Illegal

by Francisco X. Stork

  “Naah. Gropper was just puffing himself up. He met with Rupert. But … Rupert does represent the Department of Labor in various legal matters and his contact there is a man named Wilfred Jones, who happens to be a deputy director in the Department of Labor.”

  “So …”

  “He could be your ultimate Big Shot. We don’t know. But we know that Rupert is the man who runs the operation, and Moss does his dirty work.”

  “Can we get them? We need to move fast. Rupert or Moss killed Mrs. Costelo. I know it.”

  “Aurora Police is handling that investigation,” Detective Jaworski said. “You’re actually their main person of interest.”

  “Me? They think I did it?”

  “You’re famous, or infamous. An illegal alien kills the elderly woman who gave him work. It’s the kind of news that a lot of people like to hear.” Detective Jaworski looked at his watch. “The news is on right now. You’re probably the big headline. You want to see?”

  “That’s all right, Frank. We can do without the TV right now.” Stanislaw turned to me and said, “What about the cell phone, did you get it open?”

  “Aniela is coming here in a while and we’re going to try the phone’s memory card first. It’s not actually opening the phone, but it might get us something useful. We needed her mother’s phone to read the card.”

  Detective Jaworski raised his hands. “The less I know about you opening the phone, the better. I don’t want to mess up any future arrests.”

  “Why don’t you make yourself useful, then, and go get us some pizzas,” Stanislaw said.

  I went outside to wait for Aniela. I inhaled deeply. I wished I could be certain that what I was doing was the right thing. The resolve that Stanislaw wanted me to have was … shaky. I wanted it to be as solid as the Sierra Madre mountains. But that kind of certainty is rare and when it comes, it seems like such a gift. The last time I felt that kind of solidness was when I was dying in the middle of the desert. I was certain that my life had been such a waste and also that if I were allowed to live, I would do my best to make it count. That was the kind of determination I needed now.

  I don’t know if the sureness I needed ever came. The best I could do was to remind myself that Sara wanted me to fight.

  She wants me to fight.

  When I believed this with as much confidence as I could muster, I took out my phone and got Gustaf’s number from his note in my wallet.

  “Emiliano. Are you all right?”

  Gustaf sounded older, tired.

  “Yes. And you?”

  “As good as can be expected. You heard about Wes Morgan?”

  “Yes. Actually, I’m calling about Sara.”

  “Go on.”

  “Remember when we were stopped outside of Sanderson and that Border Patrol officer was about to check the back of the trailer.”

  “Yeah …”

  “You told him you knew him. He played football with your son.”

  “One of Antonio Lopez’s sons. Used to come over with Jimmy. I don’t remember his name, but he was afraid of horses, I remember that.”

  “Raúl. He said his name was Raúl Lopez. Is he a good person? You think he’d do what is right?”

  “Well … if he’s anything like his father, he would. Why?”

  “I need him to check up on Sara. It has to be someone from the inside. Her life is in danger. Ask Raúl Lopez to look in on her. They might be moving her to another facility any day now. It’s urgent, Mr. Larsson.”

  “Say no more. I’ll drive over to Antonio’s place as soon as we hang up.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Emiliano. Well, you already know. You’re always welcome. Your buddy Amigo misses you.”

  “I know. Good-bye, Gustaf.”

  I sat on the steps and looked up when I heard the flag flutter above me. Inside, I heard my name come out of Stanislaw’s television set. I was on the news. An illegal alien suspected of killing Irene Costelo. A neighbor was asked his opinion. That kind of killing was the reason why walls should be built. The Aurora Police were searching for me. All of Chicago was after me.

  The United States finally wanted me.

  Aniela and I sat side by side on Stanislaw’s living room sofa, a beat-up purple thing as ugly as it was comfortable. Aniela’s eyes were focused on the metallic bag with Hinojosa’s cell phone. Laughter, a woman’s, came from the kitchen, and Aniela and I turned our heads in that direction.

