Mary Fontana fiction short story Rio Grande Roulette

Rio Grande Roulette

by Mary Fontana

Scene 0. Start from the premise that you love your children.

This should go without saying, as it does for every well-off white woman pushing her stroller down the sidewalks of Park Slope or Noe Valley. It should not be controversial to assert that you feel for your children that same surging, unassailable, sacred love that Americans everywhere feel for their children. Yet we must begin here, because we too read the comments under every news story spotlighting the sufferings of migrant children at the border: what horrible, callous, stupid parents these kids must have, to bring them on such a journey. 

So we want to make it clear up front that you care deeply for your children, since—for the purposes of this story—you are also brown-skinned and poor, were born well south of said border, and will never set foot in an American neighborhood as tony as Noe Valley, unless you get there by subterfuge, by criminal enterprise, by—well, we’ll get to all that. As you navigate this adventure, remember that you love your kids. You want a good life for them. You would do anything to save them. 

Scene 1. When our story begins, you live with your extended family on a small coffee farm in the highlands of a populous Central American country. It’s beautiful—the trees, the rainy afternoons, the shadowy folds in the mountains—but there’s no work. Well, that’s not exactly true. There’s plenty of work, but there’s no money—no paying jobs to be had in the highlands. And caring for your children, whom you love, requires cash: for schoolbooks, shoes, food that isn’t coffee beans. Do you:

A. stay on the mountain, shaded by the same extravagant foliage that shades the red coffee berries, to experience the exquisite sensations of hunger in the loving company of your parents and children? Go to Scene 2.

B. move your family to the city? Go to Scene 3.

Scene 2. You try to stay on the mountain. You manage for a year, two years. The house gets smaller, the children bigger. Your mother’s health is failing. Your oldest child has learned as much as she can in the local school, but you can’t afford to send her away to university. One year, two, even ten—eventually you accept that the mountain’s beauty is not enough for a family of five to live on. 

Go to Scene 3. ¹ 

Scene 3. Years have passed since you moved to the city. Now you sew cheap jeans for American bottoms ten hours a day, six days a week, taking home the equivalent of twenty-four dollars every Saturday. In the highlands, this salary would support a comfortable living, but here in the city it runs through your hands like water. Luckily your husband also found work—not in another maquiladora, since they prefer women, but at a tire repair shop. He took over the business when the old boss retired. Now your oldest two children help there after school, dunking the tires and marking where bubbles stream out. You live in a colonia on the outskirts of the city, in a pallet house with a swept dirt floor. 

One morning your family receives a message that will change your lives forever. Your husband—cracker of bad jokes, whose big grease-stained hands are deft and gentle—sees an unknown number come up on his phone. A member of the local gang has noticed that his tire repair shop is doing rather well. Unfortunately, this success will no doubt make the shop a target for delinquents. To forestall robberies, broken windows, threats to the customers, etc., the gang offers its protection. They will naturally require a monthly fee, in cash.²  If this cuota is not paid, they can’t be held responsible for anything bad that might happen. You and your husband confer. Will you:

A. acquiesce, and scrape the money together for the first cuota? Go to Scene 4.

B. refuse to pay, and continue with your regular routine? Go to Scene 5.

C. report this extortion scheme to the police immediately? Go to Scene 6.

D. make plans for you and all your family to leave the city at once? Go to Scene 10.

Scene 4. Paying the cuota wipes out your meager savings, plus your entire month’s wages and most of the recent earnings from the tire shop. You borrow small sums from neighbors, an uncle, a friend, and pool them together so your family can finish out the month with food on the table. You can’t imagine how you’ll make the cuota next month, with savings and loved ones already tapped. When you think things can’t get any more bleak, your husband receives another phone call: with crime in the neighborhood climbing, the gang will require a larger payment next month. Do you:

A. acquiesce, and scrape the money together for the next cuota? Go to Scene 4. Each time you repeat Scene 4, the cuota increases by 20%.

