Border Song: A Story of Violence and Flight
Carmela fled to New Jersey to escape violence in Guatemala. Now she waits for the U.S. immigration system to decide if she can stay…
Carmela fled to New Jersey to escape violence in Guatemala. Now she waits for the U.S. immigration system to decide if she can stay. Meanwhile, all of the other Carmelas wait, as well.
Writer’s note: Some small edits have been made to the original.
This the story of a refugee. It is her story, but also one that is emblematic of so many other stories of so many men, women, and children who have fled violence and threats of violence, extreme poverty (which is a form of violence), environmental degradation, political and economic corruption, and the long list of ills that consume many in the so-called Third World.
Carmela is from Guatemala. She first tried entering the United States in 2011, fleeing local violence, but was turned away. She returned to Guatemala and became involved with a man who became abusive. She was raped, the police were unresponsive, and her son was threatened and bullied, and she was threatened when she tried to establish her younger child’s paternity. So she fled Guatemala a second time, traveling by bus across Mexico and crossing into Arizona. She now resides in central New Jersey with her two kids and awaits an immigration hearing.
Carmela (not her real name) says she would prefer to have stayed in Guatemala, but the violence and corruption there have made it impossible, and the United States offers her the best chance at safety for herself and her children. However, there are no guarantees that she will be given that chance, as the Trump administration makes efforts to stem the flow of refugees into the country.
We play a role in creating these conditions and, as such, are a prime driver of the mass migration that President Trump and the xenophobes who support him rail against. Our policies in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East have had the effect of creating and reinforcing hardship by endorsing corrupt despots or by destabilizing functioning societies as we put our thumb on their political scales.
For instance, the guns that flood Central America and arm the drug gangs, as well as the corrupt law enforcement and militaries, come largely from the United States. “The United States provides more small arms and ammunition to Central America than any other country does,” Alex Yablon wrote recently in Foreign Policy.
The market in the region expanded steadily during former President Barack Obama’s time in office and appears set to increase under President Donald Trump as well, according to customs data collected by the United Nations Comtrade program. Though the transactions look small compared to the multibillion-dollar arms deals the United States conducts with, say, Saudi Arabia — the United States approved $2 million to $4 million in gun sales per year to Honduras between 2015 and 2017 — the impact of such sales can be substantial in a poor country with a small population and a weak or corrupt government.
Those guns, Yablon writes, often get used by “authorities who turned them on innocent civilians,” or land “in the hands of criminals, through illicit deals involving corrupt army officers.”
“There’s nobody down there we could really trust not to sell them on the black market,” said Mark Ungar, a political scientist at Brooklyn College who studies arms trafficking, gangs, and corruption in Central America. “There’s no illusion of a difference between the state and organized crime” in the region.
Guns exacerbate the impacts of failing societies, add fuel to the burning embers, and turn the slow burn into a forest fire. Julian Borger of The Guardian wrote in December that the “long, dysfunctional relationship between the US and its southern neighbours … has cost countless lives over the past half-century.” Basically, the confluence of U.S. foreign policy and the region’s history create a toxic set of forces that “driv(e) ordinary people to leave their homes and put their lives at risk crossing deserts with smugglers to get to the US border.”
This is the context in which Carmela’s story unfolds, one of mass migration caused by an accumulation of hazards that go far beyond anything the global foreign policy elite could have envisioned when much of our human rights law was crafted, and which has ignited a fiery backlash at home and abroad against the vulnerable populations that have been forced to wander. The backlash has left the already difficult process of winning protected status significantly more difficult.
Despite this, Carmela traveled north with her two children, paying a “coyote” $8,000 to guide her family north. They traveled with eight others, using false papers and changing buses multiple times as they crossed Mexico. The coyotes would pay off the police, who would provide code numbers to the travelers. When police would board buses to check identification, she would give the officers the codes and they would be left alone.
They traveled to Ciudad Reynosa, which is along the Rio Grande in the eastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, about 11 miles from McAllen, Texas. She stayed in a stash house there that she described as “abandoned and in ruins — no water, no lights, no electricity, and hot.” After a day, the other families left with the coyotes and she was alone in the house with her children. She said she felt vulnerable, until a “young man was high on drugs” took them across the river.
She could hear helicopters in the distance and it was dark. They climbed an embankment and found a highway that they followed until they were discovered by the Border Patrol. This was near McAllen.
She made her asylum claim and was taken into custody and placed in fenced-in pens that she said resembled cages. She was temporarily separated from her children, though she could see her son in the distance.
She was eventually released and reunited with her children and sent to Virginia, which was near her sister. She was placed in an ankle monitor, which made it difficult to find work. She then traveled to New Jersey, where she has been since October.
