The Weight of Shadows (27 page)

It should go without saying that the suffering of migrant women doesn't end at the border. A recent investigation by PBS found countless women who work as field hands in the United States suffer sexual assault and rape by supervisors, hiring managers, foremen, and other field hands. Many of the women who were interviewed by PBS reported their experience of sexual violence in the fields had been continuous because the perpetrators were either in positions of power or they exploited the women's immigration status and fear of deportation to keep them quiet. Undocumented women who are stalked or physically abused by spouses and partners find themselves trapped, without recourse, because even though these women technically have the right to seek help from the police and social services, these possible interventions are often trumped by punitive legislation aimed at punishing immigration offenders. What little attention is given to the sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological victimization of undocumented women often focuses on the individual actors involved. The aforementioned Amnesty International
report found the perpetrators of sexual assaults weren't only coyotes, as official narratives would suggest, but also other migrants, state officials, and law enforcement agents. The few media narratives that focus on the individual perpetrators of sexual violence against migrant women before, during, and after their border crossings invariably have certain racial and ethnic trends arise in their stories without interrogating why. The first sentence of an article published by
Fusion
under the heading “JUSTICE” reads: “Before they can reach the American Dream, many migrant women have to survive a Mexican nightmare.” But it would be incorrect to assume this nightmare begins or ends in Mexico or that these racial trends have any bearing on a perpetrator's status as a sex offender. If we draw on the mountains of evidence that exist regarding sexual violence, we would understand that if any ethnic or racial group of women is isolated for consideration, these trends invariably arise, because sexual assault, like most other forms of violent crime, is intra-racial. Studies have also consistently shown that violence against women, committed by men, cuts across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic status: that poor men, like rich men, rape women; that Mexican men, just like white men in the United States, rape women. This means that if undocumented women suffer more sexual violence than women in general, it is most likely due to other factors, like the power imbalances built into clandestine situations of migration, and the added structural vulnerabilities created by the gendered experience of undocumentedness, both of which arise as a matter of policy.

“Is everyone here pleading guilty because they're guilty?” asks the judge.

One public defender adjusts the black headset on one of the prisoners so he can clearly hear the voice of the translator. If he doesn't speak good enough English to understand,
this is maybe the most helpful thing the public defender will do for him.

“Sí,” say the men and woman.

“Yes,” says one of the men.

His public defender leans over and instructs him to answer in Spanish.

“Sí,” he says.

“All answer ‘yes,'” says the interpreter.

I wonder how things that are so self-evidently farcical—so absent of any legitimate orientation toward justice—can be called justice. These chambers, the robes, the pomp, the ceremony—for what? I wonder what the judge believes she's doing, if she doesn't realize she's nothing but a manager for labor flows, part of the mechanism that wrings work and political capital from these human beings and their families in the form of suffering and exploitation.

Attorneys have instructed each detainee to take a plea deal, a deal that has been influenced by many individuals, except for the detainees. The judge will ask each group of eight if they understand what's happening, and they'll all answer in the affirmative, even if some of them don't. It's clear to me that at least one man before the judge speaks an indigenous language and only speaks enough Spanish to parrot the other prisoners. Out of nearly eighty people, only one man refuses to enter a plea of guilty. He refuses angrily. The judge dispassionately informs him that he'll be held in detention without bail for an indeterminate amount of time. A thick-necked US marshal unchains him from the other prisoners and leads him out of the courtroom. In their plea agreements, the prisoners have been made to forego their right to a trial, not that a trial would help them, and to engage in a kind of theater of adjudication where everything has already been decided for all of them. No one has been thoroughly interviewed by his or her attorney, and no one will be. The women will not meet with trained crisis counselors who might be able to build a
case for a U visa. This is an assembly line, a charnel house for justice's hollow bones.

Each person in the court will have “illegal entry” put on his or her permanent record, a record that through technology is becoming ubiquitous and impossible to ever outmaneuver. They have all had their biometric data captured by having their fingertips digitally scanned and linked to each blemished record so that their own bodies can and will be used against them by the state. Programs like Secure Communities (now defunct) cross-reference booking data at local precincts and federal databases so that any immigration discrepancy would mean being detained for up to two extra business days without charge while ICE agents were sent to get you. The program was recently discontinued because it failed in its stated goal of improving public safety. The Obama administration touted the program's discontinuation as part of so-called immigration reform, but the program was drastically expanded during Obama's first two years in office. In 2008, when George W. Bush was still in office, Secure Communities was operational in fourteen jurisdictions throughout the country. By 2013, all 3,181 jurisdictions (within fifty states, the District of Columbia, and five US territories) were cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security's deportation regime. Eliminating specific programs without changing the underlying conditions in which they exist leaves the door open for this back and forth, which generates political capital according to what's needed at the time by the party in charge.

The same US marshal stands motionless, staring into the middle distance until it's his time to retrieve another group of chained prisoners. He stands too close to a seated detainee and gestures for him to rise by placing his hand horizontally in front of the man's line of sight and moving it upward. He points his index finger at the spot on the ground where he wants him to stand, and then he traces the path he wants
him to follow with the same finger. One prisoner looks underage, one is clearly in physical pain, another struggles to keep his eyes open. When they get to their places behind the table, their public defenders put the headsets on their clients' ears and stand behind them doing nothing. The judge reads through the same script. The prisoners answer in the affirmative. The translators translate. The public defenders continue doing nothing. More scripts. A built-in space for the judge to say a few “in-the-moment” words. As with each group, she reprimands this one, some might say gently, for “not doing it the right way.” I guess she means that if only they had decades to wait, or a million US dollars to buy an EB-5 (a visa for immigrant investors), they wouldn't be taken away in shackles.