B. refuse, and continue with your regular routine? Go to Scene 5.

C. report this extortion scheme to the police immediately? Go to Scene 6.

D. make plans for you and all your family to leave the city at once? Go to Scene 10.

Scene 5. The night after the cuota is due, the tire shop burns to the ground. Half your family’s livelihood: gone. Also, your husband begins to receive death threats; the gang cannot tolerate defiance. Your options now are to:

A. continue with your regular routine, hoping the threats are hollow. Go to Scene 7.

B. report the arson and threats to the police immediately. Go to Scene 6.

C. make plans for you and all your family to leave the city at once. Go to Scene 10.

Scene 6. Look: here’s the deal: the police are outnumbered, underpaid, and inundated with cases just like yours. They will not help you. In fact, they may make things worse. Some of them are actually on the gang payrolls, compensated to look the other way—or worse, to hold while the sicarios punch. ³

And you know all this already. You’ve seen it play out with your neighbors, your relatives. Which is why we don’t believe you would really choose this particular adventure. Go back and choose again.

Scene 7. One day your husband does not come home. No one in the neighborhood has seen him, or if they have, they won’t speak of it. The neighbors also have husbands. You cross and recross the city, visiting hospitals, police wards, morgues. Weeks go by before his body is found, dumped on the outskirts of town. Terrible things have been done to it. To him. We’re so sorry. We know you loved your husband—yes, even though we did not establish that fact at the beginning of this story, we’re confident you loved him deeply. 

Later that year, your family receives another message. Maybe it comes to your only daughter, who is fourteen years old and likes to draw birds in her school notebooks. A gang member thinks she is beautiful and wants her to be his novia. This is not a request. Or maybe the message is delivered to your oldest boy, your thirteen-year-old, who can bounce a soccer ball between his knee and turned-up ankle fifty times without dropping it. A local gang thinks your son is more than old enough to run errands for them. Really, it’s shocking he hasn’t already been conscripted. Once they reach a certain age and ranginess, a certain look adjacent to adulthood, all the boys in this neighborhood will either join a gang or quietly disappear. ⁴

Or maybe the message is for you, and the gang just wants another payment—not for any business this time, since your family no longer has one, but for personal protection. Do you:

A. refuse, and continue on with your regular routine? Go to Scene 8.

B. acquiesce? Let them have your son, your daughter, more protection money? Go to Scene 9. 

C. make plans for you and all your family to leave the city at once? Go to Scene 10.

Scene 8. No, you don’t. Your beloved has been murdered. Too well you know what this choice would cost. Go back and choose again.

Scene 9. Even as you deliver on the gang’s demands, you know you are attempting the impossible: trying to placate a many-headed monster that will never be satisfied, that will always take more, as long as more remains to take. Perhaps you managed to find the money for this cuota, but what about next month? Or perhaps it was your son or daughter who purchased this uneasy, heavily qualified peace. If so, you struggle with rage, shame, guilt—because your child, whom you would do anything to save, has paid the price for your family’s continued existence. 

In any case, it’s a peace that does not last. (Could you have borne it if it had?) Your family now has the gang’s attention, and it’s only a matter of time before your (son/daughter) does not come home. No one in the neighborhood has seen (him/her), or if they have, they can’t speak of it. The neighbors also have sons and daughters. 

You cross and recross the city, visiting hospitals, police wards, morgues, for weeks—until the body is found, dumped on the outskirts of town. We’re so sorry, truly. We know you love your children. But it’s too late now to choose differently. 

Later that year, your family receives another message. The gang has designs on another of your kids. Do you:

A. refuse, and continue with your regular routine? Go to Scene 8.

B. acquiesce? Go to Scene 9.

C. make plans for you and all your family to leave the city at once? Go to Scene 10. 

Scene 10. Finally: you’ve made up your mind to leave the city. You have a little money, if it didn’t all go to the extortion scheme. You’ve got your husband, maybe, and two to three children. You have your family back on the coffee farm—those that haven’t moved to the city, or passed away (your mother died three years ago). Like most families in your neighborhood, you also have a (cousin/ sister/ uncle) in the United States. Do you:

A. return to the coffee farm? Remember you are marked now, and danger may follow you. Go to Scene 1.

B. move to another city in Central America, and try to start over? Go to Scene 11.

C. go to the US embassy to apply for asylum in the wealthiest country in your hemisphere? Go to Scene 12.

D. set off immediately for the United States, where millions of your compatriots have already sought safety? Go to Scene 13.

