The women were forensic anthropologists with Operation Identification, or OpID, which is based at Texas State University and conducts exhumations across South Texas, seeking to identify and repatriate migrants who have been improperly buried after dying while attempting to cross from Mexico into the United States. The hole where they were working was located in the Maverick County Cemetery, a grass plot the size of a city block. It was so close to the U.S.-Mexico border that you could smell the Rio Grande—at least when you stepped away from the hole, which smelled like decomposition.

It was the last day of work; the team had exhumed fifteen bodies in the previous two weeks, and they believed there were four more still in the ground. By the end of the day, they would uncover them all, carefully lift them out, and perform “intake” procedures, which entailed removing their clothes and placing them in Ziploc bags, taking notes on any identifying features, and preparing them to be transported to the laboratory at Texas State.

Many of the anthropologists said the hardest part of the work is not handling the remains themselves but coming face-to-face with effects—the keepsakes, talismans, and handwritten lists of phone numbers that once represented the hope of a new life. During one intake, Konda grabbed a shoe and checked inside, since that’s where migrants often store important paperwork. She found an identification card. “I happened to look at the birthday. He was only two years older than me, and his birthday was around the time he probably drowned,” she told me. “He probably thought he would have made it by his birthday.” She added: “I learned that I can’t think like that because I’ll cry. Crying is OK, but I was not hydrated enough to risk crying in that hot tent!

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What happens when the only way to ensure the survival of the people you love the most is to leave them behind?

That’s a choice no one should have to make, and yet it is the dilemma of overseas workers everywhere, no less so than in the Philippines, which exports about a fourth of the world’s 11.5 million migrant domestic workers, a predominantly female army of nannies, maids, and cooks. A significant percentage of these women are mothers separated from their own kids while caring for the children of others, sending home remittances and boxes of chocolate, Spam, and other treats, and wondering if their husbands are faithful and how many years will pass before they can see their families again.

“In the eyes of many employers, Filipinas were at the top of the ethnic hierarchy for domestic workers,” Rachel Aviv writes in one of the powerful stories below, “as if their nationality had become synonymous with family duty and deference.” Such sought-after traits have been a blessing and a curse, giving Filipinas access to the lives of elite families in cities like Hong Kong, Dubai, and New York City, but also subjecting them to highly exploitative and even dangerous situations.

Adding to their burdens, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have been called on to be “modern-day heroes” and uber-patriots. “Now, more than ever, we need you, the OFWs and your families, to take part in our nation-building efforts,” former President Rodrigo Duterte once said. “I thus call on you … to make our country proud.”

Laborers who remain in the Philippines, meanwhile, face their own dismal work prospects, such as foraging for discarded valuables in Payatas, a former dumpsite outside of Manila. Whether at home or abroad, Filipino laborers struggle valiantly to preserve their humanity amid hellish work demands.

You might not think that emotionally and physically arduous labor would be an inviting subject for longform writing, but it is. That’s because the writers featured in this collection portray the subjects of their stories not as victims but instead as three-dimensional people. As a journalism professor who has also reported on labor, occupational safety, and immigrant health issues, I turn to these compelling and well-researched narratives to illustrate how to report with empathy and care.

My Filipino American students in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, appear to connect to the stories in this collection at an almost cellular level.

“I didn’t realize we could be in these stories or write these stories,” a student told me after reading the work of Filipino American author Alex Tizon, whose essay is featured in this collection.

Representation matters.

Fortunately, the U.S. media has broadened its coverage of Filipino and Filipino American narratives in recent years, and we now read about Filipino American entertainers, food culture, and political leaders. But it’s important not to forget the cost—borne by so many Filipino laborers—of toiling at the hardest jobs imaginable to provide for the people they love.

The following five excellent pieces reveal the endless work ethic of Filipino workers— those who leave and those who stay.

My Family’s Slave (Alex Tizon, The Atlantic, June 2017)

With deft sentences and restrained prose, Alex Tizon recounts the story of Lola (Eudocia Tomas Polido), a servant who accompanied his family when they moved from the Philippines to the U.S. in 1964. Tizon exposes the horrors of modern-day servitude in a deeply personal and indelible way. Sadly, he died a few months before the piece was published as The Atlantic’s cover story, which went viral and generated both praise and criticism.

