by Matt Taibbi
And then the analyst in his report gleefully showed this graph:
Sources: “The Punishing Decade,” Justice Policy Institute report; “Prisoners in 2006,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin NCJ 219416.
Who wouldn’t invest in that?
Theoretically, the political winds might have blown the same way without the profit motive. But there’s no way to look at the financial picture and not conclude that the explosive combination of anti-immigrant politics and easy profits turbocharged the construction of the Big Dragnet. Ironically, the very brokest people in America, Hispanic immigrants, are one of America’s last great cash crops.
One last reason immigrants are great business: as any good defense lawyer knows, the cost of freedom is always everything you have. To put it another way, people who have no documents and no rights are desperate, and desperation is a great natural price multiplier. For immigrants caught in the dragnet, the price of everything skyrockets, beginning, usually, with the traffic ticket, and the five-hundred-dollar or thousand-dollar no-license fines are extraordinarily high for what is essentially an administrative offense. In fact, a DUI, a far more serious crime, carries the same fine in the state of Georgia.
“It’s a moneymaking scheme, pure and simple,” sighs Corso, who’s defended scores of immigrants for no-license violations.
For Alvaro, his first hint that he’d entered a new pricing paradigm as a captured alien came in the CCA facility. In virtually every CCA-run facility across America, detainees are allowed access to a commissary, where they can buy random items: Popsicles, ramen noodles, candy bars. “But everything costs three or four times the real price,” he says. One item most every detainee buys is a prepaid phone card. In most CCA facilities, the prices for these cards are also extortionate, as much as nine dollars for a card that inmates can use to make three brief calls.
“You don’t have a choice,” says Alvaro. “You’ve got to buy the card. I bought one, called my nephew, explained what was happening to me. I told him to get some money ready. I didn’t know what was coming, but I wanted to prepare.”
Once they move from the local lockup to the CCA prison, detainees enter a weird legal gray area. Like disappeared persons from the gulag era, they’re told nothing about their captivity and often have no idea how long it will be before their case is decided. The uncertainly becomes part of the interrogation process. “In my case, I didn’t get to talk to an ICE caseworker for a week and a half,” says Alvaro. “For some guys, it’s two days. Others wait for two, three weeks. You have no idea.”
When he did finally meet with his interrogator, he got the same pitch that Ella received: he had a piece of paper pushed at him, and he was asked to sign a waiver and accept voluntary deportation.
Most immigrants at least hesitate. Alvaro surprised his interrogator, a clean-shaven white ICE agent with a crew cut and heavily muscled forearms, by quickly accepting the voluntary deportation order. “I played dumb,” he says. The ICE agent eyed him suspiciously, shrugged, and took the paper away.
Days went by. Alvaro passed the time in the comically cozy CCA facility playing checkers, soccer, a little basketball. It was a relief, he says now, to be in the immigration center. “I hate to say this,” he says, “but it’s so much more dangerous to be in the county jail with the other Americans. In the CCA center it was mostly all people who’d been caught on their way to work, people with jobs. It was not a dangerous place.
“I made some friends in there, especially some younger men from Mexico who were very scared. I think they looked up to me a little. I promised to look after them until we got to the border. It was in the back of my mind that they might be able to help me once we got there.”
Nobody knew when that would be. But one morning Alvaro and all the other men were roused at five a.m. They were all put in leg chains, waist chains, and handcuffs and marched out of the CCA facility into a bus. “We were all chained,” he says. “From five in the morning until we boarded an airplane later that night, we were in chains and couldn’t go to the bathroom.”
The journey Alvaro describes from Gainesville onward is surreal. “Like a movie,” he says. They traveled from place to place, the caravan picking up more buses with more people caught in car stops and checkpoints at each place. “We went to Atlanta first, and there we met up with more people. More buses, buses, buses. I had to rub my eyes to make sure I was really seeing so many people.
