Where Are the Children? For extortionists, undocumented migrants have become big business.

The kidnapper sounded polite, even deferential, when she called on a Tuesday afternoon last May. Melida Lemus and Alfredo Godoy had left their clapboard house in Trenton, New Jersey, to pick up their two daughters from school. Godoy, who works in construction, was late to meet a client for whom he was building a home extension, and his family accompanied him to the project site. Melida and the girls—Kathryn, twelve, and Jennifer, seventeen—waited in the client’s living room, snacking on cookies and checking Instagram, while Alfredo walked through the house, taking specs: how much Sheetrock he’d need, how much spackle, how many two-by-fours. In the middle of the tour, his cell phone rang. The call came from a Texas area code.

“Are you the father of two boys?” a woman asked.

“Yes,” Godoy replied. “Is everything O.K.?”

“I have them here at my house,” she said.

The Godoys’ younger son, Brayan, had just turned fourteen. Small for his age, he was greatly impressed by icons of the strength he hoped someday to possess: the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Stone Cold Steve Austin. Robinson, a year older, was reflective and soft-spoken, a soccer player and aspiring mechanic. They had grown up in Guatemala, raised by their grandparents.

In the mid-nineties, Alfredo had been working as a security guard at Exclusivas, an upscale supermarket in Guatemala City that sold name-brand U.S. goods, when he met and courted Melida, a round-faced cashier of eighteen. Jennifer was born in 1996, and Robinson followed, in 1998. Both Alfredo and Melida dreamed of heading north, to seek out decent-paying work that would fund their children’s education. The prospect of leaving the kids behind was anguishing, but they’d be well cared for until Alfredo and Melida returned with a nest egg, a few years later. In 2000, the couple agreed that Alfredo would embark first on the journey to Trenton, where he had a relative who could find him a job. Melida was pregnant with Brayan; she’d wait to give birth before joining Alfredo, the next year. “That’s what we decided,” Alfredo told me, “with all the pain in our hearts.”

In New Jersey, Alfredo got steady work as a builder. Melida had a series of jobs: making cold medicine in a local pharmaceutical factory, cleaning rooms at a Best Western, and making fries at two fast-food franchises. Kathryn was born after their arrival in the United States. Meanwhile, the boys thrived in a private school in Guatemala City.

Melida and Alfredo sent money back to Guatemala to build a house for the family to live in upon their return. But life there was growing perilous. Fuelled by gang rivalries, homicide rates hovered at six times the global average, and people were dying at a faster rate than they had during much of the country’s three and a half decades of civil war. On their way home from school one day, Brayan and Robinson saw four children gunned down in the street while playing soccer, by men in a black truck. Later, Robinson was on a local bus when it was hijacked; a cop chased the teen-age culprit and shot him dead as Robinson watched. Melida’s father had been brutally robbed at gunpoint, and Alfredo’s father, a cabbage and corn farmer in the state of Jalapa, fielded phone calls from a group of local extortionists who threatened to kill his family if he didn’t pay the equivalent of four thousand dollars. When Brayan and Robinson visited Jalapa, the same men—recent U.S. deportees—stalked Brayan for his parents’ numbers in Trenton. The news heightened Alfredo’s anxiety, which worsened further when his father filed a police report, raising the risk of retribution. He called his sons and set down rules: “Don’t leave the house unless you have to.” “Don’t ever give out our phone number in the U.S.” And, as hard as it might be to follow, “Focus on your education.”

As conditions in Guatemala changed, so did Melida and Alfredo’s plans. In 2008, Jennifer crossed the border with an aunt to join them in New Jersey. Last spring, the couple decided that the time had come to send for their sons, too. They found a network of coyotes—couriers who transport migrants—recommended by friends and relatives, and settled on a fee of fourteen thousand dollars to get the boys safely to Trenton. Anticipating the reunion, the couple arranged to trade their cramped apartment for an airier place next door, where the four children could sleep in a pale-yellow attic, surrounded by the girls’ art projects. Melida got a job at a cosmetics factory that made products for a Sephora supplier—a night shift, so that she could pick up her sons from school. In March, she wrote to Brayan and Robinson on Facebook, “Soon, we will be together again—I miss you so much.”