The story begins for Tizon at birth, when Lola served as a maid, cook, and nanny to his family while his parents worked to establish themselves in the U.S. By the age of 11, Tizon had come to understand that his beloved caretaker—who was “given” to his mother, then a child living in the Philippines—received no salary. Lola slept in random spaces of Tizon’s home, such as on the couch or in the laundry room. Lacking documentation, she could never leave the U.S. to return home; she also suffered physical abuse and cruelty at the hands of Tizon’s parents.

No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

What strikes me each time I reread this piece is Tizon’s anguish over his family’s treatment of Lola. He also wrestles mightily with his own complicity, despite having provided Lola a pampered life when he became an adult. But as this story reminds us, good deeds don’t wipe away the sins of the past. Tizon’s final published piece is a testament to how difficult it is to forgive our family and how it’s even harder to forgive ourselves.

After Lola’s death at 86, Tizon hand-carried Lola’s ashes back to her remaining family in the Philippines, in a beautifully rendered scene of pure grief among the now-aged people who knew her as a youngster. En route to this encounter, Tizon draws on the islands’ fortitude—surprising, given their fragile formation—to suggest a metaphor for the spirit of Lola and the enduring work ethic of her beleaguered yet resilient people.

Life here is routinely visited by cataclysm. Killer typhoons that strike several times a year. Bandit insurgencies that never end. Somnolent mountains that one day decide to wake up. The Philippines isn’t like China or Brazil, whose mass might absorb the trauma. This is a nation of scattered rocks in the sea. When disaster hits, the place goes under for a while. Then it resurfaces and life proceeds … and the simple fact that it’s still there makes it beautiful.

The Cost of Caring (Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker, April 2016)

Lola is only one face of the Philippines’ massive overseas workforce. In this New Yorker piece, Rachel Aviv portrays another laborer, Emma, who leaves her nine children behind and becomes a nanny to wealthy families in the U.S. In a heartbreaking moment before her departure, Emma faces doubts too enormous to ignore.

She said, “My conscience was telling me, ‘Don’t leave your kids. Don’t leave your kids. They are young and need you.’”

But like all working mothers, she chooses work over her children. Or, more accurately, she chooses work to provide for her children. I strongly connect to Aviv’s writing—which is as elegant as her research is exhaustive—and the piece’s theme of anguished working motherhood. I hated leaving my firstborn with strangers even though his babysitters provided loving care. My plight is of course trivial in comparison to mothers like Emma, who live apart from their children for years and even decades while they channel their maternal instincts toward the children of others. I wonder: Is this rerouted maternal love a form of consolation, or a source of bitter pain?

Either way, it’s clear that Emma’s children never stopped yearning for their mother’s return during her 16-plus-year absence, during which she mainly talked to her daughters through Facebook and brief telephone conversations (five minutes for each child). And while her girls gained opportunities from Emma’s sacrifice, these advantages didn’t seem to take them far enough. We learn at the end of Aviv’s story that their economic prospects in the Philippines have not improved much in their mother’s absence—one daughter has already emigrated to Abu Dhabi to work as a secretary—which is a stunning revelation given everything that Emma sacrificed to provide for a better future. And so the arduous toil of hardworking Filipina caregivers continues: 

Emma’s daughters and their friends wished to go abroad, too, if not to America then to Japan or Hong Kong or New Zealand. “I think there’s no end to the cycle,” Emma told me. She found it hard to resist the idea of her daughters joining her in New York. She hasn’t seen them in sixteen years and still can’t discuss the separation without quietly crying. Over time, the tone of her children’s letters has evolved; there is less rivalry and more resignation. In the early years, the children kept guessing which holidays might be the occasion for Emma’s return. Gradually, they stopped asking about her plans. “I believe someday, if God permits, you can be with us once again,” her daughter Roxanne recently wrote.

Departures (Tan Tuck Ming, The Kenyon Review, October 2022)

Working for an employment recruitment agency in international domestic work, Tan Tuck Ming brings a unique vantage point to this essay about Filipina housekeepers in Hong Kong. But for him the issue is also personal: He was cared for by a beloved Filipina housekeeper as a child, and it’s clear that her kindness left an imprint on his soul. Ming’s piece mines some of the same material as Aviv’s, but the essay form allows for more rumination and ties together personal narrative with historical and theoretical frameworks. Here, for example, he discusses migrant caregiving as the fuel powering the economic engine of international commerce:

[T]he way I understand an economy is as vertical motion, people either moving up or down but never staying still. This is how cities like Hong Kong or Singapore—these dense, vertiginous centers for global capital and its circulation … are made possible by tracing the fissures of nation, empire, and debt; by the subdivision of labor charted as unskilled within the topographies of capitalism to a secondary class of migrant workers. “We need to protect domestic workers with all our might,” a member of the legislative council says, at an antitrafficking fundraising event. “After all, without them, Hong Kong cannot unleash its economic power. We must be grateful to them for releasing our workforce.” 

