him. The agent might have, too, if not for the bright red waistband on the man’s underwear. Then there was the hair. Thick, dark, spiky, the hair looked fashioned, somehow, almost stylish, after all this time in the Sonoran Desert — surely weeks, the agent figured, and possibly months.

Beyond the dead man the desert sprawled hypnotically. Hills, basins, hills, basins, dusted with monsoon greenery but without a drop of water or a stitch of shade in sight. It was a clear morning, and a golden glow came off the desert. The agent could have gazed deep into Mexico, but he didn’t linger. The sun was pulsing, the humidity enveloping. At 10 a.m. on Aug. 28 last year, the temperature outside Sells was nearing 100 degrees.

There were no telling possessions on the man, no hunting rifle or camping pack, but there was one significant feature: his clothing. He wore a hooded jacket printed with real-tree camouflage and matching pant covers. His shoes were encased in carpet-soled bootees made to hide footprints. This was someone who had wanted not to be seen.

The Border Patrol apprehends migrants who cross the border unlawfully. The dead are not in its purview. When agents find corpses or human remains near the border, as they often do, they contact local law enforcement. In this case, the agent was patrolling on the lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation, and the tribal police had jurisdiction. The agent called the department’s headquarters in Sells and relayed the body’s GPS coordinates. A Tohono O’odham detective went out. Roads are scarce on the reservation, and he drove with a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle in tow.

The Tohono O’odham government does not have a full-time medical examiner, so once the detective retrieved the body, he called the medical examiner’s office in Pima County, Ariz., which borders the reservation. Under state law, unidentified corpses do not require autopsies unless foul play is suspected, but the Pima medical examiner makes a point of looking into the cases of bodies it suspects belong to migrants. An investigator from that office, a tall, hefty, bearded man with a utility vest and a badge on his hip, drove the 60 miles from Tucson, the county seat, to Sells.

The dead man was still on the rear cargo shelf of the A.T.V. at the headquarters when the investigator arrived. The scent filled the parking lot. The Tohono O’odham detective, a tall, clean-shaven man wearing a black cap, cargo pants and a pistol on his hip, gave the investigator the GPS coordinates and scene photographs.

“Did you check the scene?” the investigator asked.

“Yes,” the detective said, with little evident conviction.

At the medical examiner’s office in Tucson, the dead man was taken to the autopsy theater. There, two technicians and a pathologist in aprons, hair covers and face masks began moving about him with dolorous expertise and talking to one another in sentence fragments. One climbed a rolling ladder to photograph the body from above as another removed the clothing and probed the hems, felt the inner panels and inspected the belt and the tags and the labels. Migrants often travel with no identification or fake identification, but they can secret away genuine documents or phone numbers in their clothing. The technician didn’t find any of those things, though from the pants he pulled a nearly empty wallet and a pocket-size Gideon Bible with a blue plastic cover. The photographer fetched an infrared camera and through the viewfinder inspected the man’s limbs and torso, looking for tattoos. “My gut feeling is this guy doesn’t have any,” he said. He couldn’t say why, exactly. “It’s just my sense.”

He was right. His sense came of long experience. He had inspected more U.B.C.s, as the medical examiner calls them — undocumented border crossers — than he could count. The man on Bird Nest Hill was U.B.C. No.104 for the year, and it was only September. In the mid-1990s, the federal government introduced a policy of pushing undocumented migrants away from border cities and into increasingly remote locations. The policy persisted, and as it did, more people died. According to the Border Patrol, just under 8,000 migrants have turned up dead on the Southern border since 1998. The real number is probably much higher, but even going by the Border Patrol’s estimates, that is a rate of about one migrant death per day, every day of the last 22 years.

Slightly less than half of those deaths occur in southern Arizona, most in the Sonoran Desert. Almost all the bodies found there end up at the medical examiner’s office in Tucson. This fact has become widely known beyond the city, and every day the office receives calls about the missing from desperate families and foreign consulates.

The desert reduces its victims with barbarous celerity, and few of them are identifiable by outward appearance. The man on Bird Nest Hill was nearly mummified, his muscles and organs autolyzed and leached out, his eye sockets full of mud and insect carapaces. On the autopsy report, his weight was 38 pounds. That was heavier than many. Often only bones turn up.

Done with the examination, the pathologist and technicians leaned in to look at the man’s hands. Could the fingers be printed? “We can take them off,” a technician said, holding a scalpel apprehensively, “but I don’t know how well they’ll print.” Nevertheless, she severed both hands below the thumbs, placed them in a clear plastic bucket and poured in sodium hydroxide to rehydrate the skin. In a few days, she would see if the patterns of his fingertip pads had re-emerged.

They inspected the wallet. In it were two bank notes from the Bank of Guatemala and a national identification card issued by the Republic of Guatemala. The morgue staff knew the ID couldn’t be conclusive, even if it was genuine; there were too many fake or stolen IDs in the desert for that. A fingerprint match would be, if the country he was from maintained reliable fingerprint records of its citizens. Guatemala did. And it wouldn’t be surprising if that was his home, they knew: Of the 153 migrants whose journeys ended in the medical examiner’s office last year, nearly half of those identified so far, the single largest group, were Guatemalan.