  “This must be some kind of record,” Aniela said. “Mom and Granddad have been together almost ten minutes and they haven’t fought.”

  “It’s the pizza. It’s hard to fight when you’re eating pizza.” Pizza was always a happy time at our house in Juárez. I smiled.

  “I’m so sorry about Mrs. Costelo. I’m praying for her. And for your sister, Sara.”

  “You pray?”

  “I’m part Polish,” Aniela said, by way of explanation. “You?”

  “I don’t know. Does prayer count if you don’t believe in God?”

  “It’s probably the kind of prayer God likes best.”

  I stopped talking as Aniela opened the SIM card tray in her mother’s phone and inserted Hinojosa’s SD card into it. Stanislaw, Aniela’s mother, Sofia, and Detective Jaworski all came out of the kitchen and stood in a semicircle watching Aniela.

  There was total silence in the room as Aniela turned her mother’s phone on. Total silence except the sound of my heart doing somersaults inside my chest. I felt like when I was at St. Hyacinth’s and the tears started to come out. Something wanted to break inside of me or explode or gush out in some kind of burning liquid. I wanted Sara to be next to me. I wanted her to punch me in the arm and tell me to stop being a baby—like when we watched scary movies late at night.

  Aniela handed me her mother’s phone. The screen seemed to be moving, but then I realized that it was my hand trembling. I placed the phone on the coffee table, where it would be more stable. On the screen, I saw the icons for two files in the shape of green folders. I tapped on one entitled BENEFICIARIOS and saw the picture of a young woman about Sara’s age. She was standing in front of a white wall, with an expression I recognized as hopelessness. These women had given up, surrendered. They knew there was no escape. In the corner of the picture, I read a letter A and a number. I touched the picture with the tip of my finger and the image of another young woman appeared before the same background, but with a different number following the letter A. I kept tapping and watching different young women appear before me. All the women were young, attractive, and were undoubtedly Mexican or Latinas. I stopped after a dozen pictures and handed the phone back to Aniela. She looked at a few pictures and then gave the phone to Stanislaw. Detective Jaworski and Sofia peered over Stanislaw’s shoulder.

  “You recognize them?” Stanislaw asked.

  “No,” I responded. “But I think I know who they are. We call them Desaparecidas. Girls kidnapped from the streets of Juárez and then killed … or used.”

  Aniela grabbed the phone from Stanislaw’s hand and pressed on the folder entitled WORK ORDERS.

  “What are these?” Sofia sat next to Aniela and looked over her shoulder.

  “Some kind of immigration forms.” Aniela read: “Petition for Nonimmigrant Worker, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, Form I-129.” She handed the phone to me.

  The first page of the form contained information about the petitioner: Odessa Agricultural Cooperative, located in Odessa, Texas. I scrolled down until I got to Part 3 where the form called for the name of the “beneficiary.” Below that were the names of three women. I gave the phone back to Aniela, waited for her to read, and then said, “Beneficiary is beneficiario in Spanish.”

  I remembered that the e-mails sent to Mello were from the head of the Odessa Agricultural Cooperative. At the bottom of the form was his name: Marko Lisica.

  “What does that mean? What did you find?” Detective Jaworski asked impatiently
.

  No one answered. I sat there dazed, trying to understand what I’d just seen. Aniela took a laptop out of her gym bag and Googled “USCIS Form I-129.” After a few minutes of reading, she answered Detective Jaworski’s question. “Form I-129 is a form used in a program to bring temporary agricultural workers into the U.S.”

  “Our Big Shot is using the program to bring the kidnapped women from Mexico into the United States.”

  The nervousness and fear that churned in me suddenly became a hot, acid-like anger. I stood and clenched my fists. Big Shot became real just then. A living, evil, flesh-and-blood creep. I wanted to run or scream or hit someone.

  Stanislaw sat, more like fell, on the recliner in front of the sofa.

  “Human trafficking?” Sofia asked.

  Stanislaw and Detective Jaworski answered her with a stony nod.