On the day after I interviewed Carmela, a story ran on The News York Times website that added context to her story. She was lucky. She is alive. Her children are alive. Even if their lives remain in jeopardy — she is the victim of abuse and rape and her abuser currently resides in the Unite States — she still has a chance to gain some form of protection, though that chance is fleeting.
Thousands of women across Central American cannot say the same — which is why, Sonia Nazario wrote in the Times, current Trump administration efforts to slash aid to Central America and to eliminate domestic violence victims as a protected class are so egregious.
Women like Carmela are vulnerable. Political corruption and the prevalence of gangs make them easy targets. If they are abused by their husbands or boyfriends, police turn a blind eye. If they file a report, they and their families become targets — Carmela’s son was beaten several times by assailants she believes were associated with her ex-boyfriend, who is the father of her second child. She had filed a restraining order against the man, who in turn threatened to kill her. The next day, someone came to her house and shot her dogs.
She called the police, but the police didn’t show. Even when they had in the past, “all they do is pick up the bullets and tell her to go to the prosecutor to file a complaint,” Carmela said through an interpreter.
“They are not interested in resolving crimes,” Carmela said. “They are interested in showing up and filling out paperwork,” because it showed they were working. “They don’t resolve any of them.”
Carmela lived in southern Guatemala. The U.S. State Departments’s 2018 Human Rights Report on the country describe a violent and corrupt public sphere. “Civilian authorities at times did not maintain effective control over the security forces,” the report said, and “Corruption and inadequate investigations made prosecution (of human rights abuses and violence) difficult, and impunity continued to be widespread.”
“It happens in all departments,” Carmela tells me. “With most crimes, there is no action on the part of the police or the prosecutor.” Officers only “act at the behest of important people with positions of power who can pay them off or give them promotions.”
Her abuser “had contacts in the police department and would have been able to manipulate the system and have things go in his favor,” she said.
When she turned to her father for advice, he told her “‘you are wasting your time. You know how the law is here. it doesn’t work.’ My father never wanted me to get involved and make waves.”
Carmela first left Guatemala in 2011. Two of her brothers had been assaulted, one so badly that he continues to suffer from a variety of trauma-related issues. Her father, a police officer, had been active in politics as a member of Otto Perez Molina’s Patriotic Party. Molina had won the national election, but there were contested elections at the local and state levels, which led to “continuous rivalry.” Her father, who also worked as an escort or bodyguard for the mayor of their municipality, resigned his position after being “asked to do something illegal.” That lifted the limited protection her family had and she decided to emigrate.
She entered the United States by herself in 2011, but was apprehended at the border. She was detained in Dallas for three months as she tried to file for asylum. She did not have any family in the United States and lacked financial and other resources, so she was convinced by U.S. officials to sign an order to be “voluntarily returned” to Guatemala.
“The deportation officer I talked with said that since my family won’t help, I should sign the voluntary departure order,” she said. He also told her that, if she were to return, should would need to bring documentation — meaning police reports and other paperwork that would help prove persecution. When she fled north in 2018, she made sure to bring documentation of the violence she experienced.
Being voluntarily deported in 2011, however, means that the threshold of proof is higher. To qualify for asylum, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services form I-589, “you must establish that you are a refugee who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her country of nationality … because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Applicants need to establish that membership in one of these classes is “at least one central reason for your persecution or why you fear persecution.” Abused women have in recent years been included as a social group.
Because of the earlier voluntary order, however, she can only apply for “withholding of removal,” which requires that applicants “must establish that it is more likely than not that (their) life or freedom would be threatened on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion in the proposed country of removal.” This, advocates say, is a higher bar (demonstrating a 50 percent likelihood of being persecuted, rather than 10 percent under asylum), though the constant threats and actual violence faced by Carmela likely would have been enough to allow her to meet that threshold in the past. That is not necessarily the case today, as the Trump administration presses to make it more difficult for all applicants to apply for protected status.
In particular, as Nazario writes, the administration is attempting to reverse precedent and “bar victims of domestic violence from applying for asylum.”
In June, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, sought to reverse a Board of Immigration Appeals decision from 2014 that added domestic violence to the list of horrors that could qualify someone for asylum. In December, a federal court ruled that he didn’t have the authority to do that. But the Trump administration has persisted and is appealing the decision.
If the Trump administration is successful, it will leave Carmela and thousands of women like her at the mercy of the violence in their home countries. Many of the so-called migrants, Nazario writes, “are coming because they don’t want to die. This is particularly true of women, who make up a greater proportion of border crossers every year.” Central America as a region, according to a report from, is the most dangerous region on earth for women. Honduras and El Salvador remain the most dangerous Central American nation’s, but Guatemala is not far behind.
According to the U.S. State Department’s 2018 human rights country report on Guatemala, “Rape and other sexual offenses remained serious problems,” even as the “government took steps to combat femicide and violence against women,” including the creation of an alert system that resulted in more than 420 women being reported missing. Domestic violence — called intimate partner violence in the report — remains a serious issue and one that has not received adequate attention from the national police, possibly because they are complicit in the violence.