The black-and-white portrait on the ID showed a young man with broad cheeks, a wide jaw, arched eyebrows and a high quiff of thick dark hair. According to the birth date, he had recently turned 23.

Around his town, few people called Roberto Primero Luis by his name. His friends called him Rokuzzo, the name of the barbershop he owned. His wife liked to call him Robert, because it sounded more American. Mainly it was his parents who still used their firstborn child’s given name.

Lucas Primero and his wife, Eufemia, traced their heritage back many generations in the area of the town, Cubulco. They were both Achí, a Mayan people that established a trading route in this area of central Guatemala before the Spaniards arrived. Lucas left school as a boy to labor in the cornfields and eventually worked his way up to earning a living as a bricklayer. He and Eufemia married at 15. Roberto was born in 1996, the year Guatemala’s 36-year civil war ended.

Roberto was studious, obedient and, thanks to his father, who was also a pastor, devout. He sang and played the saxophone, keyboard and drums in the church band. After high school, he wanted to become a nurse, but the tuition for nursing school was more than his family could afford, so to raise the money Roberto apprenticed as a barber. Finding that he liked the work, he put nursing on hold to open his own shop. Lucas lent him the money, and together father and son went to Guatemala City to buy the chairs and razors and scissors.

Rokuzzo became one of the most popular barbershops in Cubulco. (The name apparently derived either from Antonela Roccuzzo, the wife of the F.C. Barcelona soccer player Lionel Messi, or from Rakuten, a sponsor of the team.) Roberto was beloved for his good cheer and devotion to his customers. He worked 13 hours a day, six days a week. He hired his younger brothers, and they became known for their signature style: a high quiff, pushed back, with closely shorn sides into which they shaved swirling patterns. They printed posters of Cubuleros with the cut and hung them on the walls. At night, those same Cubuleros would gather in the waiting chairs in the shop to banter and watch Barcelona highlights and listen to music. After closing, Roberto’s brother and his friends would pull down the aluminum gate and continue hanging out, but Roberto wouldn’t stay — he wanted to be with his fiancée.

He and Caty Sunún had been together since he was 16 and she 13. Before they met, he had noticed her on the street. She was angelic, he thought, with big, warm eyes and a radiant smile. One day he called out to her: “You’re Catalina!” She replied, “And?” and continued walking. He phoned her for months before she agreed to talk to him.

For two years they dated secretly. When Caty finally told her parents about Roberto, they weren’t pleased. They had a vision of their daughter’s future, and it didn’t include her staying in Cubulco.

Tomás and Magdalena Sunún were also Achí, and, like Lucas and Eufemia, they came from families of poor farmers and laborers. They, too, had married as teenagers. But there the families’ stories diverged. They diverged in the way Guatemalan society itself has diverged over the last two generations.

Guatemalans had been migrating to the United States for decades, but mass migration began in earnest in the 1980s, when the civil war entered a genocidal phase. Washington had backed Guatemala’s military dictatorships since inciting a coup d’état in 1954. Armed with American weapons and funds, the government now labeled Mayans like the Achí insurgents. Cubulco was one of many towns set ablaze.

The American government went a small way toward atoning by granting thousands of displaced Guatemalans asylum. Some gained citizenship; others didn’t but stayed. Many prospered, and in time family and friends and neighbors followed them north. According to the International Organization for Migration, roughly 2.6 million Guatemalans live outside the country, a vast majority in the United States. But according to Aracely Martínez Rodas, an anthropologist and migration expert at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, it could be as many as four million, or roughly a quarter of the current population of Guatemala. While poverty is still the principal driving factor, more and more members of the middle class are migrating. In 2019, according to the World Bank, Guatemalans living abroad sent back remittances worth nearly $10.7 billion. That is roughly equivalent to the Guatemalan government’s entire spending for the year.

In 2000, the year after Caty was born, Tomás migrated to the Nashville area. Three years later, Magdalena followed, leaving Caty in Cubulco in the care of her grandmother, a common choice for young parents who migrate. In Tennessee, Tomás worked as a builder, Magdalena as a cleaner, until 2010, when he was pulled over for speeding and subsequently deported. Had he not been, they might never have come back to Guatemala. As it was, they returned people of means. They built a new home in the middle of Cubulco and on its ground floor opened a grocery, bakery and animal-feed shop.

Tomás and Magdalena agreed to let Caty see Roberto on the condition that she finish school. She and Roberto dated for three years, the traditional courtship period, and in 2018 he proposed. Caty was Catholic, Roberto evangelical, and at first she wouldn’t agree. She broke up with him. They reconciled, and she converted.

Caty had trained to be a teacher, but there were no teaching jobs in the local schools. The region around Cubulco, Guatemala’s dry belt, was among the poorest in the country and particularly vulnerable to climate change; the last several harvest seasons had been a pitiful sight. But Roberto was doing better financially than anyone in his family ever had, making as much as 300 quetzals, or about $40, a day in his shop. He had paid back his father’s loan. Lucas gave Roberto a plot of land. They were planning to build a house together.

