A DETENTION CENTER VIGIL THAT DEFIES LA MIGRA
By David Bacon
Capital & Main, 3/5/18
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-detention-center-vigil-that-defies-la.html
https://capitalandmain.com/a-detention-center-vigil-defies-la-migra-0305

Paola, after the phone call

Paola was standing outside the West County Detention Facility, a prison in Richmond, California for 150 to 300 people awaiting deportation, when she got the phone call.  She’d been fearing it for days.  Florencio, her husband, was in another detention center in Arizona, calling to tell her that la migra (immigration agents) had caught him in the desert, walking north with a dozen others.

Paola (not her real name) hadn’t spoken to Florencio for several weeks, not since the day before he crawled into the luggage compartment of a bus in Puebla in southern Mexico.  The bus, he hoped, would take him close to the U.S. border.

It had already been a harrowing journey for himself and Paola’s brother Lorenzo.  «After we left Guatemala and crossed the river into Mexico, we wound up in a kind of camp in Chiapas,» Florencio recalls. «There were hundreds of people there.» When the day to leave on the long trip north finally arrived, the coyotes running the camp organized a kind of shape up.  It was not that different from the stories told by an earlier generation of migrants, the braceros (contract farm laborers), who remember being herded together at Mexican way stations, inspected and shipped to the border between 1942 and 1964.

Vigil participant

«Different coyotes called us by numbers, separating us into groups,» Florencio says.  «Then they put 80 or 90 of us into the back of a truck.  There was so little space we had to stand pushed up against each other like sardines.  It was a bumpy ride, and soon people began to get sick and faint, especially the pregnant women.  They stopped the truck and gave us pills and lemons, but people were already throwing up and the smell was terrible.»

The ride resumed, but after 12 hours the people inside began to bang on the walls.  Hearing the noise, the driver pulled over.  «He let us out and told us to run around a little,» Florencio says.  «Then we got back in, and it was another 12 hours.»  When the truck got to Puebla, Florencio called Paola to tell her he was coming.