“There were numerous examples of the PNC’s failure to respond to requests for assistance related to domestic violence,” the report says. “As of September 8, the PNC reported 48 open investigations against PNC officials for violence or discrimination against women or children.”
Karen Musalo and Eunice Lee in an essay for the Journal on Migration and Human Security that focused on the causes of and responses to a surge of women and children attempting to cross the U.S. border in 2014, described violence as a chief “push” factor that drives migration from the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras).
“Gangs and organized crime have proliferated, contributing to the skyrocketing levels of violence,” they wrote in their 2017 article.
Household violence, which disproportionately impacts women and children, is at epidemic proportions. Adding to this are conditions of extreme poverty and income inequality leading to social exclusion, and depriving large segments of the population of those minimal conditions necessary to survive (Musalo and Lee 151).
A 2018 piece in Violence Against Women by Lynne Duffy explained that much of the violence is tied to “strict gender roles” and (quoting A.W. Riemann) “a product of social organization structured on the basis of gender and age” (Duffy 422).
Riemann identified the interrelatedness of femicide, sexual violence, and domestic abuse in Guatemala, with these having “similar root causes” namely, cultural devaluation of women and the pervasive impunity that comes from the civil war. (Duffy 422).
The violence, therefore, appears endemic to the larger culture, which manifests itself in high levels of insecurity, especially for Mayan and other minority women. Duffy (quoting Carey and Torres) writes that
femicide exists due to “culturally accepted practices that promote gendered violence, including the socially tolerated forms of sexual abuse, physical and emotional battery, and sexual harassment” making the lives of women and girls (quoting Russell, 2001) “chronically and profoundly unsafe” (Duffy 423).
Carmela is particularly vulnerable, though that vulnerability places her in a gray area within international refugee and asylum law. She falls into a class of potential asylum seekers who have been ignored historically. Joanne Gottesman, clinical professor of law and the director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at Rutgers Law School in Camden, told me that domestic violence victims did not have official standing in the United States to claim asylum until a 2014 ruling that found that a woman, who was fleeing a violent relationship in Guatemala, was a member of a protected class.
“Traditionally, asylum was given to certain kinds of cases” connected to political, religious and racial persecution, she said. “A lot of issues that women were facing were not recognized. (The 2014 decision) recognized that.”
Essentially, Gottesman said, the definition of an asylee “hinges on the definition of a refugee” — asylee’s apply at the border, while refugees apply in heir home country, but they have to meet the same definition: someone who is fleeing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a defined social group or political opposition to the sitting government.
“Where it gets challenging,” Gottesman said, “is that domestic violence doesn’t fit neatly into” the accepted paradigm. The 2014 decision, however, found that “married women who are unable to leave their relationships” because of violence or the threat of violence “constituted a particular social group.”
The failure to address women — along with other potential refugees, such as those fleeing environmental or extreme economic hardship — is a relic of an earlier time. Gottesman called it a “sign of the times of how the definition was crafted.”
“When I think back to the example of Guatemala and I think of the extreme poverty some of the people in Guatemala are facing,” she said. “The most extreme poverty is found among the indigenous community, who have an inability to access better jobs on account of their membership in an indigenous group.”
But economic deprivation does not qualify a migrant for refugee or asylum status, nor do the effects of environmental collapse, unless a natural disaster is involved.
Part of the reason is our longstanding nativist impulse, which tends to rear its head when international migration is at its highest. Deborah Anker, in a 1990 article, described the history of American asylum law as “a complex story formed by our historically ambivalent attitudes toward newcomers” (75). We are both cosmopolitan and nativist in our approach, both open to an “ethnic pluralism” and suspicious of “peoples of dissimilar cultures.” So, we proclaim ourselves a welcoming people, while at the same time enshrining ethnic and racial quotas in law and enacting rules that make it difficult for many fleeing dangerous circumstances to enter the states.
The Holocaust and World War II altered the refugee landscape, both here and abroad. “International outrage … spurred the development of human rights norms, including those for the protection of refugees, given positive expression in international instruments” (77). Even then, however, the United States sought ways to limit entrance by non-European refugees. Anker writes that policy makers “saw the power and utility of evoking the national historical mission (of the United States as nation of immigrants) as an instrument of foreign policy,” but the nation failed to ratify the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and it put in place quotas favoring “refugees fleeing communist-dominated countries.”
As The Washington Post pointed out in a piece on Trump’s push to limit asylum claims, the nation’s “asylum laws emerged after World War II, when the United States and other nations signed treaties declaring that political dissidents and others fleeing persecution from across the globe should not be forced to return to nations where they likely would be harmed or killed. The 1980 Refugee Act cemented those principles, and courts have upheld them.”