Scene 11. New city, old demons. The same gang that threatened you before has a presence here, too: the most powerful gangs are transnational and well-networked.⁵ Even if you managed to escape the tentacles of that particular gang, power abhors a vacuum: anywhere you go, you find yourself in the sights of another gang, another extortion scheme, another threat to your son or daughter. Only the poorest and least populated areas of your country are spared from gang control, and you can’t eke out a living in those places. Do you:

 A. return to the coffee farm? Remember you are marked now, and danger may follow you. Go to Scene 1.

B. move to another city in Central America? Go to Scene 11.

C. go to the US embassy to apply for asylum? Go to Scene 12.

D. set off immediately for the United States? Go to Scene 13.

Scene 12. No, no, no. The US embassy official explains that you cannot apply for asylum there while you’re still here. You must first set your feet onto American soil. 

You ask about a visa then, some way to enter legally. The official smiles wearily, says that most visa categories for someone like you—an “unskilled” worker, no citizen family—require you to prove you don’t intend to stay in the US. There’s no visa category for Central Americans desperately seeking safety. 

You would be willing to wait in line to enter the US legally—but now you understand that for you and your family, no line exists. You waited four tense months for this appointment. Go back to Scene 10.

Scene 13. You’ve made up your mind to travel north to the United States—that nation whose companies have long held huge swathes of your nation’s most fertile land, and whose government has funded and armed your own for years, though the only wars your government was waging were fought against its own campesinos, clamoring to share that land.⁶ The maquila where you worked for over a decade: American. Once made, the decision to go feels logical, even inevitable. Millions of your countrymen have already made this journey.

You have a specific destination in mind—not simply the vast idea of America. Your cousin in Denver sent you some money when your (business burned down/ husband disappeared/ child’s body was found), and said you should come north. Now all you have to figure out is how. You must cover a distance of some 2,500 miles. Most of that is Mexico, through which you must travel without papers. Do you:

A. attempt to ride the bus to a city on the US-Mexico border? Go to Scene 14.

B. hop a freight train? It’s perilous, but “free.” Go to Scene 15.

C. hire a smuggler to take you to the border? Go to Scene 16.

C. walk? Go to Scene 17. 

Scene 14. You board the bus in your capital city without incident, and though you can barely breathe through it, the crossing into Mexico goes smoothly. But several hours later, the bus is flagged down at a checkpoint and Mexican immigration officials haul you and your family off onto the side of the road. They want a bribe, but you have little left after buying bus tickets. You are taken to a detention facility and held for days, soundly beaten, given nothing to eat. After a week you are deported. The immigration officials kept the handful of bills that wasn’t enough for a bribe, calling it payment for a lesson. And indeed, you’ve learned something. What now?

A. Remain in the Guatemalan border city where the immigration police dumped you? Go to Scene 11.

B. Hop a freight train? Go to Scene 15.

C. Hire a smuggler to take you to the border? Go to Scene 16.

C. Walk? Go to Scene 17. 

Scene 15. Before you read further, pick a number between 1 and 10, inclusive. Remember it.

Enter La Bestia—The Beast. That’s what people call the train that runs up the tailbone of Mexico, from the state of Chiapas in the south to D.F., the capital city, where it radiates into a network of linked freight lines rolling northward to a handful of border termini. You and your (husband and) (surviving) children hop the first of a dozen trains near the town of Arriaga. You must board the train while it’s moving—ideally just as it leaves a station, before it gains too much speed—because every time it stops, armed guards step down to ward off stowaways. It is incredibly dangerous: you, your fourteen-year-old daughter, your gangly sons, are jumping onto a moving train. 

Remember that number you picked? If it’s between 1 and 5, you fare better than many. No one in your party slips off while scrambling on, or falls asleep in the night and rolls from the top of a boxcar. If you picked a 7, 8, or 9, one member of your family loses a limb to the train wheels: a foot or leg, most likely. Of course, this brings your journey to a screeching halt. Hopefully you are near a city and can find, and then afford, medical care. You may need to stay here for months while your (son/daughter/husband) recovers enough to walk. Enough, perhaps, to jump on a moving train again, or maybe you will chance the bus this time. If you picked 10, your (son/daughter/husband) was crushed to death beneath the train.