This politician’s statement is of course vexing. I wonder if a low-earning Filipina maid in Hong Kong actually aspires to unleash the power of the wealth-gathering class. And yet the comment suggests a key truth, which is that the center of Hong Kong’s economic juggernaut is not a technology or financial infrastructure so much as a beating heart—that of the industrious, loving Filipina caretaker.

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed (Adrian Chen, Wired, October 2014)

Of course, Filipino labor doesn’t only occur overseas. In fact, the Philippines is one of America’s leading outsourcing destinations for customer service, technical support, and other industries.

Adrian Chen explores the highly stressful labor of content moderators, whose job is to evaluate questionable uploads to social media and to remove offensive, harmful, and inappropriate material. And this profession takes a toll, as Chen documents in interviews with workers in the Philippines who spend all day looking at the beheadings, sexual assaults, animal abuse, and other horrendous content that users attempt to post on Facebook and other platforms. Chen shows us an invisible workforce taking on the worst of humanity to make our reading and viewing online more benign. But as always, it’s the laborer—and in this case, the Filipino/a worker—who makes a massive sacrifice to enable our scrolling pleasure.

In a shopping mall, I meet a young woman who I’ll call Maria. She’s on her lunch break from an outsourcing firm, where she works on a team that moderates photos and videos for the cloud storage service of a major US technology company….“I get really affected by bestiality with children,” she says. “I have to stop. I have to stop for a moment and loosen up, maybe go to Starbucks and have a coffee.” She laughs at the absurd juxtaposition of a horrific sex crime and an overpriced latte.

Constant exposure to videos like this has turned some of Maria’s coworkers intensely paranoid. Every day they see proof of the infinite variety of human depravity. They begin to suspect the worst of people they meet in real life, wondering what secrets their hard drives might hold. Two of Maria’s female coworkers have become so suspicious that they no longer leave their children with babysitters. They sometimes miss work because they can’t find someone they trust to take care of their kids.

The Magic Mountain (Matthew Power, Harper’s Magazine, December 2006)

In this final selection, the late great adventure writer Matthew Power explores one of the world’s notorious trash dumps at the time in Payatas, a barangay outside of Manila.

In this literally toxic workplace, enterprising foragers dig for buried trash items they can sell: copper wires, old cell phones, even a frozen swordfish thrown out by a restaurant. It’s grubby and exhausting work, and some of the foragers live on the site (at least at the time of Power’s visit). The descriptions are as precise as the site filthy:

The ground underneath our boots is spongy, and as we climb, black rivulets of leachate flow down the access road. A black puddle releases methane, bubbles like a primordial swamp, and the ground itself shakes when a loaded truck rumbles by.

Yes, the description is memorably graphic, but the story goes well beyond capturing the gross-out factor. Power instead brings the workers on this trash mountain to life, not only showing Filipino foragers in action but also in rare moments of leisure: singing karaoke, enjoying the cockfights, even planting gardens. The piece is ultimately a paean to work ethic and labor even in supposedly menial jobs that appear simple and straightforward. The work, like the people who perform it, is complex and worthy of our admiration:

A kalahig slits open a bag as if it were a fish, garbage entrails spilling out, and with a series of rapid, economical movements, anything useful is speared and flicked into a sack to be sorted later. The ability to discern value at a glimpse, to sift the useful out of the rejected with as little expenditure of energy as possible, is the great talent of the scavenger. 

I appreciate that Power goes beyond “studying” his subjects through the lens of first-world superiority and instead gives us reason to respect their immense work ethic and love of family. Sadly, like Tizon, Power died long before his time, in 2014. 

Amy DePaul is a college journalism instructor at the University of California, Irvine. She reports on public health, immigrant communities, and labor. You can find her boogie-boarding at Crystal Cove.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens 

Sarah Souli  | November 2022 | 13 minutes (3,781 words)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 133, “A Matter of Honor.” The story was completed with generous support from the Incubator for Media Education and Development, a nonprofit journalistic organization founded in 2018 with an exclusive donation from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

“Just by being there, the border is an invitation.
Come on, it whispers, step across this line. If you dare.”
—Kapka Kassabova

Life in a diaspora can have the dull ache of a phantom limb. In the Istanbul neighborhood of Zeytinburnu, in August 2021, the pain was acute. More than 2,000 miles away, the Taliban was starting to take back control of Afghanistan; within days the country would fall to an old regime made new. The events had plunged Zeytinburnu, an enclave of tens of thousands of Afghans displaced from their home country by war, poverty, and other ills, into a state of collective fear and mourning.