She and Alfredo were aware of the journey’s dangers. They’d been tracking the boys through frequent phone calls, but hadn’t heard from them in three days; the last call had come just before the boys were supposed to cross the Rio Grande into Texas.

“They were lost, and I found them,” the woman on the phone told Alfredo, as he paced around his client’s living room. She allowed the boys to speak briefly with Melida. Then she said, “My brother will call you with instructions.”

America’s migrant-extortion market remains in the shadows of our fierce immigration debate. One reason is that the crime targets those who are least likely to report it. Another is that the victims of ransom kidnappings are sometimes twice disappeared: after being rescued from the stash houses where they are kept, they are often detained long enough to testify against their captors and then are swiftly deported. Some of them are informed of the possibility to seek legal relief, generally in the form of a U visa, designated for victims of crime who help law enforcement or prosecutors, or a T visa, for survivors of trafficking. Still, such protections are hard to obtain, and the price for speaking out against captors can be steep.

Shortly before Alfredo Godoy received the phone call about his sons, two men in Trenton faced trial for kidnapping a fifteen-year-old girl in Texas while she made her way from Guatemala to New Jersey, where her mother lived. The mother told police that the kidnappers had starved and abused her. “They caused so much pain for my daughter that she does not live a normal life,” she wrote to the judge. The girl would not be able to testify, “due to fear that they will see us, follow us, and do us harm.”

Fear of the police can loom as large as fear of captors, particularly in parts of the country where law enforcement is believed to detain undocumented people who come forward to report a crime. One person who did contact the police was Sonia Avila, a woman living in Texas whose teen-age son, Franklin, reached Arizona from Honduras in 2011, only to be abducted by men posing as good Samaritans and held captive in a stash-house bedroom. Franklin’s kidnappers phoned Avila, demanding fifteen hundred dollars. Otherwise, they told her, they would chop off Franklin’s ears, or kill him.

Avila called 911. When Franklin was rescued by federal agents, she agreed to testify against the culprits. The prosecutor’s last question to her on the witness stand made clear what she had put at stake by speaking out: “Now, do you realize you might have to face an immigration judge?”

“The kidnapping victims are treated the same as the extortioners,” Stephanie Taylor, an immigration attorney based in Texas, told me. “They’re considered willing participants.” Some undocumented family members who report that their loved ones were sexually assaulted or held captive for profit have been punished, rather than told of their potential right to legal protection, she said. Taylor spent the past five years at American Gateways, an Austin nonprofit that provides legal aid to immigrants, where her clients included kidnapping and trafficking victims. In one of her cases, a mother called the police in the hope that they would rescue her three children from a Houston stash house, where they were being held by a smuggler who had jacked up his fees. After apprehending the captors, authorities detained the mother and the children and placed them in deportation proceedings.

Alfredo Godoy wasn’t thinking about kidnappers when he made the crossing, in 2000. He had signed up to travel in a group of seventy-five people in April, before the summer heat cranked up, but, as they made their way from Guatemala to Mexico to southern Arizona, the scrubland felt like a kiln, while the nights were frigid. At one point, Alfredo bedded down beside a cactus in the dark; when the sun rose, he saw that he had slept next to several corpses, “just a bunch of bones inside their T-shirts.” On another night, an elderly migrant demanded that Alfredo give him his jacket: “You’re young. You’re not going to feel the cold.” Alfredo was indignant. He wasn’t sure if he could survive. But he took off the jacket and gave it to the man, convinced that God would return it someday.