Whatever way your number came up, you can’t avoid the bandits. They ride the trains and prey on migrants that make it aboard. They take your money at gunpoint, and your backpack of provisions. You will be on this particular train for eighteen hours, and no food or drink will pass your lips.

But you find humanity, too, on the path of the Beast. In a small town in Veracruz a few women wait at the track’s edge with a grandmother look about them—worn, tender, and not to be gainsaid. As the train roars by they toss up plastic bags of bottled water, and hot burritos wrapped in foil, to the many hands extending from the train cars. In Ixtepec, and again in Saltillo, you follow other train-hoppers to migrant shelters where you can rest for a night or two. The meals are hot. You sleep on a pallet in a room crowded with strangers, with whom you feel a certain kinship. These kindnesses buoy you onward. After a week—or months, if you had to wait out an injury or repatriate a body—the train you are riding arrives at the border. Go to Scene 18.

Unless you picked 6. If you picked 6, you and your family disappear. You were last seen running for a train outside Mexico City. No one who loves you will ever learn what happened to you.⁷ 

Scene 16. Before you read further, pick a number between 1 and 10, inclusive. Remember it.

The coyote charges the equivalent of $4000 for transport across Mexico. That’s $4000 each—for you, your husband, your daughter, your—how many of you are left again? Half the fee must be paid up front. You call your family, your neighbors, and your cousin in Denver. You tell them this is the big one, the last plea. Once you make it to the US, you will be sending money back to them. This is an investment. The price of your very lives. Somehow you cobble the money together, drawing a whole circle of loved ones into debt with you. 

You meet your coyote at the appointed place and time. You and your family—let’s say you are four now—and ten other people pack into a concealed, unventilated compartment in a trailer hauling bananas. It is hot, cramped, and airless. For four days you crouch together in this small space. There are no bathroom breaks. Only once are you given food: half an avocado, a tortilla and a can of soda. Deprived of oxygen, you waver in and out of consciousness.  When the coyote finally arrives in the city of Chihuahua, a few hours’ drive from the US border, the kids are delirious. One man cannot move his legs enough to crawl out of the trailer. You spend three days in a “safe” house here, with more space than the trailer but scarcely more food.⁸

Now, that number you picked: if it’s between 3 and 7, you are lucky. The coyote is not abusive and does not suddenly raise his fee once he has you locked in a small space. If you picked a 0, 1 or 2, the coyote and his associates demand an additional two thousand dollars from each party before they will let you out of the “safe” house. Another captive in your group insists he has no one to call, no earthly way to come up with more cash. He is savagely beaten in front of you, then hauled away. You do not see him again. With a gun at your temple, you call your cousin in Denver and beg him to wire the money. Which he does.

If you picked 8 or 9, you and your daughter and the other women in the group are taken to a room down the hall and sexually assaulted. This happens every day you spend in the “safe” house.⁹

After three days, what’s left of your group rides in the back of a van to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. You have finally arrived at the border. Go to Scene 18.

Unless you picked 10. If you picked 10, you and your family disappear. You were last seen climbing into a banana trailer. No one who loves you will ever learn what happened to you.

Scene 17. Before you read further, pick a number between 1 and 10, inclusive. Remember it.

In a way, you’ve chosen the simplest option. One day, you and what’s left of your family step out your door and just…start walking. You carry little. Inside the hem of your shirt you’ve written the phone number of your cousin in Denver in permanent marker. At first there are many thousands like you, funneling out of the Central American highlands to the crossing at Tapachula. Here, you watch Mexican immigration officials, la Migra, haul waders out of the river shallows and beat them. The Mexican Migra is more feared than the American Migra, and you can see why. Somehow you manage to cross the river—on a moonless night, say. Or because you have joined up with a group of thousands, a walking “caravan,” and they can’t stop all of you. 

But there are nearly two thousand more miles to traverse. You check maps whenever you can to see how far you’ve traveled, how far you have left to travel. It’s a depressing equation. The caravan erodes slowly, some of its number picked off by the Migra or the National Guard, others defeated by days of exertion, hunger, thirst, and the poor sleep one snatches on rough ground. Still others are recruited by smugglers or decide to try their luck in some Mexican city that looks all right. There’s safety in numbers, but the numbers dwindle. The reality is, few people reach the US border by walking the entire way. 