The context seemed to render my investigation, now dragging into its third year, futile. What did three dead women matter when a whole nation was having its heart ripped out?

The heat of late summer shimmered off the pavement as I spent long, liquid days moving from one person to another, displaying my phone screen and asking the same question: Do you know these women? I approached customers in call centers that promised good rates back home, patrons in restaurants where the smell of mutton biryani filled the air, elderly men sipping tea on wooden benches, and mothers watching children at a construction site that had been turned into a makeshift playground. I lost count of how many people I asked. Everyone gave the same answer: No.

On what was supposed to be my last afternoon in Zeytinburnu, I stood outside a café window watching a young Afghan man inside churn cardamom shiryakh (ice cream) in a large copper pot. The customers behind him drank fruit juices and devoured frozen treats amid kitsch decor: blue plastic flowers, a glossy relief of the Swiss Alps. The scene felt at odds with the urgent historical moment; in Kabul, as the American military withdrew, the Taliban was shooting people dead in the streets. Still, perhaps my professional defeat, my failure to find answers, would go down easier with sugar.

The door to the café jingled as I walked inside with Tabsheer,* an Afghan journalist and translator who was helping me report. We sat at a plastic table, where a waiter placed a dish of ice cream swirled to a perfect point and dusted with pistachio. After we ate, Tabsheer suggested, “Let’s just ask one more person. We’re here. We might as well.”

We settled on a middle-aged man who, in a pressed shirt and slacks, would have looked the consummate professional if not for the comically large banana smoothie he was drinking. We walked over and introduced ourselves using the same tired script. I took out my phone and pulled up a photo of a woman, her glossy red lips pursed in a coquettish expression that over the course of my reporting had come to signify disappointment—at men, at law enforcement, at me, the journalist trying to unearth her story.

The man looked at the image and put down his smoothie. He furrowed his brow and leaned in slightly. His lips parted and he hesitated a moment, which prepared me for familiar disappointment. Then he spoke.

“Yes,” he said. He cocked his head to the side. “Yes, I know this woman.”

“Are you sure?”I asked, incredulous at the turn the day had taken.

I pulled up another photo—a teenager with dark eyes, her straight hair tucked behind one ear. “What about this girl, do you recognize her?” I asked, holding my breath.

The man narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he repeated.

I brought up another photo, this time of a young man looking over his shoulder, his mouth firmly set. “I often saw them together around here, but this was many years ago,” the man said. He looked at me quizzically. “What do you want with these people?”

I chose my next words carefully. Few things spook people like the mention of murder. “I’m looking for them,” I replied. “Something bad happened to them in Greece.”

The man held my gaze for a moment and took a sip of his smoothie. Whatever he was weighing, when he set his glass down he seemed to have made up his mind. “I know all these people, and I know their story,” he said. “I will tell you everything.”

THREE YEARS EARLIER

On the morning of October 10, 2018, a Greek farmer named Nikos Papachatzidis left his house to tend his fields. His land abutting the Evros River had long been a source of pride. This slice of the world, on the very eastern edge of Europe, is fertile, a place where sugarcane, cotton, wheat, and sunflowers grow in abundance.

With his snow-white hair blowing in the breeze, Papachatzidis, then in his early seventies, hopped onto his tractor and began tilling the soil. As he drove, he noticed something on the ground: a human hand, bound with a length of rope. He stopped the tractor and climbed down to find a dead woman, her face more or less intact, with a wide wound on her neck. Papachatzidis called the police.

Papachatzidis is not a man easily ruffled. When the police arrived, they cordoned off the area around the body, and Papachatzidis went back to work on another part of his land. He stayed out until sundown, at which point he returned home, exchanged his muddy boots for house slippers, and told his wife about the dead woman. At first she was angry—why had he waited all day to tell her? Then she grew so scared that a killer might be on the loose that she spent a sleepless night praying.

The next day, the couple received a phone call from the police. The bodies of two other women had been found on Papachatzidis’s land. It was likely that all three were migrants or asylum seekers. They had been murdered.