Roberto had never expressed interest in “going north,” as Guatemalans call migration to the United States. When his aunt offered him a chance to apply for a work visa, he declined. But now he and Tomás talked about his going. Tomás’s deportation hadn’t soured him on the U.S. On the contrary, he still revered America, in exile more than ever. Guatemala did not offer people like them much opportunity, Tomás pointed out, even people as enterprising as Roberto. Whatever Roberto might be making at his barbershop, whatever he might make in the future as a nurse, would be dwarfed by the pay he would find in the U.S., even in a job like construction or meatpacking.

Caty and Roberto discussed the idea. Like Roberto, she didn’t feel hopeless in Cubulco, or not always. Yet she knew so many people in the U.S., including her younger sister, an American citizen whom Magdalena had given birth to in Tennessee. There was no one in Cubulco, it seemed, who didn’t have family somewhere in Tennessee. Nashville was 1,500 miles away, yet for how familiar it felt, it might have been the next town.

Going north wasn’t just about escaping desperation, not any longer. It was about being a success. People who went to the U.S. had nicer houses, nicer jobs, nicer lives. They sponsored religious festivals, endowed churches and paid the school fees and hospital bills of distant cousins. Their children had better prospects — a matter of newfound concern for Roberto and Caty, who in early 2019 learned that Caty was pregnant.

When, that summer, Roberto told his parents he was considering migrating, he had already made his decision. The plan was for him to go first. Once he was settled near Nashville, Caty would go. She wanted to give birth there so their baby would be an American citizen.

Finding someone to take him wasn’t difficult. Tomás called a “coyote,” or people smuggler, who had recently transported the nephew of a friend. When he came to the Sunúns’ store, Caty and Roberto realized they had seen him around town. It turned out Roberto’s father was friendly with him, though he had no idea the man was a coyote. He was a familiar face. He wasn’t going to mistreat a fellow Cubulero, Roberto reasoned.

The coyote told Roberto that his journey across the desert would take three days and that the entire trek would cost him 75,000 quetzals — about $10,000. This was many times what Tomás and Magdalena had paid, and Roberto couldn’t afford it — not even close. But it was a common rate, and migrants figured out how to pay. Families got mortgages on their homes or land to send members north, sold off livestock or took out private loans. Roberto could have asked his father to pay, but Lucas was opposed to his going. Caty’s father lent him the money. He didn’t realize he was sending his son-in-law to a very different border than the one he crossed 19 years earlier.

On his last visit to church, Roberto donated two conga drums to the band and sang a hymn. Caty was struck by one lyric: When I finish my journey in this world, Roberto sang, my soul will be lifted. On the morning of May 25, 2019, a pickup truck pulled up in front of the store. Roberto climbed in.

Geologists estimate that the Sonoran Desert has been accumulating for about two billion years. Today it occupies approximately 100,000 square miles — an area larger than Britain — that stretch from the Colorado Plateau in the north down through Sonora, Mexico, in the south, and from Southern California in the west to just east of Tucson. In the desert’s Pinacates Volcanic Field, as little as an inch of rain falls in a year. NASA used to train Apollo astronauts there — it was the closest thing to a moonscape they could find.

The eastern desert, which includes the Tohono O’odham’s tribal lands, is more hospitable, but even here the earth’s indifference to human need can seem vindictive. A route through the desert that missionaries, miners and migrants traditionally followed was called El Camino del Diablo, the Devil’s Highway. It followed an older trail that the Tohono O’odham used to send their young men down. Toward the desert was “the direction of suffering.” One early-20th-century account called the desert a “vast graveyard of unknown dead.” It can still feel that way. Hiking on the Arizona border today, even taking a walk outside Tucson, you can find human bones. Some are years old, some months.

Last December, I accompanied a pair of Border Patrol agents as they left the gates of the agency’s sprawling sector headquarters in Tucson and headed toward the border. Jesus A. Vasavilbaso and Daniel Hernandez had for about a decade been “sign trackers,” following migrants through the desert.

“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve come upon groups in the desert, and they have no food, no water,” Vasavilbaso said as he drove south on State Route 286. “And the journey they had — they had no idea what was coming. The terrain was so harsh, and they’re in the middle of nowhere. And we tell them: ‘You should be grateful and glad that we caught you when we caught you. What was coming, you were not going to make it out.’”

As migrants have sought out increasingly remote routes through the desert, more of them have died. This is a fact not seriously disputed by anyone familiar with the problem, including the Border Patrol. But if we are to look at these deaths as the Pima County pathologists do, as a kind of slow-motion epidemic, we must label the desert a proximate, not an ultimate, cause. There are various ultimate causes, but perhaps the plainest, certainly the most traceable, is federal policy. Confronted with images of holding pens and parentless children, it would be easy to assume the policy began with President Trump, the latest face of a revived — though hardly new — American hostility toward migrants. In fact, it has been in place through four presidential administrations.

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In 1993, the Border Patrol apprehended over 1.2 million people trying to migrate without documentation. Bill Clinton entered office that year pledging to “get serious” about the problem, and in a strategic plan the following year, the Border Patrol introduced “prevention through deterrence” (the quotation marks are original). It called for an increase in security around border cities like Tijuana, El Paso and Nogales. As more agents assembled in these places, the thinking went, undocumented migrants would try to cross in increasingly remote areas, where the land and the elements would take over. “Mountains, deserts, lakes, rivers and valleys form natural barriers to passage,” the plan read. “Temperatures ranging from subzero along the northern border to the searing heat of the southern border affect illegal entry traffic as well as enforcement efforts. Illegal entrants crossing through remote, uninhabited expanses of land and sea along the border can find themselves in mortal danger.” Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time, said later that “it was our sense that the number of people crossing through Arizona would go down to a trickle once people realized” how dangerous it was.