Remember your number? 

A. If you chose a 1 or 2, you tire of walking halfway through Guerrero State and strike a deal with a coyote. Go to Scene 16. 

B. If you chose 3 or 4, you run afoul of the Migra and get deported; go to Scene 11.  

C. If you chose 5, 6 or 7, after walking for three weeks you board a bus in exhaustion. To your great shock and relief, this works: you have walked far enough to pass most of the Migra’s stop-and-search operations, and you reach the border without further incident, except for a couple of infected blisters on your feet. Go to Scene 18.

D. If you chose 9 or 10, impressive! You are one of those rare birds who actually reaches the US border by walking the entire way. Go to Scene 18.

E. If you chose 8, you and your family disappear. You were last seen walking down the road toward Tapachula. No one who loves you will ever learn what happened to you.

Scene 18. Ciudad Juárez is a city of 1.5 million people that spills down from rough-spined hills into the basin of the Río Bravo, where it tumbles right up against the international border, the portal to America, El Paso del Norte. The city is young and chaotic and colorful, and you have finally arrived in it. You talk to other migrants on the street. You walk down the bustling commercial drag of Avenida Benito Juárez and gaze at the curving concrete bridge that carries cars and pedestrians up and over the border, focal point of all your hopes. You consider your next move. Will you:

A. stay and look for work in Ciudad Juárez?  Go to Scene 3. 

B. try to request political asylum through the official port of entry? Go to Scene 19. 

C. sneak across the border; once you have crossed, turn yourself in and request political asylum? Go to Scene 21.

D. hire a coyote to smuggle your family all the way to Denver? Go to Scene 22.

Scene 19. There’s an app for that. No, really. Anyone wishing to request asylum at a port of entry must make an appointment through the government’s CBP One app. Around a thousand new appointments appear onscreen at nine o’clock each morning, distributed across eight border cities from San Diego to Brownsville. Optimistically, that’s 150 appointments each day for all of Ciudad Juárez—where some 35,000 migrants are now gathered, waiting to cross.¹⁰ And The App is glitchy. It often crashes while you’re filling in your appointment request. Its photo function has trouble recognizing dark-skinned people, like your husband (if he is still with you). 

For two weeks you try for an appointment, adrenaline coursing through you each morning as nine a.m. approaches, checking your WiFi signal, refreshing your screen. The slots vanish before your eyes. A few minutes after nine, it’s all over. Another day in which you have made no progress toward your goal.

Meanwhile, your family must pass the time in Ciudad Juárez, the city with the second highest murder rate in the world, after Tijuana. Around the commercial center, thousands of recently arrived migrants hustle for coin and jostle for space in the streets and inadequate shelters. Local criminal gangs specifically target people like you; every day you hear stories of fellow asylum-seekers who have been robbed, assaulted, raped, or kidnapped and held for ransom. Sicarios, hit men for the local gangs and cartels, wait at the end of the international bridge to pick up deported migrants—easily identified by their lack of shoelaces, which get confiscated in detention. They prowl around the packed migrant shelters, waiting for someone to walk out alone. You don’t know how long you’ll have to wait here. 

Before The App was rolled out, there was “The List:” an actual, physical list maintained by a local nonprofit, a spiral notebook—four notebooks by the end—where asylum seekers signed up to be processed. There were thousands of names on the list.¹¹ Some days Customs & Border Protection called twenty names, or twenty-five, and those people were escorted like celebrities over the bridge. Some days, no names were called. You’re not sure which system seems better: since The App was implemented, more people seem to be allowed in each day, but it’s luck of the draw; with The List, at least you knew where you stood. The question becomes moot the day a new President is sworn in. Within hours of his inauguration, The App goes dark. The people who snagged appointments that very morning were ushered across the bridge as usual; those with afternoon appointments are turned away. There will be no more appointments.