“In my bus there were two men who had been in jail for drugs. The rest were people like me who’d been caught on the way to work. None of us knew exactly where we were going, but we knew we were headed for the border.”
From Atlanta, the caravan made its way westward and eventually reached an airport in Columbus, Georgia, where it was understood that the group would be flown to the border. “It was hard because the plane wasn’t ready,” Alvaro explains. “We sat there in the heat in chains waiting, waiting. Some people were getting unwell.*2 From the windows we were all watching; we saw strange things.
“The men and the women were segregated, of course, but we saw a bus full of women. One of them apparently had to go to the bathroom, so she was led out of the bus. She was in full chains—legs, hands, and hands chained to the waist. It seemed so unnecessary. Except for a few, none of us were criminals. We couldn’t escape anywhere. Anyway this woman, they led her to one of those—what do you call them?”
A Porta-Potty?
“Yes, exactly,” he says. “The guards, and there were several of them, they led her to the toilet and just pushed her in, still in chains. All of us on the bus watching this were in amazement. It would be hard even for a man to find a way to go to the bathroom with all those restraints on.
“You could see her asking the guard to undo her cuffs, but he wouldn’t. She went inside the toilet, stayed in for a while, and came out. I don’t know how she managed.”
Finally the plane arrived. For the men it was a relief, because they were allowed to urinate before boarding. “But they kept the chains on,” Alvaro says.*3
The airplane he was boarding was bigger than anything he had ever seen. “There must have been four hundred fifty of us. It was a gigantic aircraft.” The crowd of men and women got on board, still in chains, and sat through a short flight south, to Texas.
Once there, they were quickly loaded onto buses again and driven straight to an international bridge that would lead them across the border. Here, finally, the chains were removed, and Alvaro learned where he would be released, the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo. From his seat on the bus, he peered through the window toward the border and started to think through his options, when suddenly there was a disturbance at the front of the vehicle.
“One of the men, I think, made some kind of sarcastic comment to one of the guards,” he says. “I’m not sure what it was. Something about the chains, maybe. I remember the guard suddenly turning red. In English, he said something like, ‘You want to get tough? You want to get smart?’ And the guy, he didn’t back down, and next thing you know there are four more guards in the bus. He’s leaning back in his seat, pointing his chin out at them.
“I’m thinking, uh-oh. Within a few moments they dragged that guy out of the bus. Took him away somewhere, no idea where.”
Not even certain why, Alvaro made a mental note of the man’s face.
Soon the bus door was opened, and the men inside were motioned to get out. Each of the detainees was handed a box with his property, which was the clothes he had been wearing at the time of arrest, mainly. They all changed clothes and began walking. A line of guards on either side of the detainees created a makeshift corridor. The line of people was so long, Alvaro could not see the end of it.
As he walked over the Rio Grande into Mexico, he considered the absurdity of his situation. He was being repatriated to a country he had never been to, where he knew no one and had no connections. He thought everything he had been through to that point had been difficult. “In truth, that was just the warm-up,�
�� he says now. “The hard part was just starting.”
Once over the bridge, the group took on the feeling of a gang of prison escapees, each man unsure of whether the survival odds were better alone or in a group. Some gathered in big crowds, others went off alone. Alvaro stayed with the two young Mexican men he’d taken under his wing in Gainesville.
An undocumented immigrant is like a bleeding fish. Every predator for miles around will swim at top speed to take a bite. For Alvaro, the process had begun back in America, with the police who stopped him at night and slapped him with a seven-hundred-dollar ticket. It continued with the overpriced soups and phone cards in the CCA facility. It was now about to continue in Mexico.
He had $60 in his pocket, and going off toward downtown Nuevo Laredo with the two young men, his first thought was to change his money. There was an exchange window right near the bridge. The exchange rate at the time was 12 pesos to a dollar. He pushed his $60 across. The woman handed him back 600 pesos, seemingly expecting he wouldn’t notice she was shorting him 120 pesos.