Bodies turn up along the Evros River with morbid regularity. The thin, shallow waterway divides Greece and Turkey for some 120 miles—the countries’ only shared land border—before dumping into the Aegean Sea. The area around Papachatzidis’s farm is a popular gateway for people desperate to enter Europe in search of freedom, safety, and dignity. But while traversing the river is less treacherous than a boat passage across the Mediterranean, it is by no means safe. Between 2018 and 2022, more than 200 migrants and refugees died trying to cross the Evros. Hypothermia and drowning are the most common causes of death. The strong current is challenging even for capable swimmers, and natural debris such as tree branches can snag on clothing and drag people—often children—to the river’s muddy bed. Across the Evros, other dangers await. Smugglers load people into vans bound for Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, with drivers who are often scared and inexperienced, resulting in horrific car crashes along the highway.

Murder, though, is a different matter. It is all but unheard of in Evros, the Greek region that takes its name from the river. For locals, the crime on Papachatzidis’s land was the most brutal act in recent memory.

Word spread fast, fueling rumors. This was the work of Islamic State operatives, some people said. No, the Turks did it. No, only a Greek soldier could be responsible. Greece, after all, had militarized the border in recent years, in an effort to keep migrants out of the European Union. With support from Brussels, the Evros River was now lined with fences and patrolled by men with guns. Some police officers who intercepted Afghans, Syrians, Somalis, and other migrants after they crossed the river allegedly violated international human rights law by sending them right back to Turkey, a practice known as pushback. (Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Greece denies that it engages in pushback.) Over the coming years, several people would be shot dead trying to enter Evros. In March 2020, as border police and the military fired upon migrants, reportedly killing two, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen thanked Greece for being “a European shield.”

A glaring indignity, among many others, is that Europe is not always aware of who dies on its doorstep. Identifying bodies found in Evros is the job of one man: Pavlos Pavlidis, a doctor and forensic scientist. When a migrant dies, the body is taken to Pavlidis’s morgue at University General Hospital in the seaside city of Alexandroupoli.

Pavlidis is tall and gaunt, with the stooped demeanor of a man used to doling out bad news. His job often feels Sisyphean: endless and hopeless. Unlike the sea, the Evros River has no salt to preserve bodies, and faces quickly disintegrate beyond recognition. Most identifying documents are lost or heavily damaged during crossings. Pavlidis takes DNA from the bodies and notes potentially identifying clues—tattoos and circumcisions, for instance—as well as material possessions. He sometimes works with the International Red Cross and various embassies to try and contact the families of the deceased. In most cases, the bodies he inspects are never identified.

When Pavlidis arrived at Papachatzidis’s farm, a grisly scene awaited him. Two of the women were found on their knees, facedown in the soil. Roughly 330 feet away, the third woman, who looked older than the others, lay sprawled on the ground, as though she had tried to run away and been knocked off her feet. All three had their hands bound, and their throats were cut. Their shoes were laced and their pants were buttoned.

Pavlidis is not an emotional man. In the more than two decades he has spent toiling in a hospital basement, he has learned not to think about what the dead were like when they were alive, or what they experienced in their final moments. A morgue is no place to contemplate the immense cruelty of the world if one wants to stay sane. “You get feelings,” Pavlidis said with a firm shake of his head. “I don’t want that.”

Pavlidis oversaw the transfer of the women’s bodies to Alexandroupoli, where they were placed on metal gurneys. The sharp chemical smell of the hospital masked the musk of decay. Decomposition had already set in; it appeared that several days passed before Papachatzidis discovered the bodies. Pavlidis noted that the women were dressed like “Europeans,” in tight denim and without headscarves. They had no identifying documents. Pavlidis found no internal bruising or other signs of trauma. No drugs or alcohol were in the women’s systems, and there was no evidence of sexual assault. The younger women were still, at least medically speaking, virgins; the older woman was not.

Pavlidis took DNA samples from skin, clothes, and hair. He scraped underneath the women’s fingernails, which were manicured and painted pearly pink. Genetic testing soon illuminated one piece of the story: The women were related. The younger two were sisters, and they had been killed a short distance from their mother.

The cause of death in each case was hemorrhagic shock brought on by severe blood loss. The women’s jugular veins had been cut, likely by someone right-handed. In Pavlidis’s experience, wounds of this nature were often sloppy and jagged; slicing someone’s throat is difficult, especially if they’re screaming or moving around. But the wounds on the women were precise. “It was like a butcher cut,” Pavlidis told me, sitting in his office. A cigarette smoldered in a glass ashtray on his desk, and an old PC hummed behind it. “I’ve said from the beginning, this guy is a professional.”