  “Oh, my God!” Sofia said.

  Aniela grabbed my hand and pulled me down next to her. She was scrolling through the documents in the WORK ORDERS file. “There must be fifty separate forms in here. There’s other types of forms. This one is called ETA 9142 A and another is ETA 790. These are from the United States Department of Labor.” Again, Aniela searched in her laptop. After a few minutes she said, “That makes sense. The Department of Labor has to certify that agricultural workers are needed before Immigration Services grants the temporary worker visas.”

  It took me a few moments to understand how the Department of Labor was involved.

  “You’re telling me that two government agencies are in cahoots to bring women into this country for … to make slaves out of them?” Sofia asked. Then, glaring at Stanislaw, “Why doesn’t that surprise me in this administration?”

  Stanislaw stared at Sofia. “We’re talking about human beings, criminals, rats, not agencies. If these people have this much power, you can be sure that they’ve been at it for longer than this president has been in office.”

  “Yeah, well, with this president, the rats feel more empowered to come out!”

  “Grandpa, Mom. Please. Not now.” Aniela took a white cord out of her gym bag and connected one end to Sofia’s phone and the other to her laptop.

  “Do you see the name Wilfred Jones or Mathew Rupert anywhere?” Stanislaw asked.

  “The forms were prepared by the law firm of Rupert and Brodie,” Aniela said.

  “We got the sons of bitches!” Stanislaw said.

  “We don’t have Wilfred Jones,” Detective Jaworski said.

  “Come on, Frank. You have enough to go to a judge and get a warrant to open the phone. Jones will be in there. Anyway, you got enough to get Rupert, and you know as well as I do that if you squeeze Rupert, he’ll give up Jones or whoever is calling the shots.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see enough probable cause that a crime has been committed. I see pictures and I see immigration forms.”

  “What if I could show you that the women listed as beneficiaries in this phone are women who have gone missing in Mexico?”

  And there it was: the certainty that had eluded me before.

  “How about that for probable cause?” Stanislaw asked Detective Jaworski.

  “That would work,” Detective Jaworski said, looking at me. “The only question would be if CPD has jurisdiction. Has a crime been committed in Chicago?”

  “I can give you the information you need to bring out the people responsible for this human trafficking and for Mrs. Costelo’s murder.”

  “That’s Aurora, but it’s close enough. If I get Aurora Police involved. I could see us getting a warrant. Go ahead, I’m listening.”

  “I have a plan. But how do I know you won’t deport me afterward?”

  “He’s not stupid,” Stanislaw said.

  “I can’t stop ICE from deporting you, but I can make you a confidential informant of the Chicago Police Department. That will give you some protection. How’s that sound?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll get the paperwork started. What’s your plan?”

  “Let me work on getting you the information on the women and then we can put the plan together.”

  Stanislaw and Sofia went back to the kitchen. Aniela finished copying the files from Hinojosa’s memory card. She placed the card back in the phone and closed the metallic bag. She closed the laptop and placed it on the table next to the cell phones. “I was kind of looking forward to opening the cell phone,” Aniela said, pretending disappointment. “I was going to take the day off from school tomorrow.”

  “You can still take the day off. We need to get Big Shot.”

  “Do you really have a plan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Grandpa know what it is?”

  “I’ll tell him after everyone leaves. But I need your help before then. The Chihuahua State Police and the Mexican Federal Police have websites with pictures of missing women. We need to go through the pictures on those websites and find links to the women in the phone files we just saw.”

  “Got you. Let’s do it.” Then, after a while, she said, “I hope it’s long-term.”

  “What?”

  “Your plan,” she said, and briefly looked into my eyes.

  “Maybe.”

  What is long-term? A week, a month, a lifetime?

  All I knew was that it included tomorrow.