“Apparently a lot of the men who come across the bridge do not count so well,” he says. “It took some arguing, but I got my dollars back. We moved on.”
From there Alvaro decided to get a hotel room with the two men, until they could find relatives to come and get them. He was on his way to doing that when he decided to call his nephew back in Gainesville at a phone booth. The instant he dialed the States, he felt a pair of arms grabbing him from behind. “I turned around, and it was a policeman,” he says. “A bicycle policeman, as it happened—his bike was leaning up against a wall.”
The two other young men Alvaro was with scattered when the policeman arrived. Meanwhile, the bike cop demanded that Alvaro identify himself and then told him he was under arrest.
“For what?” Alvaro asked.
“For making an illegal phone call,” the policeman said. The ticket, he said, was going to be three hundred pesos.
Alvaro stood his ground, arguing with the bicycle policeman, who eventually gave up and went away. He shook his head and laughed. An illegal phone call?
Watching this scene the whole time was an elderly man who was sitting at a shoeshine stand, waiting for customers. When Alvaro was finally done with the policeman, the old man waved him over.
“He introduced himself, asked me where I was from,” Alvaro says. “I told him, ‘I’ve just come from up north.’ He says to me, ‘You come with me, you will be my guest for the night, forget about the hotel.’ ”
Alvaro headed toward the old man’s house, stopping along the way to buy some groceries, some hot dogs, eggs, something to eat. They walked for a long time, entering neighborhoods that were progressively more and more beaten down, until finally they reached a section of the city that was completely devastated. Alvaro again remarked to himself the strangeness of his situation. “The houses were burned down, or else in complete disrepair. They were empty and boarded up,” he says. “This gave me pause. I asked the old man, ‘What happened here?’ He says, ‘Don’t ask.’ ”
Finally they made it to the old man’s house. Alvaro immediately sensed that something was odd about the home. The old man was in his late sixties and almost in rags, but he had a wife who was young and pretty. “She was twenty-five at most,” Alvaro says, “and pregnant with his child. She was very nice and didn’t seem surprised that I was there. And there were two other children in the house who were not his, and might not have been hers, either. I didn’t ask questions.”
After the long journey, Alvaro slept well; the next morning the shoe shiner took him to a downtown plaza, where he was introduced to someone described to him as “the man. The main man.” The jefe was some sort of local mafioso to whom the shoe shiner and everyone else in the area was paying tribute. “It was wild,” Alvaro says. “The guy didn’t have a telephone, but when he wanted to make a call, someone would bring him a telephone and say something like, ‘Here’s your telephone, boss.’ It was like meeting Jabba the Hutt.”
But the jefe, who went by the odd name Fitus, was good to Alvaro. Fitus told him that he could arrange a coyote, for a price. Alvaro, without getting into too many details about his life, explained that he could have some money wired, but it might take a day. Fitus seemed fine with that. He even lent Alvaro a few hundred dollars in the meantime and told him to come back the next day, or as soon as he could, with the deposit.
“While in town, I made some calls and arranged for money to be wired,” Alvaro says. “Also it was Halloween night that night, so before I went back to the old man’s house again, I bought candy for the children and some toys with the money I’d borrowed. But this second night, things went very wrong at the old man’s house. He bought some very strong beer and he got very drunk.
“Almost right away, he quarreled with that pretty young wife of his. Then he began to really give it to her. He was hitting her. I tried to tell him, ‘I know I’m a guest, but I can’t let you hurt your wife.’ So he threw me out of the house.”
It was Halloween night. Alvaro found himself alone in the pitch-black, burned-out neighborhood. He looked for a cab. Passing a junkie on the street, he asked where he could get a taxi.
“He laughed and said, ‘You must not be from around here. No taxis will come here,’ ” Alvaro says. “So I walked farther. Finally I found a cab after some time. They took me to a hotel, and I checked in. And then I made a very serious mistake. I called Colombia.”