Alfredo’s trip followed one of the most significant shifts in U.S. border policy in decades: the implementation of a strategy known as “deterrence through prevention.” In the early nineteen-nineties, programs such as Operation Hold-the-Line, in El Paso, attempted to block undocumented migrants’ access to traditional crossing routes. But, rather than give up, most migrants simply adapted. Instead of approaching dense cities directly, they resorted to harsher, ever more circuitous routes, increasing their exposure, along the way, to lethal threats like sunstroke, dehydration, and snakebites.

A second major change took effect in the decade following Alfredo and Melida’s arrival in Trenton. In the aftermath of 9/11, the border with Mexico came to be viewed as the site of three distinct U.S. policy wars—on drugs, on illicit immigration, and on terrorism—all intertwined in the notion of “border security.” The country built some six hundred miles of border fence, and deployed Predator drones and other instruments of aerial surveillance. The ranks of Border Patrol more than doubled, to twenty-one thousand. By last spring, as Brayan and Robinson prepared to leave Guatemala, the U.S. was devoting more money annually to border- and immigration-enforcement agencies than to every other federal law-enforcement agency combined, including the F.B.I. and the D.E.A.

One consequence of the heightened border-security measures in the past two decades is that far more border crossers have died. Between 1998 and 2012, fatalities nearly doubled, reaching a peak of four hundred and seventy-seven even as Mexican migration dipped to its lowest level in four decades. These deaths have started to decline only recently, as border authorities and volunteer groups work to rescue a greater number of stranded migrants.

Kidnapped: Brayan Godoy (left) and his brother, Robinson, were travelling from Guatemala to join their parents, in Trenton. In Texas, a woman in a white car said, “Get in!”

Another consequence has been the concentration of human smuggling under the aegis of organized crime. According to Michelle Brané, who has interviewed more than a hundred Central American migrants for the Women’s Refugee Commission, “The harder you make it to cross, the more people can charge, the more dangerous the trip becomes.” The country’s current approach to border security has made coyotes more indispensable to migrants than ever, Brané told me, and has led to the replacement of small-time smuggling operations—lone guides, in many cases, bringing migrants across the border—with sophisticated, and increasingly brutal, transnational networks. “Smuggling is not the same as trafficking,” she said. Migrants pay smugglers to transport them; traffickers are in the business of moving or holding people against their will. “But as the border becomes militarized the differences become blurred.”

Predatory groups seeking to profit from migrants’ vulnerability have flourished along the border. In 2007, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement noted an uptick in immigrant kidnappings in Arizona “related to the fact that it’s tougher to get across the border” which “makes people vulnerable to exploitation.” Opportunists known as bajadores have thrived by seeking out lost, exhausted migrants to rob or lock up in stash houses for the purpose of extortion; they have even raided stash houses to seize human loot for ransom.

“It’s exactly like Prohibition—exactly like bootlegging,” Terry Goddard told me recently. As the mayor of Phoenix during the nineteen-eighties and Arizona’s attorney general from 2003 to 2011, Goddard had presided over the explosion in border-security measures, aggressively seeking to eliminate stash houses where migrants were held for ransom. But he discovered that the source of the problem went much deeper than individual smugglers. Arizona’s harsh anti-immigrant laws made undocumented victims afraid to coöperate with law enforcement on prosecutions, and, as long as the country continued to rely on immigrant labor while giving workers few avenues for legal entry, extortionists would have access to a consistent supply of prey. “You can push down the practice in Arizona,” he said, of stash-house extortions, “and it will pop up elsewhere.” In recent years, “elsewhere” has come to mean the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas—the Godoy boys’ planned point of entry into the country.

Targeting migrants for extortion has its roots south of the border. For years, Mexico’s ransom industry thrived by focussing on the rich. In 2006, the Mexican military, with American support, began to battle the country’s drug cartels, with the paradoxical result that the strongest cartels, like the Zetas, consolidated their power. Even as they continued to traffic in lucrative specialties—cocaine, marijuana, meth—the Zetas sought out additional criminal ventures, pursuing everything from pirated oil to bootlegged DVDs. Migrants were easy prey. The cartel took over northbound migration routes, charged fees to coyotes, and began snatching migrants from the tops of freight trains riding north; they extorted victims’ families with near-total impunity.