Your options, such as they are:

A. stay and look for work in Juárez?  Go to Scene 3. 

B. cross the bridge and request asylum in person at the official port of entry? Go to Scene 20. 

C. sneak across the border; once you have crossed, turn yourself in and request asylum? Go to Scene 21.

D. hire a coyote to smuggle your family all the way to Denver? Go to Scene 22.

Scene 20. Two agents wait at the top of the bridge, just south of the big brass plaque that marks the boundary between Mexico and the US. As your family approaches—weary, unwashed, carrying your belongings in plastic bags—they move to block your way. 

If you could just set foot on US soil, both American and international law would entitle you to make an asylum claim. But they physically turn you back.

Will you:

A. stay and look for work in Juárez?  Go to Scene 3.

B. sneak across the border, then turn yourself in and request asylum? Go to Scene 21.

C. hire a coyote to take your family all the way to your cousin in Denver? Asylum seems like a pipe dream now. Most of all, you dread being deported back to your home country, seeing the sweat and suffering of your journey undone. Go to Scene 22.

Scene 21. The official boundary dividing El Paso from Juárez is the river—called the Río Bravo on one side, the Rio Grande on the other. But in the city center this boundary is heavily reinforced. The river lies in a concrete channel. There’s a sturdy fence at the channel’s edge;  then a steep-walled canal running parallel to the river, lined with more chain-link fences; then a pounded expanse of dirt where green and white Border Patrol jeeps roll slowly; then another chain-link fence, with slanted rolls of razor wire at the top. 

You’re not crossing here.

Instead, one night you and your family take a bus west to the outskirts of the city, where working-class colonias straggle into the desert. Some people walk for days through murderous heat and nighttime frost, accumulating delirious thirst, feet blistered and pierced by cactus thorns. You won’t need to do that. You only need to get one step across the border. Then it’s fine if the Migra spots you immediately. You hope they do.

It’s slow going, up the rocky slope dotted with sagebrush and cholla cactus and tall, long-spined ocotillo. Loose scree threatens to break someone’s ankle, the last thing you need. But with hours of steady effort you make it to the boundary. Five years ago there wasn’t even a fence here; the desert was the fence.  Now, steel slats rise thirty feet high. Hundreds of people have broken femurs, hips, backs coming down this very stretch of wall.¹² You don’t know this, which is just as well. But you’re not prepared to cross, either. When others said “fence,” you pictured something you could climb or crawl under. Something a previous traveler might have clipped a hole through. 

But you’ve come this far, so you keep walking. The fence must end eventually. It does. By then the sun is high, your water’s long drunk, and you’ve climbed well into the hills, through terrain so rough and gullied no Border Patrol jeep will run across you here. Your youngest son leans on you heavily. You pass a crude obelisk, painted white and spotted with graffiti. Only halfway down the next hill do you realize what it meant: you’ve crossed the border. You thought you would feel elation, but you are only thirsty.

And now? If you’re reading this adventure on a weekday, you stumble down the slopes until you find a hard-packed strip of dirt, clear of cactus. You turn to follow what might be jeep tracks. After several hours, the sound of a motor in the distance fills your heart with gratitude. Two Border Patrol agents pick you up and take you to the processing center in town. Go to Scene 23. 

If Saturday or Sunday: you and your family disappear. You were last seen setting off into the desert with a gallon jug of water. No one who loves you will ever learn what happened to you.¹³

Scene 22. New coyote, new fees. You count the money hidden in your shoe. Maybe you or your husband manages to find work in Juárez, guarding a parking lot or cleaning someone’s house. Three weeks of work: maybe a hundred dollars. You get on the phone again. Somehow between your family back home, and their friends, and your friends, and the cousin, and the cousin’s friends, you scrape together half the money. The rest you promise upon arrival in Denver, praying silently that you’ll be able to figure this out when you get there. 

The coyote leads your group through the desert—not a mere public bus ride from the city center, but fifty or sixty miles. You have to avoid the patrols, which are designed not so much to keep people from crossing, but to drive them so far out into the desert that heat, thirst, and exposure bar their way. 

If you are reading this on a Sunday or Monday, your luck runs out when your group runs into some agents cutting sign on foot. They take you to the processing center in town. Go to Scene 23. 