As the court is drained of people, it becomes so quiet that every small sound seems heightened, acute. The dragging and crashing of the chains is so crisp I can almost feel the materiality that produces each sound, the footfall of each measured step the US marshal takes. The short squeak his rubber boot heels produce as he pivots. The stressed breath working its way through each of the prisoners' tensed bodies. High-pitched aspirations through swollen, irritated, dried-out passages. Aspirations through teeth. The concussion of the chamber door slamming shut.

Streamline is a grotesque spectacle. One of the cat's nine tails. An added layer through which migrants are churned to further criminalize their movements and compound their bodily and psychological sufferings. Even if Streamline weren't here, something else slightly more “palatable” would be. Even if judges had the power to use their discretion, their discretion would often conclude similarly. The stenographer stops hitting her keys. The translators remove their headsets. A US marshal motions for the few observers to exit the court. Tomorrow it will all happen exactly as it did today.

There's a small group of dedicated people who gather here
from time to time to block buses from leaving the facility, but the majority, the “white moderate,” is always elsewhere, watering his or her lawn, going to indie shows, attending gallery openings to appreciate Mexican-themed art. They never make it down here.

The sun is so glaring, the sky looks like a glittering opal. It's lovely. My mouth becomes a faucet and black creeps in from the edges of my field of vision. When I can see again, I'm holding onto the top of a metal trashcan, looking down into a pool of my saliva soaking into a cardboard pizza box. I look up to the street where a young white girl, maybe five, wearing an oversized green bow in her hair, walks down the sidewalk holding her father's hand, while inside the people who've just been processed are loaded onto buses and will be locked in cages for attempting to get what she was given at birth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My partner, Caitlin Roach, spent many mornings, afternoons, and evenings grinding away at drafts of this manuscript with me. Without her curiosity, economy of language, ferocious intelligence, and love, this book would not exist. Conversations and interactions with countless individuals helped me to better see the truth of my situation and the situations of others like me. I would like to acknowledge the essential work being done by groups like No More Deaths, Frontera de Cristo, and the Colibrí Center for Human Rights. Individuals involved in those groups showed me what it means to live in solidarity with others. Thank you.

Thank you to Octavio for transgressing and living, despite so many things. Thank you to Yoli and Martín for always fighting for me and for each other. Thank you to Yoli, in particular, who taught me that all information needs to be interrogated, especially information presented as truth, and most especially truth presented by authority. Thank you to David Lazar for encouraging me to trust my mind and spirit on the page. Thank you to Jeff Porter, John D'Agata, Robin Hemley, and Patricia Foster for helping me hone my voice, and for the support they've given me throughout this project. Thank you to my agent, Rob McQuilkin, and editor,
Gayatri Patnaik, who believed in this project from the beginning. Thank you to all the people who live and breathe resistance. The courage, integrity, and rage of the people I've lived among, loved, and struggled with, made this book.

NOTES

Please note that page numbers are not accurate for the e-book edition.

Many names and identities have been obscured in a variety of ways and to varying degrees. Some locations were visited multiple times. The narrative of this memoir suggests that things progressed in a linear fashion, which was generally the case, but some spans of time were compressed for narrative purposes.

Page 2:
The Sig Sauer website states, “The P229® DAK™ is the standard pistol of the Dept. of Homeland Security and the U.S. Coast Guard who selected the P229 after a 3 million round grueling torture test. A favorite among law enforcement professionals, the P229 offers compact size, choice in firepower of 9mm, .357 SIG or .40 S&W, tactical versatility of an accessory rail, double-action only and the unbeatable performance that only comes from SIG SAUER® all in one package.” The Secret Service is couched within the Department of Homeland Security, as are the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). These three latter agencies make up the immigration apparatus of the federal government. Generally ICE is the investigative branch that handles investigations, apprehensions, and raids in the interior of the country. CBP handles the so-called border, even though the border has been made to extend well into the landmass of the country (as will be discussed later). USCIS acts as the administrative branch.

Page 2:
The forty-five-cubic-inch temporary stretch cavity is based on Evan Marshall and Edwin Sanow,
Stopping Power: A Practical Analysis of the Latest Handgun Ammunition
(Boulder, CO: Paladin, 2001), 75.

Page 2:
An educated guess about what kind of mobile device the Secret Service likely uses to send electronic messages was based on information found in Suzanne Choney, “Obama Gets to Keep His BlackBerry,” NBC News, January 22, 2009,
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/28780205/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/obama-gets-keep-his-blackberry/#.VfcxU2RViko
.

Page 2:
Obama family Secret Service code names: “11 Great Secret Service Code Names,”
Time
, n.d.,
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860482_1860481_1860422,00.html
.

Page 5:
It should be clear that I have no idea if the “two men at table fifty-six” were actually Secret Service agents.

Page 6:
The “three ten bar,” as it is colloquially referred to, is still in effect. It is now possible for some qualifying individuals to apply for a waiver. Under the current law, spouses and children of US citizens and lawful permanent residents are allowed to apply for a waiver of the bar before leaving the country for consular interviews if they can demonstrate that their departure would result in “extreme hardship to a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent spouse or parent.” The most current information about the bar can be found on the application itself, which at the time of publication of this book could be found here, “Instructions for Application for Waiver of Grounds of Inadmissibility,” I-601, US Citizenship and Immigration Services,
http://www.uscis.gov/i-601
. At the time of my writing this chapter, Octavio would not have qualified for this waiver.