  I sat at the head of Stanislaw’s kitchen table. The metallic bag with Hinojosa’s cell phone was in front of me. To my right sat Detective Jaworski and to his right was Ann Rogers, a detective from the Aurora Police Department. Stanislaw was at the opposite end of the table. Detective Jaworski stopped speaking when Aniela entered the room. I was glad to see that she had decided to skip school. She pulled the chair next to Stanislaw and smiled at me.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said.

  The detective went on. “I was just going over what we’ve pieced together with the information that you guys gave us last night. We’ve put a lot of the pieces together in the past twelve sleepless hours. So, as I was saying, we’re looking at a human trafficking scheme that depends on a number of key players. The scheme was facilitated by three, possibly four criminals working in various governmental agencies. Hinojosa and his associates in Mexico ‘procured’ the young women. The names of the young women were sent to the Odessa Agricultural Cooperative, which submitted an application for temporary workers to the Department of Labor. The approved labor certification was then sent to the Customs and Immigration Service. The U.S. consulate in Juárez then granted H-2A visas to the women listed in the I-129 forms. The young women were then brought, probably flown, into the United States. Their entry was ‘legal,’ in the sense that they had visas. What we don’t know yet is where those women ended up. We suspect that some went to prostitution rings, others were placed with individual men, others may have been placed in homes as domestic workers.”

  During the silence that filled the room, I thought of María, the woman who worked for Abe Gropper. Then I thought of Sara—she too could have been one of those young women taken.

  Detective Jaworski continued. “The key for this scheme to work is the labor certifications. We found out that it was Deputy Director Jones who gave the order to approve all requests from the Odessa Agricultural Cooperative.”

  “And Rupert?” Stanislaw asked.

  “Rupert gives the whole business the cover of legality. His firm fills out the labor and immigration forms. And Rupert, with his powerful connections and influence, smooths the process with bribes and threats. We think that he and Jones are then involved in selling the women to the highest bidders.”

  “It’s sickening,” Stanislaw said.

  “You got that right,” Detective Jaworski responded. “We’re going to have to get the feds to help us in order to make all the arrests, but the important thing now is to find the women who have been enslaved.”

  “And the perps who killed Irene Costelo,” Ann Rogers said.

  “Yes. And this is where Emiliano comes in. Tell us your plan.”


  “The plan is for me to return Hinojosa’s cell phone to my father,” I said softly.

  “What?” Aniela asked.

  “It really is the only way …” Aniela’s worried expression stopped me. “I called my father this morning on my burner phone. I said I wanted to go back to Mexico and that I would give him the bad guy’s phone in return for a bus ticket to the border and some money. I told him I’d meet him at the bus station today at one. Then I hung up.”

  Aniela shook her head. “Who’s to say Rupert’s men won’t be there to grab Emiliano and then kill him? Why leave a loose end?”

  Detective Jaworski spoke up. “We’ll have undercover officers throughout the station. If they make a move against Emiliano, we’ll be there.”

  “Will they be fast enough to stop a bullet?” Aniela asked. Her tone was only slightly sarcastic. Then, “I don’t understand what returning the phone to Emiliano’s father will accomplish.”

  Detective Jaworski took a deep breath. “Here’s what we have. Emiliano is now a registered confidential informant with the Chicago Police Department. Thanks to the files you gave us, we were authorized by an Illinois Superior Court judge to place a listening and tracking device inside Hinojosa’s phone. All we did was open the back of the phone to place the device. We did not touch any of the data in the phone. We didn’t even charge the phone. You copied the contents of the phone’s memory card but left it intact. They’re not going to know the phone has been tampered with. Emiliano called his father, like he told you, and will meet him in a couple of hours. Then we just follow the cell phone wherever it takes us. We investigate whoever touches it and we listen to the conversations that take place around it. But we are pretty sure the phone will lead us to Rupert. When that happens, we will have Rupert connected to the missing women who Emiliano and Aniela have linked to the files in the phone. It’s a solid case. Once we have Rupert, we will go after Jones and will get them to reveal the location of the women.”

  Aniela interrupted. “That phone will be checked to see if it’s been opened and then it will be trashed.”