If it’s Tuesday, things turn out surprisingly okay. Oh, it’s still a grueling journey—days of walking, little food and water, relentless sun. The coyotes hurl abuse at the slowest and point their guns at anyone who complains. One night you hear them rape one of the women in your group. Sadly, it’s no more than you expect at this point. On blistered feet you cross not only the border but the checkpoints that lie some 25 miles in, monitoring the traffic out of El Paso. Once you pass those, things turn almost luxurious: the twenty-two people in your group cram into a twelve-passenger van and roll the rest of the way to Denver. Go to Scene 25.

If you’re reading on a Wednesday or Thursday, your coyote abandons you. You don’t know if something went wrong or if this was the plan all along, but one day he tells you all to wait while he scouts ahead, and he never comes back. After a while you keep walking, until finally you reach a paved road. Spent, you sit at its edge. After many hours, the sound of a motor in the distance fills your heart with gratitude. Border Patrol agents take your entire group to the processing center in town. Go to Scene 23. 

If it’s Friday or Saturday, your coyote abandons you and you never find the road. You, your family, and everyone else in the group, all disappear. Your bodies mummify in the dry air of the Sonoran Desert. Coyotes—the furry kind—scatter your bones. No one who loves you will ever learn what happened to you.

Scene 23. The Border Patrol substation is cold. You wait with thirty other people in a cell built to hold twelve. The agents are not unkind. They bring water and crackers. You tell every badge you see that you fled your country under threat of death, and you are afraid to go back. After an indeterminate amount of time—one day? several?—you are brought into a room with an agent who speaks Spanish, somewhat, and spreads onto the table a sheaf of papers, all in English.

Look down at the shirt you are wearing. If it’s blue, breathe a sigh of relief. The agent is an asylum officer. This is your credible fear interview. You explain in detail what happened to your family. The officer listens gravely, asks questions. She determines your fear is well-founded.¹⁴ You and your children will be released while you pursue asylum. Your husband will remain in detention—not because he’s deemed a threat, or because his fear is any less well-founded than your own, but because the detention system has lots of beds for single men, and by law it must fill a certain number of them every night. Go to Scene 24.

If your shirt is red, yellow, or orange, the agent is an asylum officer, but at the end of the interview she sighs heavily and explains that as a rule, victims of “private violence” don’t qualify for asylum. It doesn’t seem to matter that your nation’s police and justice systems are so entwined with the criminal cartels that they cannot or will not ensure your safety. 

The officer says she’s sorry. She really does look sorry, and for a brief, absurd moment you feel like comforting her. You’ll remain in detention until enough of your compatriots accumulate to fill a plane. Then you will be sent home, reversing all the labors of the last several months in a matter of hours. It will be your first airplane flight. Go to Scene 11. 

If your shirt is black, or white, or any color not listed above, or if you are wearing a dress or tank top or just sitting around in your underwear reading, then the agent is a regular agent. There is no asylum officer. No credible fear interview. The statutes dictating treatment of asylum seekers—laid out by the nations of the world at the 1951 Refugee Convention, ratified by the United States through the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, and further enshrined into American law by the Refugee Act of 1980—have recently been tossed out the window. You are presented with your own expulsion order to sign. 

And then, you are offered a poisonous choice—perhaps the most difficult choice you’ve faced yet. You can bring your children with you, back to the precarity of the streets in Ciudad Juárez; or you can sign them away and leave them here while you return to Mexico, in hopes that they—after how long and with what level of certainty you do not know—will be released to your cousin in Denver, whom they have never met. 

How can you possibly agree to leave your children here? On the other hand, how can you take them back into that dangerous labyrinth across the border, where many migrants enter and never come out? These questions are unanswerable. The next morning you and your husband—perhaps with your children, perhaps not; for once in this adventure we will not make you choose—are escorted on foot back into Juárez. At the end of the bridge, lurking men look you up and down. They are noting, no doubt, your shoes without laces. Go to Scene 18.