Political persecution was the key phrase at the time, which was narrowly defined. Women were not seen as a class in need of protection — they remained, for most of the world, second-class citizens, possessions, subject to the whims of men. Arranged marriages, often based on purely economic motivations, were still common around the globe and marital rape was not recognized as a crime in most countries, including in the United States. This was based on the absurd notion that “marriage constituted permanent consent that could not be retracted.” Women, therefore, did not require protection from their husbands and that they did not constitute a separate class or social group.
Kersti Yllo, professor of sociology at Wheaton College, wrote in a blog post in 2017 that spousal rape often is protected because of the power imbalances that exist in most marriages and because marriage is often thought to be “sacrosanct.”
“This ideology has global resonance,” she writes, “not because people on many continents were influenced by Lord Hale, but because control of women’s bodies through marriage is foundational to patriarchy.”
Attitudes are changing, she says, to reflect that “the idea that women’s rights are human rights,” with “International human rights organizations … now recognizing abuse in the private sphere as a rights violation.” That had led to domestic abuse being included as a legitimate asylum claim in. Canada and the United States, though that is now under assault here.
That leaves Carmela in limbo. She is required to check in with ICE later this year, but no date has been set for her Reasonable Fear interview, which could allow her to remain in the United States. Once she gets an interview, Carmela will need to convince her interviewer that her fear of return is real. That initial interview is likely to be with an ICE staffer. If that goes well, she would get a hearing in immigration court before a judge.
The system, however, is backlogged. There were nearly a million cases waiting to be heard nationally as of April, and almost 50,000 in New Jersey, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. And it’s costly, Carmela is facing attorney fees and other costs that could top $20,000 on top of the money she still owes her coyote.
The system is at a crisis point. More people are being swept up. Fewer are finding work. And the lawyers who work on behalf of immigrants and refugees are swamped.
In the meantime, Carmela fears she will be sent back to Guatemala and that she would “end up as just one more story.”
“What I’m fearful for is that I would have to return and face the same situation,” she said, even if he’s not in Guatemala. “He has friends.”
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Sources
Anker, Deborah. “U.S. Immigration and Asylum Policy: A Brief Historical Perspective.” In Defense of the Alien, vol. 13, 1990, pp. 74 — 85. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23143024.
“Backlog of Pending Cases in Immigration Courts as of April 2019.” TRACFed. Syracuse University. https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/court_backlog/apprep_backlog.php Accessed 17 June 2019.
Borger, Julian. “Fleeing a hell the US helped create: why Central Americans journey north.” The Guardian. 19 Dec. 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/06/us-mexico-immigration-climate-change-migration Accessed 11 April 2019
“Carmela.” In-person interview,” with translation help from Maria Juega. Interview took place at the Princeton Public Library. 4 April 2019
Duffy, Lynne. “Viewing Genderred Violence in Guatemala Through Photovoice.” Violence Against Women. Vol. 24 (4), 421–451.
Gottesman, Joanne. Telephone interview. 11 April 2019
Kerwin, Daniel. “The US Refugee Protection System on the 35th Anniversary of the Refugee Act of 1980.” Journal on Migration and Human Security. Vol. 2 No. 2, 2015. 205–254. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F233150241500300204
Musalo, Karen, and Eunice Lee. “Seeking a Rational Approach to a Regional Refugee Crisis: Lessons Fromm eh Summer 2014 ‘Surge’ of Central American Women and Children at the US-Mexico Border.” Journal on Migration and Human Security. Vol. 5, No. 1, 2017. 137–179.
Nazario, Sonia. “‘Someone Is Always Trying to Kill You.’” The New York Times. 5 April 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/05/opinion/honduras-women-murders.html Accessed 5 April
Rothman, Lily. “When Spousal Rape First Became a Crime in the U.S.” Time 28 July 2015. http://time.com/3975175/spousal-rape-case-history/ Accessed 17 April 2019
Sacchetti, Maria. “U.S. asylum process is at the center of Trump’s immigration ire.” The Washington Post. 9 April 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/us-asylum-process-is-at-the-center-of-trumps-immigration-ire/2019/04/09/7f8259b8-5aec-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html?utm_term=.6a0f909bb611 11 April 2019
Shear, Michael D. and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. “Trump Administration to Push for Tougher Asylum Rules.” The New York Times. 9 April 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/us/politics/asylum-seekers-trump-administration.html?emc=edit_ctb_20190411&nl=crossing-the-border&nl_art=&nlid=90314229dit_ctb_20190411&ref=headline&te=1 Accessed 11 April 2019
Yablon, Alex. “Trump Is Sending Guns South as Migrants Flee North.” Foreign Policy. foreignpolicy.com. 8 March 2019. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/08/trump-guns-honduras-central-america/ Accessed 11 April 2019