Two knives were found at the crime scene: one nine and a half inches long, with a serrated edge, and another, slightly shorter, with a black plastic handle. Both had been wiped clean. Police found a few other items near the bodies, including a water bottle, a bag of almonds, a tube of lipstick, and a soda can.

The most important piece of evidence was also one of the luckiest finds: a Samsung mobile phone tucked in the mother’s breast pocket. The local police didn’t have the technology to extract metadata from it, nor the experience to handle what was likely to become an international criminal investigation. The women had been killed in Greece after leaving Turkey, and it was all but certain they’d begun life in a third country. To find out who the women were and who had killed them, someone with resources and connections would have to run the investigation.

Zacharoula Tsirigoti is short and compact, with small fingers that seem constantly to be rolling cigarettes with the assistance of a little machine she keeps in her purse and reddish hair that, when we met, was cropped close to her scalp. But while outward appearances indicate a woman built for efficiency, during our first interview Tsirigoti called herself “a romantic.” I watched her tear up twice while talking about her work.

From the age of 13, Tsirigoti wanted to be a police officer. “Not like the riot police that just beat people up,” she clarified, wagging a finger in the air. She wanted to give back to her community; she was attracted to the ethos of service and protection. After graduating from university, Tsirigoti started off as a constable, then spent 22 years working on relations between the Hellenic police and foreign law enforcement. She eventually became head of the Aliens and Border Protection Branch, and in 2016 was promoted to lieutenant general in the Hellenic police in Athens, making her the highest-ranking female officer in Greece.

None of this was without challenges. Greece is the lowest-ranked EU country in terms of gender equality; the Hellenic police is not a bastion of feminism. “The society in Greece is not ready to accept women doing jobs that men used to do,” Tsirigoti said. She sprinkled tobacco onto a rolling paper and looked up at me with a sly smile. “They gave me this branch because they thought I couldn’t manage the situation, but they were wrong,” she said. “A woman is more diplomatic than a man.”

Diplomacy was one characteristic needed to helm the investigation into the triple murder in Evros. Another was patience. Tsirigoti knew it might take months, if not years, to make progress in the case. The required paperwork and bureaucratic maneuvering, already Kafkaesque in Greece, would become even more dizzyingly complex when other nations entered the mix. With her commitment to her work and her Rolodex of international contacts, plus her deep understanding of migration patterns between Greece and Turkey from her time in border protection, Tsirigoti was ideally suited to the job.

One factor working against the investigation was general disinterest in the victims. In November 2018, a month after the murders, Eleni Topaloudi, a 21-year-old Greek woman, was attacked, gang-raped, and killed on the island of Rhodes. The case mobilized the nation, and police quickly arrested the perpetrators. The following year, when Suzanne Eaton, a sixty-year-old American woman, was murdered on Crete, the crime made headlines around the world, and her killer was brought to justice in two weeks. By contrast, the three migrant women killed in Evros barely made the news.

Tsirigoti didn’t just keep law enforcement’s attention on the case—she was the attention. “For me as a woman, it was very sad to see a mother with her two daughters killed like this,” she said. “To cross the border to another country there is a cause. They are human beings, not a number. I wanted to prove to the world, to the EU, that the Greek police investigate and care about everything. It was a matter of honor.”

The first step in the investigation was to contact Interpol, the international organization that facilitates cooperation among law enforcement in 195 countries. Greek police sent a “black notice” to the agency, an official request for information pertaining to unidentified bodies. They shared fingerprints taken from the three bodies—if the women had been registered as asylum seekers in, say, Turkey, there was a chance Interpol would be able to identify them. “We expected to get an answer from them,” Tsirigoti said. But that route turned out to be a dead end.

Tsirigoti hoped that the phone found on the mother would hold clues, so in December 2018 she turned to the Hellenic police’s anti-terrorism unit—not because she suspected that the women had been killed in an act of terrorism, but because the unit is the most technologically advanced in Greek law enforcement. Forensic analysts extracted data from the phone, including 511 contacts, 282 text messages, the dates, times, and numbers associated with 194 calls, and hundreds of photos and videos. Additional messages were found on social media platforms, along with data indicating when and where Wi-Fi was activated.

Sifting through the information, Tsirigoti was able to begin piecing together the women’s identities. They were from Afghanistan, and their first names were Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana. Fahima, the mother, was in her mid-to-late thirties. Rabiya was 17, and Farzana couldn’t have been older than 14. In the photos on the phone, they were suddenly alive. In some images they had their arms thrown around each other. Filters—floating pink hearts, rabbit ears—embellished others.