Scene 24. Congratulations! You’re free, sort of. You have permission to remain in the United States while your case wends through immigration court. That could take years—years of relative safety for you and your children. That’s not nothing. That’s immense, in fact. You and your kids make it to your cousin’s house in Denver. The arrival is bittersweet: your husband is still detained near El Paso. Plus, you can’t work—not legally, anyway, not yet. There are jobs aplenty under the table, but you don’t want to jeopardize your chance to remain in this country free and clear. Instead, you get to work on your best hope for the future: your asylum case. Applicants who navigate the asylum process by themselves have a 15% success rate, a third of what it is for people with legal counsel.¹⁵ Upshot: you’ve got to find a lawyer. 

Flip a coin ten times, and record the number of heads.

You share your story with an intern at a low-cost legal clinic in Denver. He cautions you that your case is unlikely to succeed. Fewer than 20 percent of asylum applications from Central America’s Northern Triangle are approved—compared, for example, to a success rate of 76 percent for Chinese applicants. It’ll help if you can buttress your story with evidence, such as scars, X-rays, witness testimonies, police reports and death notices—which you would have needed to bring with you when you fled for your life, and then kept intact all these tumultous months. 

Even with proof, odds are your case will fail. Still, thrillingly, the legal clinic agrees to take you on—if you flipped at least seven heads. There will be a fee, of course. Calculated on a sliding scale, it still makes you wince, you can’t even apply for legal work authorization until five months after you file your application for asylum application. 

If you flipped ten heads, lucky you! You did manage to keep that police report, that newspaper obituary, that threatening note, folded carefully into your wallet. Miracle upon miracle: your attorney is competent and your judge attentive. After months to years, multiple hearings, stacks and stacks of carefully compiled papers, a ruling is issued. Dear God. You won. Go to Scene 26.

If you failed to rack up at least seven heads in your coin toss, you won’t be able to find an attorney willing to take you on—not for a price you can afford, anyway. You pursue your case pro se, but you are going to lose. We’re sorry. This is not a personal judgment; it’s just math. If you flipped eight or nine heads, you find an attorney, and she does her best, but the odds are too stacked against you. Close, but no cigar. There will be no offer of asylum for you or your family. That door has closed. Your choices now are to accept deportation—where at least you’ll be reunited with your husband, who will be flown home straight from detention—or to flee into the shadows, without him. 

A. If you consent to deportation, go to Scene 11.

B. If you want to remain in the United States as an undocumented family, go to Scene 25.

Scene 25. In Denver you join some 11 million undocumented people nationwide¹⁶ who have found the means to live, work, learn, love, argue, tremble, organize, suffer and thrive within this country’s margins. They keep their employment off the books. They build new homelands in miniature and from scratch. They draw support from the community of those who have preceded them and lend a hand to those who arrive after. You can live this way for decades—a good life in many respects!—though you will always be afraid. If your house is burgled, you will not call the police. You will pay into Social Security, but never get a penny of it back. Meanwhile, your kids will acquire flawless English, go to school, make friends, work mundane summer jobs. The obstacles of being undocumented in this country will accumulate for them, too, as they get older. On some level, your lives will never stop feeling precarious. Yet each year you spend here is a year none of your children were executed on their way home from school. 

Scene 26. You did it. You made it. You can’t believe it. We can’t believe it. You are one of just 7,690 Central Americans to win political asylum in America this year.¹⁷ Winning is the operative word—as in winning a prize, or the lottery. You’ve traveled grueling distances to arrive at this place—a distance measured not merely in miles. You’ve succeeded where thousands of others not all that different from you have failed. Your reward is priceless: not money, stability, or long years, but rather the opportunity to pursue these things. An empty plot in which to sow the rest of your life. Maybe you’ll start a business, send your kids to college. Maybe the local newspaper will one day publish a story about you—the successful immigrant, the model now-citizen, who achieved the American dream through hard work and persistence. This story will be true, but incomplete. Some will point to it as proof that a real road exists for desperate people to enter this country legally—and that those who come by other routes deserve no mercy. This story will elide the many other people who tried to do what you did, and failed—and the countless decisions you made, on one side of the law or the other, to finally arrive.

Yet arrive you have. You are, in a partial but nevertheless meaningful sense, safe—safe from the violence you fled in your own country, and the threat of deportation in this one. A safety in which to strive. This is just the beginning of your life in America. Go to—no, no, we’re not sending you anywhere else, ever again. This is it. You are here. Congratulations.

---