A year and a half before Brayan and Robinson Godoy travelled north, I arrived at Mexico’s border with Guatemala, in the state of Tabasco, to join a group of nearly forty Central American women on a bus trip to search for their children, spouses, and relatives, many of whom had vanished en route to the U.S. During the next three weeks, we travelled three thousand miles along Mexico’s migrant trail, tracing the same path north to Texas that awaited the Godoys, before we looped back south, through the country’s interior kidnapping hubs. At morgues, hospitals, shelters, and mass graves, we looked for clues to the whereabouts of the missing.

In the borderlands of Tamaulipas, police in black balaclavas surreptitiously snapped photographs of us. It was here, in 2010, that seventy-two Central and South American migrants headed for the U.S. were kidnapped by members of the Zetas, then bound, blindfolded, and executed on a ranch in San Fernando, ninety miles south of Brownsville, Texas. The following year, some of the women on our trip had ventured to the ranch to search for evidence left behind by police. (Officials investigating the case had been assassinated, stalling progress.) Other women travelling with us hoped to trace ransom calls and clues they’d received from places such as Puerto Vallarta, on the country’s west coast, where a Honduran woman’s son had made his last call home, and Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, where a mother from Nicaragua believed that her daughter was being held by a sex trafficker.

On the first day of the journey, I sat beside Virginia Olcot, a Kaqchikel speaker from the rural northern highlands of Guatemala. Around her neck, she wore a photograph of her husband, Carlos Enrique Xajpot, in the hope that one of the strangers we encountered would recognize him. In August, 2009, after his work as a cobbler dried up, Xajpot left home to seek short-term employment in New York. He called his wife from Mexico’s border with Arizona just before crossing: “My love, I’m good.”

Days passed, then months, but Virginia heard nothing from Carlos. Finally, in February, she got a call. “They left your husband abandoned in the desert, but thank God we have him with us,” a man said. He demanded five thousand dollars for Carlos’s return. Virginia begged to speak with her husband. A voice cried out, “Please, help me, I’m kidnapped!” followed by the sounds of a man being beaten. Virginia, who sold tortillas from her home, found a way to pay the sum, only to be met by silence. Nearly three years later, she had left her small children in the care of relatives to try to learn what had happened to their father.

 “The Zetas’ strategy, it’s classic wholesale,” Marta Sánchez Soler, the director of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement and the trip’s coördinator, told me. “When organized crime kidnaps somebody rich, the media and police mobilize. Then the criminals feel the heat. So they realized that, rather than doing one big, flashy kidnapping of someone rich and powerful, it would be better to do a hundred small kidnappings of migrants whom nobody pays attention to.” Together, we did the arithmetic: by recent estimates, at least eighteen thousand migrants are seized in Mexico each year. If a third of their families pay a lowball ransom of four thousand dollars, that’s twenty-four million dollars, with minimal risk or labor.

Soler noted that these kidnappers are often aided by the same Mexican authorities who benefit from U.S. drug-war funds. Many local police, she said, have been known to take a cut of the ransom. Last December, a document obtained by the National Security Archive, in Washington, D.C., revealed that, during confidential questioning by Mexican prosecutors, a local law-enforcement officer said that San Fernando police had helped turn migrants over to the cartel in exchange for payoffs.