Now that Tsirigoti knew the women’s nationality, her next move was to reach out to the Afghan ambassador in Greece, Mirwais Samadi. In March 2019, she shared the black notice and other details about the case with him. A much needed stroke of luck: Samadi was close with the chief of police in Kabul. He called in a favor to accelerate the process of formally identifying the women.

Two months later, in May, Tsirigoti received a document from the Interpol office in Kabul. It stated that Fahima was married with five children: Rabiya, Farzana, and three younger ones, two boys and a girl. The whole family had left their home in Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north of Afghanistan, in early 2018. They had passed through Iran before settling in Istanbul for a few months, where they sought passage to Europe. When the Mazar-i-Sharif branch of Interpol received photos of the deceased women, one of Fahima’s sisters and an uncle identified them; law enforcement was able to corroborate their identities with a brother-in-law of Fahima’s living in Europe.

Tsirigoti then turned her attention to Turkey, visiting the country five times as part of the investigation. She worked with the Turkish authorities, trying to track down men who may have come in contact with Fahima and her daughters. Since the women were migrants, they almost certainly had paid smugglers to get them across the Evros River. Those men could be murder suspects or the last people to see the women alive.

But that summer, Tsirigoti’s investigation came to a sudden halt. Political allegiances run deep in Greece, and Tsirigoti had been appointed to her post under the leftist Syriza government, which in the July 2019 elections lost power to the center-right New Democracy party. The new government made sweeping changes to police leadership, and on July 23 Tsirigoti, only 54 at the time, was forced to retire. “I didn’t finish the investigation,” she said, “and I feel very sad about it. But the police is a man’s world.” She shrugged.

Before vacating her office, Tsirigoti spoke with the officer who would take over the case. She made him swear to God he’d solve it. He promised he would, then handed it off to a small team of young male officers. It soon stagnated as police cooperation along the Greek-Turkish border all but ceased under the new government.

Conflict between Greece and Turkey stretches back centuries. After nearly 400 years of occupation by the Ottomans, Greece declared independence in 1821. Four wars followed. In 1923, a forced population exchange of 1.2 million Orthodox Greeks living in Turkey for 400,000 Muslim Turks living in Greece drastically altered the demographic makeup of each country. Refugees came to constitute one-fifth of Greece’s population—among them was Tsirigoti’s grandmother.

Another influx of refugees, this time in the 21st century, became a new source of acrimony between Greece and Turkey; both countries are keen to stir the pot of nationalist ideology and point fingers at each other when it suits them. Greece insists that Turkey isn’t doing enough to stop displaced people from crossing into European territory, while Turkey, host to the world’s largest refugee population, accuses Greece of pushback measures. Caught in the middle are migrants and refugees, human beings treated as pawns.

With her professional experience and fervent commitment to justice, Tsirigoti had managed to bulldoze through political hostilities to investigate the murders of Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana. Without her there was a risk that the crime might never be solved. When we first met, in January 2020, Tsirigoti was still keeping an eye on the case, albeit from afar. She also had a theory about what had happened to the women. She leaned in close to tell me. Behind her, cars zipped down a busy Athens street. “It is my belief that this was an honor killing,” Tsirigoti said.

It seemed reductionist to assume that foreign women had been killed for foreign reasons, as opposed to a smuggling gone wrong, a mangled burglary, or something else related to the perilous journey they’d made to Europe. A form of gendered violence seen primarily in extremely conservative communities, honor killings usually occur when a woman or girl is believed to have tarnished a man’s reputation. These are not crimes of opportunity—they necessarily involve a perpetrator motivated by a desire to protect what he perceives as his dignity. Who might have had that motive, and why? Tsirigoti didn’t have an answer, but she thought she knew who might.

Found on the phone in Fahima’s pocket were photos of a young man who appeared to be in his early twenties, with deep-set eyes and black hair that swooped across his broad forehead. There were images of him with Fahima’s daughters in a park, and one of him sitting on a sofa. In some of these, he had his arms around Fahima; in one, she kissed his cheek. What was his relationship to the women? Could it have been a reason for violence, committed by him or by someone else?

Data from the phone indicated that the young man may have been the last person to see Fahima and her daughters alive. Law enforcement had no idea where he was. I told Tsirigoti that I’d try to find him. Then, in a rush of bravado, I went further: I said that I would find out what happened to the three women.