“Prevention through deterrence” worked. Apprehensions increased, reaching a peak of nearly 1.7 million in 2000. So did deaths. Migrant deaths weren’t new. People had always died trying to cross. It was where they were dying now, and how. Previously, the most common forms of death involved traffic accidents or drowning; migrants were hit by vehicles as they tried to run across Interstate 10 into El Paso, for instance, or went under when the Tijuana River flooded. Now they were dying on ranch lands and in mountain ranges and in the desert, of exposure, dehydration, heat stroke. Certain victims the desert took quickly. Others suffered more. “It is not unusual to find bodies of migrants who in a confused state have removed their clothing in freezing weather or attempted to drink desert sand to satisfy thirst in extreme heat,” according to one report from the American Civil Liberties Union and Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. “Disoriented, migrants sometimes fall on cacti or rocks, suffering blunt

trauma and lacerations in different parts of the body.”

At the medical examiner’s office in Tucson, the pathologists began compiling reports of missing migrants. This was not a standard practice, but they saw a trend. “We knew it was a rise,” Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist with the office, told me. In 1994, Pima County handled 11 dead migrants. In 2000, it had 74 cases. By 2010, 222.

Under George W. Bush, the Department of Homeland Security began cooperating with local law enforcement agencies to increase detentions and deportations of undocumented people. The cooperation continued under Barack Obama, whose tenure saw more deportations than those of any of his predecessors (or of Trump). Though unlawful migration decreased drastically, the American debate around immigration grew only shriller. Trump used the charged atmosphere to stoke fears of Mexican rapists and Central American caravan invasions. He sent thousands of Border Patrol agents and National Guard troops to the border.

The Border Patrol’s Tucson sector — with over 3,600 agents — is one of the most heavily staffed. While that seems like a lot, Vasavilbaso and Hernandez told me that I had to consider the size of the sector: 262 miles of border, 90,530 square miles. But the last two decades have seen a proliferation of “tactical infrastructure,” as it’s known: not just the new vehicle barriers and pedestrian fencing that have been erected along much of the Arizona borderline but also unmanned aircraft, motion sensors buried in the ground and, one of the latest innovations, towers equipped with some combination of high-definition cameras, night vision, thermal-imaging sensors and radar. The result is what the Department of Homeland Security calls “wide-area persistent surveillance.”

Vasavilbaso pulled into Sasabe, Ariz., and turned west onto an unpaved track that ran along a stretch of fence. Sasabe is divided from El Sásabe, Sonora, by the border. Vasavilbaso had known this land man and boy, he told me. He was born in Arizona and grew up in Nogales, Sonora. Long before there was a fence, his uncle, a rancher, used to bring his herds up here to water. Like many border families, Vasavilbaso’s had members on both sides. They were Mexican and American. Citizenship wasn’t an issue. He was familiar with the local coyotes, of course — everyone was. “They were mom-and-pop operations,” he said.

That had all changed. As an agent, he watched as the Mexican criminal organizations took over. On the Arizona border this meant, principally, the Sinaloa cartel, which in its heyday had at its helm the redoubtable Joaquín Guzmán, lately of Colorado’s Supermax penitentiary. If it wasn’t “El Chapo” who first conceived of merging drug-trafficking and people smuggling, he refined the merger, as he did so much illicit border commerce, making migrants just another product he moved.

As the business changed, so did the cargo. In 1993, 97 percent of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol were Mexican. So few people of other nationalities were there that they were collectively known as O.T.M.s, Other Than Mexicans. Last year, close to 20 percent were Mexican. Seventy-three percent were Central American.

The special agent in charge of homeland-security investigations in Phoenix, Scott Brown, told me that for the Mexican organizations, migrants became “easy and additional profit.” They represented income in themselves, but they could also serve as drug mules, willingly or unwillingly, or as diversions away from drug mules. If Border Patrol agents have to track large groups of migrants who are simultaneously being fanned out by their handlers onto different trails across the desert, the agents are less likely to come upon a small band of smugglers. Vasavilbaso and Hernandez averred this, and added that they believed this tactic could partly explain why coyotes had started moving migrants in such immense groups.

In the fall of 2018, Central American migrants, including many families, began arriving in northern Mexico in daily busloads. Tucson was overwhelmed. The Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement processed so many people that they had nowhere to put them, and they took to turning groups loose in the city. Temporary shelters were set up. The largest was in an old Benedictine monastery. When I first visited it, in early 2019, about two-thirds of the migrants were Guatemalan, but there were people from all over the world: Indians, Russians, Congolese, Venezuelans, Cubans. That year, the Border Patrol apprehended migrants from over 140 countries. That shelter has since been moved to a former juvenile detention center.