The authorities we encountered on our trip were generally indifferent, and on occasion hostile, toward the mothers. At a morgue in central Mexico, a forensics specialist suggested that Virginia and several other mothers could have come to steal corpses. In Saltillo, a Zetas stronghold, the entrance to the city’s morgue was blocked by a shootout between police and cartel gunmen, so we spent the day at a shelter for migrants that had recently been visited by researchers for migrants’-rights organizations. Police complicity was a recurrent theme in the abduction accounts that they collected. A typical story began, “My name is Nancy. I am Salvadoran and I was kidnapped from April 13 to June 22, 2009.” Federal police, Nancy said, “took the money that was given to them as a bribe to keep silent. The kidnappers told us to pay attention so that we would see that they had paid for everything. One of the men began to bother us women and sexually abuse us. Then one of our male companions got angry and tried to defend us, but he couldn’t, because they raped him, too, and then they beat him to death.”

Along the journey, in the Catholic migrant shelters where the mothers and I slept in large, open rooms, we noticed many children travelling north without parents or guardians. Shelter volunteers told us that the children were the youngest they had ever seen. Later, I got in touch with dozens of advocates and attorneys who worked with unaccompanied migrant kids in the U.S. They described a spike in caseloads, with an unusually high proportion of girls among them. Nationally, the number of unaccompanied migrant children from countries other than Mexico had increased from an annual rate of eight thousand to more than thirteen thousand in 2012.

“We’re completely overwhelmed,” Cheryl Little, the executive director of the nonprofit Americans for Immigrant Justice, in Miami, told me in the fall of 2013. She explained that undocumented children have no right to free legal counsel in court, and that the government had been slow to act in response to the new numbers. “And now we’re turning away kids who we believe do have compelling cases, and they’re ordered to be deported,” she said.

By last summer, the number of child migrants travelling alone had soared above fifty thousand, straining the capacity of the systems put in place to deal with them. The vast majority were fleeing the violence and poverty of Central America’s Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. President Obama declared an “urgent humanitarian situation” and directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to create an interagency task force, led by the head ofFEMA, to provide relief. As the governments of the Northern Triangle sought to stanch the exodus, a U.S.-funded public-service campaign flooded Honduran and El Salvadoran radio stations with songs set to marimba beats, to discourage children from crossing: “Hanging on the railcars / Of this iron beast / Migrants go as cattle / To the slaughterhouse.” In Guatemala, TV ads designed in Washington showed a teen-age boy with dreams of heading north, despite his mother’s warnings. “He who doesn’t take a chance doesn’t win,” the young man writes to his uncle before departing. In the ad’s final frame, his skinny corpse is shown sprawled on the cracked desert earth.

On the morning of May 5, 2014, a coyote picked up Brayan and Robinson at their grandparents’ home, in Jalapa. The first leg of the boys’ journey proved to be far more comfortable than their father’s. They rode in buses through the forests of Guatemala’s western highlands until they reached a hilly border town called Gracias a Dios. There, they slipped into Chiapas, changing hands to a new coyote, and called their mother to let her know that all was well. From the windows of successive vehicles, the brothers got an education in Mexican geography: the busy streets of Tuxtla Gutiérrez; the turquoise expanse of the Veracruz coastline, flanked by sugarcane fields; the bleak cityscape of Reynosa. Finally, after a week on the road, they arrived in Camargo, Tamaulipas, a small city tucked between cornfields, nearly touching Texas. The boys felt hopeful; they’d made it through the zona roja, Mexico’s danger zone. In the morning, they’d cross the Rio Grande.

The last of their coyotes explained what would happen next. In a group of half a dozen migrants, including an El Salvadoran brother and sister around their age whom they’d befriended on the journey, Brayan and Robinson would climb onto a black inflatable raft pushed by men with sugarcane poles. When they reached the outskirts of Rio Grande City, in Texas, they would look for their next guide.

“Hope you don’t mind—it was his last request.”

 

 

“Just walk straight for ten minutes,” the coyote told them. But, he explained, if they ran into Border Patrol agents first, they shouldn’t be afraid. A 2008 federal anti-trafficking statute allows child migrants travelling without parents or legal guardians to make their case before an immigration judge, rather than face immediate deportation. (The statute excludes minors from Mexico or Canada.) According to Border Patrol, some ten thousand unaccompanied children were apprehended after crossing over from Mexico in the month that Brayan and Robinson did, many of them from the Northern Triangle. If the boys were apprehended by Border Patrol, they would simply tell the truth: that they had fled from Guatemala and hoped to be reunited with their parents.

