Having made the trip twice, Roberto Esparza was aware of the dangers of crossing illegally into the United States when he set out again in June.
Headed for a job in Florida, the 23-year-old pool builder had warned his wife about the unscrupulous immigrant smugglers on whom he would have to rely, and even about the perils of hiding in rail cars along the way.
Esparza’s words came home to haunt his family last week when Mexican officials and one of the smugglers informed them that Esparza and his cousin are believed to be among the 11 people who suffocated after being left in a locked grain car destined for Iowa.
“The man who did this didn’t see these people as someone’s sons,” said Leticia Rico, 45, Esparza’s mother. “This is something that isn’t even human.”
Esparza, whose stepfather was headed for Iowa on Saturday to help identify the bodies, was among thousands who risk the uncertainties and dangers of crossing the Rio Grande to fill the needs of U.S. employers each year. And each year, many of these journeys end tragically.
The train deaths underscore the debate behind demands for revising U.S. immigration policy, a topic that Mexican President Vicente Fox will put at the top of the agenda when he meets with President Bush next weekend at a summit of Pacific Rim leaders in Baja California.
Latin American officials and advocates for immigrants have long argued for some “normalizing” of the unending flow of workers over the border. The goal is better protection of their safety, dignity and rights while they are supplying crucial labor to the United States.
Fox has been frustrated that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the U.S. focus on security sidetracked that debate. But the Iowa deaths may help him put the issue back on the front burner.
“This is the continuing human cost of our failed immigration policy,” said Nathan Selser, a community organizer with Project Liberty, a non-profit legal firm in Texas that helps those coming across the border.
Mexican officials said Esparza and his cousin, Omar Esparza, 17, were tentatively identified among the dead in Iowa because one had a Mexican voting card and the other had papers from a Mexican university.
Esparza’s family said he had come home from Florida in March to see his 1-year-old son, Roberto, for the first time. But he was determined to return to the U.S. to earn money to finish the house he and his wife were building in Los Conos, a town of about 800 roughly 250 miles north of Mexico City.
“He was doing this for his son,” said Irene Godinez, 21, Esparza’s wife, who had gathered with the rest of the family at his mother’s home. “He didn’t want him not to have all the things he didn’t have as a boy.”
The two cousins took a bus to Matamoros on June 10, the family said. From there, they rafted across the river and met with their “coyote” smuggler and about 30 other illegal immigrants in Harlingen, Texas, where they boarded the train June 15.
The family says it knows this because eight days later, another young man from the village came home and said he had been among the 30. He told them that an hour after they climbed into three hopper bins, the U.S. Border Patrol inspected the train and discovered most of them.
However, the agents did not uncover the car where the Esparza cousins were hiding, the young man said. He did not know why the smuggler never reappeared to open the last car.
Esparza’s family says the smuggler was a local man who is well-known as a coyote and has bought houses in the U.S. with his profits. Esparza and each of the other immigrants had paid $1,500 for the journey.
“He could have told us something went wrong,” said Rico, Esparza’s mother. “We could have searched for [Roberto].”
The Iowa deaths were hardly the first casualties among illegal immigrants in the pursuit of the American dream. More than 2,000 have died since the United States started beefing up border security in the mid-1990s.
This year, a record number of immigrants died of dehydration and heat exposure trying to cross the Sonora desert into Arizona, where temperatures soar to 115 degrees. Mexican officials attribute the jump to the heightened border security that has forced illegal immigrants to try crossing in more remote and dangerous areas.
Many others drown trying to swim across the Rio Grande.
Many other undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans simply disappear during the journey. This year, Mexico’s consulates in the U.S. have registered nearly 1,400 reports of missing people.
Families without answers
That means fear and uncertainty for hundreds of families. Officials say family members show up on both sides of the river, looking for traces or grave sites even 10 years after their loved ones disappeared.
“There are literally thousands that are never seen again,” said Nestor Rodriguez, co-director of the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston. “And for every one, there is a family without a word.”
Bush and Fox vowed to tackle immigration reform when they met Sept. 6, 2001. But the issue was nearly forgotten as Americans suddenly became more concerned about terrorism and security than open borders.
That sentiment could be heard in the beeps of car horns passing Border Patrol headquarters in Brownsville last week. The drivers were showing support for Dagoberto Barrera, a retired school counselor who donned a Stars and Stripes outfit and planted himself behind a banner thanking the agency for “cleaning up our town.”
“We have to be very, very vigilant,” said Barrera, 70, who worked in the Education Department during the Reagan administration. “Mexico has got to start taking care of its people. We can’t be the papa for the whole world.”
U.S. reform plans modest
James Ziglar, commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, recently proposed a new legal guest-worker program for Mexicans. He said it would better control immigration flows, free agents to focus on real security threats and help the U.S. plug an expected 20 million-person labor shortage.
Many analysts say that is the most Washington could contemplate at this point.
But Mexican officials say they will not settle for anything but full reform, which includes some form of amnesty for those already in the United States. They note that U.S. labor unions support an amnesty but not a guest-worker program, which would be a temporary fix.
Meanwhile, all the dangers and contradictions of the illegal immigrant trail are heard in the stories told at night in the courtyard of the Casa Juan Diego shelter in Matamoros, near where Esparza boarded the train in June.
Last week, a Salvadoran said it took him four weeks and 10 bus rides to get to the U.S. border and that men with machetes stole half his $400 in Oaxaca, Mexico. A cook from Honduras said he was returning to the job his employer is saving for him at a steakhouse in Evansville, Ind.
And Rosa Sanchez, 45, said she was trying to figure out how to raise the money to reach her sisters in Houston. Five months after leaving Honduras, she was out of money, alone and aware that she was going to need a coyote to get across.
“You can swim,” she said, “but the river is just the beginning of the obstacles.”