When Caty’s parents crossed into the U.S., one coyote took you all the way from Guatemala to Arizona. He had been at it for years and had close relationships with the Mexican desert guides. Since then, border crossing had become an anonymous volume business. To a new generation of coyotes, a migrant like Roberto was of no more value than a load of fentanyl or a kilogram of cocaine. Rather less, actually, because his passage cost less than the value of the drugs, and because unlike the drugs his arrival was in the main irrelevant. Whether he turned up in the United States alive or dead was of no consequence to his handlers so long as he paid. There would always be more like him. Along the way he might be kidnapped, murdered or raped, or he might die in the desert — not because he might get lost, but because he would be abandoned. If migrants were exhausted or injured, they were simply left behind to die, and the profiteering didn’t cease with death. Coyotes and a hem of freelance extortionists that had grown up around the trade contacted families to lie about the fates of their missing loved ones, saying they had been abducted or waylaid or injured and could be freed for an additional cost.

The Mexican organizations, meanwhile, had introduced their signature military prowess to the merged migrant and drug trades. I spoke with an undocumented migrant from Honduras who arrived at the border with no money and unattached to a coyote. If you arrive on your own this way, you are liable to be recruited or press-ganged by the plaza boss, who monitors migrant traffic for the cartel. He was taken to a safe house and was told at gunpoint that if he couldn’t come up with the money to cross, he could carry drugs. Or he could die.

He chose the drugs. He was outfitted with a camouflage suit and carpet shoes, along with a heavy rucksack. He was told not to open it. He complied. He was put into a group with four other men. They trekked through the desert, mainly by night, only in their group. They were not allowed near other migrants. They were accompanied by escorts in front and back who never spoke to them, save for threats. On the hilltops along the entire route, there were lookouts. He said: “There were cartel people everywhere. There were more of them than migrants.”

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For every Border Patrol innovation, Hernandez told me, the people smugglers had an answer. They had persistent surveillance of their own. The lookouts used encrypted radios, signal repeaters, long-range video equipment. He recalled catching a lookout. When Hernandez questioned him, the lookout, apparently wanting to talk shop, listed each location Hernandez had been to that day. The organization had tracked his every move.

“They have great, great countersurveillance,” Hernandez said. “These guys are incredibly sophisticated.”

“You have to always assume you’re being watched,” Vasavilbaso said.

The Border Patrol has expanded its Search, Trauma and Rescue Unit, and mobile rescue beacons are now situated throughout the desert. They feature a large red button that, when pressed, sends a signal to the Border Patrol, and in some cases a phone. Still, deaths go uncounted. A 2017 USA Today Network investigation found that “hundreds of border deaths involving migrants were not included in official Border Patrol statistics over the past five years.” It was 25 percent higher in Arizona over this period, the report said, “but some years it was 100 percent higher.” Almost all of Arizona’s share of the border is on public land. In Texas, where almost all of it is on private land and where many of the border counties don’t have medical examiners, the situation is premodern. “Many of these jurisdictions don’t track migrant deaths.”

The pedestrian fence that Vasavilbaso drove along was composed of high steel bollard beams separated by narrow gaps. From a cross rail above hung two spools of concertina wire. There had been rain the night before, and while on the American side of the fence the track was tidy, on the Mexican side the water had amassed at the base of the fence a miles-long berm of what the agents called “migrant trash.” Jackets and backpacks and diapers and socks and black gallon water jugs. In some washes, the berm was several feet high and deep. Especially the jugs; there were thousands of them. You had to wonder: If the migrants shed their water here, what did they do once on the other side?

“It’s like this at the end of every migration season,” Vasavilbaso said.

On the fence posts, the mist had brought out handprints and shoe scuffs. Some people are strong enough to climb up the fence and leap over the wire. For those who aren’t, like small children, the guide will bring a ladder. We passed a ghostly sight: a child’s sweatshirt suspended in the coil of wire, hanging there as though on a mannequin in a shop window: the sleeves outstretched symmetrically, the hood upright. It appeared as though a child had dropped out of it and the sweatshirt had stayed.

“It’s kind of eerie, isn’t it?” Hernandez said.

The coyote from Cubulco took Roberto to another town in central Guatemala, where he handed him off to another coyote, who drove him over the border into Chiapas, Mexico. There Roberto boarded a bus. Coyotes buy up blocks of seats or charter whole buses and pay off drivers, depot guards, the police. He slowly made his way north with an expanding group of migrants, switching buses every few days. From the bus, Roberto video-called Caty on his smartphone several times a day, pointing the camera out the window onto the passing landscape so she could see what he saw. She noticed that the buses were becoming more crowded. Eventually Roberto was standing in the aisle. There were no rest stops. The passengers were given only scrambled eggs and some water for sustenance.

For solace, Roberto read the little blue Gideon Bible, one of a shipment of Bibles his aunt’s church in Nashville had sent to his church in Cubulco. In Chihuahua, the bus had to turn around and backtrack, adding another three days to the journey. When he called Caty now, Roberto sounded depleted. He asked her to pray for him.

After two weeks of this, Roberto finally arrived in Altar, a town 60 miles south of the border in Sonora, Mexico. He was exhausted but excited, he told Caty. He was put in a group with nine other migrants, and they were installed in a safe house, one of many around Altar. The coyote gave Roberto’s group over to the foot guide who would lead them through the desert. The man never said his name. He handed Roberto a black plastic gallon water jug, a camouflage jacket, pant covers and carpet shoes.