This call was the portal into the mirror image of the American deportation machine. It turns out there’s a dragnet on the other side of the border, too.
In Mexico, there is crime, and then there’s organized crime, and then there are the Zetas, a group of gangsters known for their extreme cruelty and technical sophistication. The group was originally formed in the 1990s by Special Forces commandos, had a brief alliance with a drug organization known as the Gulf Cartel, and then broke off on its own to create a powerful crime syndicate that not only traffics in drugs but makes money through extortion and kidnapping. The Zeta trademark includes beheadings and a preference for torture over bribery. And one of the Zeta businesses involves people like Alvaro.
When he made the call out of the country, he came to the attention of these gangsters, who monitor the calls of hotel residents. An hour after he made the call, men arrived at his hotel room, dragged him outside, and threw him into a car. Alvaro was terrified but said nothing. He was driven in total silence to a big house on the outskirts of town. When he was pushed inside, he was shocked to discover familiar faces.
“There must have been twenty-five or thirty of the people who’d walked over the bridge from Laredo with me,” he says. “They’d all been kidnapped by the Zetas. They went straight from ICE custody to Zeta custody.”
Among the men in custody was the unfortunate character who had argued with the ICE officials in Alvaro’s bus on the other side of the border. Alvaro asked him what happened when the guards took him away. The man laughed. “Oh, they slapped me around a little,” he said. “But nothing serious. Not like this.”
The Zetas, Alvaro learned, operate on a simple business model. They know that most of the immigrants deported out of the United States have left relatives behind in America. Many of the deportees’ relatives have saved money to bring more loved ones to the States from Mexico. That makes the deportees natural kidnapping targets.
Alvaro asked some of the men there what their situation was. Depending on the immigrant, the Zetas were demanding to be wired five thousand to seven thousand dollars before they would be released. Alvaro asked if there was any guarantee that they would even be released after the Zetas got the money. The men shrugged.
Soon, however, his captors took him aside. “So the Zetas start asking me questions about who I am and what I’m doing,” he says. “I tell them, ‘I’m no Mexican. I’m not like these men. I’m a Colombian, and I’m heading north.’ They ask me, ‘Who’s helping you through? Who’s arranging the coyote?’
“And that’s when I got lucky. I told them Fitus was helping me. That changed everything.”
Once he dropped Fitus’s name, the Zetas disappeared and had a discussion. Soon they came back and told him, “Hang tight. We’re going to check this out with Fitus.”
So Alvaro spent a whole day in captivity, in the house outside Laredo, with the twenty-five other deportees. But Fitus vouched for Alvaro, and he was released from the haunted house. He has no idea what happened to the other men.
From there, Alvaro began the long journey back to America. He got money wired to Fitus’s friends and was taken to a place in Nuevo Laredo called the Spot. It was like a safe house.
There were twenty to thirty people in a filthy room. “No ventilation, no bathrooms, these were people who wouldn’t know what toilet paper is,” Alvaro explains. “I spent three days there. I had to sleep on a terrace outside, because the mosquitoes on the first floor were unbearable.”
Finally he and the others got on a bus, headed west, to the neighboring Mexican state of Coahuila. There, by the side of a road, they met up with two coyotes. One of them, Alvaro remembers, was extremely drunk.
Then, in a strange echo of the journey from Gainesville to Laredo, the group moved toward the Rio Grande, stopping from time to time to accumulate more members of the convoy. “At first there were three groups of twenty or so,” he says. “Then we disappeared behind some trees and met up with some more. Finally, when we got to the banks of the river, there were about two hundred of us.”
The two hundred huddled people were given minimal food and water while they waited for a boat to arrive. Night came and everyone slept in the open air. Then morning, then afternoon. The food and water vanished. There was nothing left. Alvaro began to get worried.
But finally men arrived with an inflatable raft and began moving people across the river a few at a time. “We got to the United States side,” he says. “And we started walking. And walking. And walking.”