Around eleven the next morning, the children climbed from their deflating raft—it had sprung a leak, alarming the brothers, who couldn’t swim—onto Texas soil. Along with the siblings from El Salvador, who were on their way to Maryland to reunite with their parents, the boys walked through an expanse of prickly pear and cat’s claw to reach the road.

A white car pulled up, and a heavyset woman with long brown hair rolled down the window. “Children, get in!” she called. The Godoys exchanged glances with the other sibling pair. They didn’t know what their new coyote was supposed to look like, and the driver seemed insistent. All four kids climbed into the car.

Minutes later, they arrived at a single-story house with an imposing gate. The driver left the children with a man in his early twenties named Pedro and his sister, who collected their soiled clothes for the laundry and fixed them plates of chicken with rice. The kids passed the afternoon watching TV, but they soon grew anxious. They noticed that the house was outfitted with surveillance cameras, and they counted four pit bulls. Used to checking in with their parents at stops on their trip, they told the woman that they wanted to call Trenton. She asked for the number, and Brayan, breaking his father’s rule, gave it to her.

At home in Trenton, Alfredo and Melida lay awake for most of the night after speaking with the kidnapper. Per her instructions, they had wired two hundred dollars to a man named Pedro Alonso Mendez at an address in Rio Grande City, to make sure that the children would be properly fed. The next morning, Alfredo received another call from a Texas area code. It was Mendez.

“Listen,” he said. “The coyotes you hired back in Guatemala? We have nothing to do with that. This is another business.” As Alfredo recalls, Mendez went on, “I need you to give me five thousand dollars, to get this conversation started.” A wire transfer would have to be sent within the next hour.

“But I don’t have that kind of money,” Alfredo said. “I’ll have to go knock on doors.”

“I don’t care what you need to do,” Mendez told him. “If you don’t send the money, I don’t know what will happen.”

Alfredo required little coaxing to take the demands seriously. The week that Brayan and Robinson set off, word reached Jalapa of two teen-age brothers who had departed from a small farming town there to reach their parents, in Virginia. They were kidnapped in Mexico and held for ransom in a stash house. When the parents were unable to pay, the boys were shot.

Melida and Alfredo exhausted their savings and called their siblings for loans. Still, they fell short. Their daughter Jennifer, an honor-roll student who worked at a fast-food restaurant after school, offered her savings. At 4:35 P.M., Alfredo wired two thousand dollars from a local MoneyGram to the same address in Rio Grande City.

Meanwhile, Melida reported to her shift at the cosmetics factory, 4 P.M. to midnight on the assembly line. During her break, she rushed to the factory’s courtyard to negotiate with the strangers who held her sons. Mendez’s sister answered the phone. The two thousand dollars was not enough, she informed Melida. Mendez had been arrested, she said; cops had seized the cash. (Federal court records show that, on May 14th, Pedro Alonso Mendez was arrested in connection with a different stash house, in McAllen, Texas.) She instructed the Godoys to pay fifty-six hundred dollars more that night.

As Melida returned to the factory line, with its thousands of bottles of opalescent anti-aging serum for “Beauty Emergencies,” an idea struck her. On her next break, she called Alfredo. “Stay up and wait for me,” she told him. “You’re not going to work tomorrow.”

Around this time, Juan Gonzalez, the police chief of San Juan, Texas, spurred by the region’s rash of migrant kidnappings, formed the Rio Grande Valley’s first stash-house unit. It was run from an improvised office in a shack behind his station. The unit’s operating theory was simple: smugglers were rational businessmen. “You can make more money in the human-smuggling business than in the drug business,” Gonzalez told me when we met in his office last fall. He thought that he could put a dent in the smugglers’ busines