When Tomás crossed, the Border Patrol had about 8,600 agents on the border; now there were 17,000. Eight of every 10 miles of Arizona border was now blocked with some form of pedestrian or vehicle barrier. Tomás and Magdalena had gotten through on their first tries, but now it was common for migrants to make several attempts before getting across, if they got across at all. The day after Roberto arrived in Altar, two groups of migrants returned from the desert. On the American side, they reported, the Border Patrol was everywhere. There had been no way through, and they turned back.

The guide told Roberto’s group they could still go, but they would have to hike a longer route. It would take seven days rather than the planned-on three. Roberto agreed. He had heard about migrants dying in the desert; everyone in Guatemala had. Even his mother-in-law, who spent three days trekking in the desert, told him it took all her strength. But it was all worth it, she had said.

Late on the morning of Sunday, June 9, Roberto called Caty.

“Please be careful,” she said. “I love you, and our child does, too.”

She was now five months pregnant.

“I’ll be on the other side by Saturday,” he told her. “Get ready. You’re next.”

When Caty didn’t hear from Roberto on Saturday, June 15, the day he was supposed to have arrived in Arizona, she got anxious. Her father told her not to worry. “They’re probably somewhere hiding from Border Patrol,” he said. She called Roberto’s family and learned that he tried to call her from the desert but couldn’t get through. He had talked to his aunt in Nashville, however, and sounded good.

But by Monday, Caty still hadn’t heard anything. Tomás called the coyote in Cubulco. He told Tomás that Roberto had been caught by the Border Patrol. When Roberto’s father, Lucas, saw the coyote in the street around the same time, the coyote told him the same thing.

Tomás, who speaks some English, called Customs and Border Protection in the U.S. He was told that there was no record of a Roberto Primero Luis in custody, but that there was another man with the name of Primero. Tomás and Caty knew it was possible Roberto had been given phony identification. They decided, hopefully, that Roberto might be using a pseudonym. They waited two more weeks.

When no further word came, Tomás called the coyote and persuaded him to pass on the phone number of the Mexican coyote who had taken Roberto to Altar. Whether the number was genuine, Tomás couldn’t know, but he called. The man who answered said yes, he had handled Roberto. But Roberto had not been arrested; he had been kidnapped. He gave Tomás a phone number that he said belonged to the kidnappers. Tomás called it. The man on the other end said he had Roberto. He was willing to release him and get him to Nashville, but Roberto needed medical attention first. The price for everything would be 28,000 quetzals, or about $3,600. Tomás was skeptical but agreed. He and Lucas drove to the border of Guatemala and Mexico and gave the money to an intermediary.

He never heard from the supposed kidnapper, nor the supposed coyote who had put them in touch, again. The coyote in Cubulco disappeared and turned off his phone.

By now it was July, and Roberto had been missing for a month. Caty and Lucas made the four-hour drive to Guatemala City, where they went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The officials there had heard nothing of Roberto and suggested contacting the Guatemalan Consulate in Tucson. They did, relaying Roberto’s personal information and a physical description. July turned into August.

Though the route of Roberto’s group had changed, its endpoint was the same: Twenty miles north of the border, they would near the town of Sells, on the Tohono O’odham reservation. They would emerge in a remote stretch of State Route 15 and be picked up and driven to the outskirts of Phoenix. From there, Roberto would be taken to Nashville.

The Tohono O’odham reservation is one of the largest in the country; it occupies 62 miles of the border and is larger than the country of Lebanon. Yet it has about only 15,000 residents, making it one of the least-populated places in the U.S. After riding with Vasavilbaso and Hernandez, I went to the reservation to see Ophelia Rivas, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation whose home is a few hundred feet from the border. The Tohono O’odham’s original lands, which long predated the border, and for that matter the countries it separates, extended well into Sonora. (The tribe’s name translates as “people of the desert.”)

Like most Tohono O’odham, Rivas has family in the U.S. and Mexico, and it used to be that they would go back and forth, on horseback or by wagon, later by truck. This is no longer possible. A vehicle barrier now extends along the line. Gone are the Tohono O’odham farms that used to grow from the alluvial fans here; gone are the Tohono O’odham cowboys who used to ride herd north and south. Even as the suburbs and bedroom communities of southern Arizona have expanded, the Sonoran Desert has become a more barren, and dangerous, place.

As Rivas and I looked out to the east onto a pair of hills on whose ridges she played as a girl, a Border Patrol truck went up an unpaved road into the saddle between them. The Trump administration had tried to persuade the tribe to allow it to extend pedestrian fencing across the reservation. The tribe objected, and the administration agreed to instead install a series of the new surveillance towers. The truck was headed to the base of one of these towers, which was still under construction.

For as long as she could remember, Rivas told me, migrants had come through her family’s land. But, she said, “we didn’t recognize them as migrants. We just thought of them as people coming across.” They started coming in greater numbers in the late 1990s, as “prevention by deterrence” took effect, and it wasn’t long before the Tohono O’odham felt besieged.

The chairman of the tribal government, Ned Norris Jr., attributed this to federal policy. “I believe that the government knew exactly what they were doing,” he said. “They were going to force that migrant activity somewhere, and in my opinion, they forced it onto the Tohono O’odham Nation.” With more migration, he said, came more crime. “Suddenly our folks were being carjacked. They were being held hostage in their own homes. They were being threatened.” The Mexican criminal organizations had infiltrated the reservation, he said. Members of the tribe were recruited.

Just as bad, Norris went on, was the toll that lost and sick migrants had on the tribe’s already threadbare services. They were treated gratis at the hospital. The Tohono O’odham are supposed to be reimbursed by the federal government, according to Norris, but it is millions of dollars in arrears. When migrants die on the reservation, the Tohono O’odham must pay Pima County for the medical examinations. Half of the police’s man-hours are given over to migrants.

Rivas and I left her home and descended a sandy track to the border. Once, when she was a girl, she told me, a man turned up in the yard, haggard and worried. He had been traveling north with his wife and daughter, who had stopped, exhausted. He had continued on to find help. Rivas’s grandfather hitched up a wagon and took the man back into the desert to retrieve them.

Standing on the borderline, we looked onto a palimpsest. Stretching east to west was the new vehicle barrier, composed of hulking steel posts, not as much of an eyesore as the pedestrian fencing outside Sasabe but hideous enough. Running parallel to that was the “old fence,” put here long ago, a waist-high line of barbed wire rusted into quaintness. Between new and old was a small grave site, a circle of sun-bleached stones. This was where Rivas’s grandfather and the migrant had buried the man’s wife and daughter, whom the desert killed.

On the morning of Sept. 9, a Sunday, Caty was at church with her mother when she received a call from the Guatemalan Consulate in Tucson. A Guatemalan ID bearing Roberto’s name had been found on a body retrieved from the desert. The official told Caty that this didn’t mean the body was Roberto. The medical examiner was determining if the fingers on the body could be printed.

Two weeks later, the official called again. The fingers had yielded prints. They had been run against the Guatemalan government’s fingerprint database. There was a match.

At the airport in Guatemala City, Lucas and Eufemia were taken to a waiting room where Roberto’s remains would be offloaded. There they met three other families. The plane from Los Angeles containing their children was supposed to arrive at 6 a.m. but was delayed by fog. While they waited, Lucas and Eufemia fell into conversation with Augusto and Cecilia Mejia, who were there to retrieve their son, César. It was the first time Cecilia had ever been to an airport.

César, too, had died in the desert, she told Roberto’s parents. She said they didn’t know why César had gone north. He’d had a good job at a tile factory, a new wife, a house. Lucas confessed that he felt the same way about Roberto. He said, “He was young and had no reason to go to the U.S.”

The flight was four hours late. When the long, rectangular cardboard coffins containing the remains were finally brought into the waiting room, Cecilia asked if she could open César’s. She wanted to make sure it was him. How could she be sure? She hadn’t seen him in so long. Augusto told her they would wait until they got to the funeral home.

Cecilia asked an airport employee who was with them how often the bodies of migrants arrived.

“Every day,” he told her.

At the same funeral home, in Guatemala City, the coffin containing Roberto was opened. In it was a Styrofoam container with his remains. Lucas and Eufemia didn’t open it. Instead, they put it into an ornate gray metal coffin and that into a hearse that followed them back to Cubulco, where the town turned out for Roberto’s funeral. A procession filled the street in front of Rokuzzo, where the wake was held. Ten Cubuleros then carried the coffin on their shoulders to the graveyard. There, Lucas had built a simple red brick sarcophagus for his son.

Not long after the funeral, I went to Cubulco. At the Sunún family’s grocery, I found Caty tending the register. When I said why I was there, she began crying. Tomás and Magdalena were in the store, too. They took me to the faintly lit back room, near a conveyor-belt oven that was pumping out tortillas. Men carried sacks of animal feed in and out. On a table was a small altar with a statuette of the Virgin Mary and a burning candle. Above the doorway hung a framed portrait of Caty and Roberto on their wedding day.

As Caty and I spoke, she gently swayed a hammock. Inside, swaddled in blankets, was her son, asleep. He was born a few days before Roberto’s remains were repatriated. I asked his name. “Roberto Tomás Emmanuel,” she said. “But we haven’t been able to formally name him yet. The government hasn’t sent Roberto’s death certificate.”

Late in the conversation, Caty told me that one of the other Guatemalan migrants in Roberto’s group, a young man named Santos, was from Cubulco. He was, in fact, a distant cousin of Caty’s. Santos and Roberto had met on one of the buses and figured out their connection. They were paired by the foot guide before the group went into the desert. The guide gave them a phone to use if they got separated from the group. It was from this phone that Roberto had last tried to call Caty.

After Roberto went missing, Caty called the phone, again and again, for weeks. It was always off. Then, one day, Santos answered. He told her what happened.

Toward the end of the trek, he said, he and Roberto were nearing the rendezvous point where they would be picked up. But they were dehydrated and exhausted. Santos couldn’t go on. He collapsed. The guide wouldn’t wait, but Roberto refused to leave Santos. He poured what little water they had left into Santos’s mouth. He prayed over him. Santos revived, and, now separated from the group, they pushed on. The guide called them, gave them directions. They were so close, Santos recalled.

Roberto collapsed. There was no more water, no shade to rest in. Santos didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to leave Roberto, but he believed that if he stayed with him, he would die himself. They would both die. So he left.

Santos didn’t see Roberto die, he told Caty, but he also didn’t see how he could have made it out alive.

“He seemed to feel bad about leaving Roberto,” Caty told me.

She couldn’t be sure from Santos’s story that Roberto had died in the desert, so she had held out hope, to the end.

She had never told Roberto’s family any of this.

As I was leaving the grocery, I told Tomás that I’d like to come back to speak with him about Roberto. He shook his head sternly.

“I don’t need to remember that,” he said.

Tomás had wanted Roberto to experience the America he had. But that America no longer existed — not for Guatemalans, at any rate. Of the 860,000 people apprehended by the Border Patrol in 2019, more than 265,000 of them were Guatemalan, the single largest group. In the same year, over 54,000 Guatemalans were deported. Tens of thousands more have been detained. Several Guatemalans have died in these facilities, among them a teenage boy from a village near Cubulco. Most of the detainees have been caught near the border soon after crossing, but many have been arrested in the interior, in raids on the kinds of businesses and neighborhoods that Roberto would have been working at and living in. In April 2018, federal agents arrested 97 people, many of them Guatemalan, in a meatpacking plant near Nashville.

In Tucson, after Roberto was positively identified, I discussed his case with the Guatemalan consul. When I asked whom in Roberto’s family I should contact, the consul told me that it wasn’t clear. His widow and his family were arguing over who would receive the body at the airport. Before I spoke with Caty, I noticed that her parents’ store was a matter of feet from the Rokuzzo barbershop. I asked if she ever went there to say hi to Roberto’s brothers. No, she said. “They talk about me behind my back.”

Roberto’s parents lived in the hills above Cubulco, in the same three-room wood-slat house that Lucas built after they married. When I arrived, washing hung over bucket sinks and chickens chased one another around in the mud yard. It was a Sunday morning, and I suspected that they would be at church, so I came with a basket of fruit and a note with my phone number, planning to leave it at their door. But as I stood on the porch, a woman stepped outside. It was Roberto’s mother.

I told her who I was and why I’d come. She began crying. I apologized, offered my condolences and was preparing to leave, when she began talking about Roberto. She spoke as though he had only just died.

When I told her I had come from the U.S., the place where her son was now supposed to be, her thoughts turned to the coyote. She grew angry thinking of that man who “left my son in the desert,” she said. “That ungrateful, ungrateful man.” But then she returned to Roberto, recounting the moment when she learned that he was leaving. “He made up his mind to leave in a matter of three days,” she said. “In three days, he realized he had to make that journey. I told him no. But he didn’t take my advice.

“Well, he’s gone, right? He’s by God’s side. But we’re still in pain, yes. It hurts because he was a very smart man. He was a hard-working man. Yes. He was kind.”

She had been told nothing of her son’s death by the Guatemalan government, nor for that matter by the American one. When I told her I had been with the medical investigator in Arizona when Roberto’s body was retrieved, she had many questions. “I wonder if he was there for many days, suffering,” she said. “Do the immigration officers go to that place often? Why did it take months until they found him?” Finally she asked, “Did they take pictures when they found him?”

I told her yes, and I had them, but they were upsetting. She didn’t hesitate before answering: “I would like to see them. It doesn’t matter, because we have experienced that pain already.”

We went into a bedroom, where we were joined by Roberto’s younger sister, Nohelia. On the wall were photographs of Roberto, in the corner a black case containing his saxophone. Nohelia brought in two plastic chairs, and Eufemia and I sat next to each other, while Nohelia sat on the bed behind us. I opened my laptop, brought up the file with Roberto’s autopsy photos and began scrolling.

“I’m sorry” was all I could think to say. But Eufemia didn’t look grief-stricken. She was concentrating intently on the images.

We looked at the first photographs, of Roberto lying facedown on Bird Nest Hill. “They found him stuck on the ground?” she asked, as doubt overtook her face. Roberto was unrecognizable, and she seemed not to know whether to believe this was him. After all, she had not seen him since he left Cubulco. She had not opened his coffin after it arrived at the airport. “But that’s not him, right?” she asked again. “That’s not Roberto?”

I assured her it was. She motioned for me to continue scrolling. We arrived at an image of his face, with the mud-filled eye sockets and the skeletal hand pressed to his cheek — and the hair, still looking good. She didn’t cringe, or even blanch. She looked up at a photograph of him on the wall.

“He was a handsome boy,” she said. “Look at him.”

“When he was here, people called him Gringo,” Nohelia said.

I brought up a picture that the Tohono O’odham detective had taken, the most striking image in the file. It showed Roberto in the foreground, while beyond stretched the desert, seeming to emanate from but also culminate in him. Hills, basins, hills, basins, a mild golden glow, a ribbon of blue above. You could see deep into Mexico. Eufemia gazed at it for a long time.

“He walked all this,” she said.

By James Verini

Aug. 18, 2020

This article was written with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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Source: How U.S. Policy Turned the Sonoran Desert Into a Graveyard for Migrants