“OK,” Tsirigoti said with a chuckle. “Good luck.”

What I found was an entirely different story: a generation of young men for whom the greatest barrier to starting a new life was not physical but bureaucratic. They were effectively held prisoner by a byzantine application process so interminable that people had begun scaling the fences — to escape and return to their home countries.

He seemed to sense he stood little chance of being granted the right to stay, but he felt unable to concede that he had spent so much time here for nothing.

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can always visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

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1. Dust and Bones

Yessenia Funes | Atmos | August 31st, 2022 | 3,884 words

“The border crisis is bad now, but climate change will make it exponentially worse,” writes Yessenia Funes in this compassionate piece for Atmos. Extreme heat plays a major role in migrant deaths along the southern border of the U.S. In 2021, the bodies of 225 migrants were recovered from the Arizona desert, and this year, 126 have already been found. One third of these deaths are due to the harsh, dangerous environment. Funes joins a migrant rescue group that combs the desert for people who’ve gotten lost during their journeys. Mostly, though, they search for remains: “bodies, bones, and belongings.” While researchers have studied how climate change will influence migration patterns, they haven’t really measured how it will physically and mentally affect an individual — until now. Funes weaves this data into a very personal and reflective account. The photographs by Carlos Jaramillo, especially images of found items like black water jugs and camouflage backpacks scattered across the desert, are haunting. —CLR

2. The Degradation Drug*

Carl Elliott | The American Scholar | September 1st, 2022 | 5,463 words

It’s hard not to think of Oliver Sacks when you start reading this piece, thanks to its opening tale of a woman’s alarming reaction to the drug pramipexole. But Carl Elliott quickly delves beyond case-study voyeurism to plumb a litany of fascinating philosophical questions. When an impulse-control disorder changes a person’s personality dramatically, and seemingly irrevocably, how do we evaluate the resulting behavior? Are they responsible for their transgressions? Is it even them who’s transgressing? “The issues involved in these judgments raise profound questions about what exactly makes us who we are,” Elliott writes. “And those questions remain morally contentious even without identity-altering drugs.” Come for the “wait, they what?” moments, stay for the constellation of Wittgenstein thought experiments and Philip K. Dick references.  —PR

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3. The Death Cheaters

Courtney Shea | Toronto Life | August 29th, 2022 | 4,711 words

Michael Nguyen, once a tailor to the stars, is the founder of Longevity House, a club where the ultra-wealthy are dipping into high-tech ways to prolong their lives. There’s the BioCharger, which is a fancy device that fights chronic disease and brain fog; experimental fecal transplants; and access to specialists, from a chakra guy to a person who can read your stool samples like “physiological tea leaves.” For these biohackers, the goal is optimization and autonomy over one’s own health care. (Says the starry-eyed founder: “The patient is the doctor of the future.”) But does biohacking work, or is Nguyen just a wellness snake-oil salesman for the 1%? In this entertaining read, Courtney Shea, both with wide eyes and a necessary skepticism, gives us a glimpse into this subculture — think “Goop but for tech bros,” a wellness community where “cryotherapy is the new CrossFit,” and a world in which the body and mind are merely first-generation devices, primed for upgrades. Here, 90 is the new 50.  —CLR

4. Can the American Mall Survive?

Jillian Steinhauer | The New Republic | August 22nd, 2022 | 3,974 words

I grew up in a small place where there wasn’t much to do except go to the mall. I can still navigate its corridors in my brain: Bath & Body Works was around the corner from Victoria’s Secret and just down the way from the GAP. When a new, bigger, splashier mall opened a two-hour drive from my town, a high school friend and I made a pilgrimage to shop there. After all, it boasted an Abercrombie. Needless to say, I ate up Jillian Steinhauer’s excellent essay about the history and future of the American mall, which doubles as a review of a new book about the topic, by architecture critic Alexandra Lange. Steinhauer considers why malls hold such an oversize place in the American cultural imagination. “Malls are not necessarily the communal spaces we would design for ourselves, but in a country short on alternatives, they’re the ones we’ve been given,” she writes. “Is it any surprise that we want them to be so much more?” —SD

5. How Many Errorrs Are in This Essay?

Ed Simon | The Millions | August 24th, 2022 | 6,525 words

I spend a lot of time deliberating over words, so reading Ed Simon’s delightful essay on “when copy goes wrong” was a guilty pleasure. When Simon points out “Theodor Dreiser’s An American Tragedy describes a pair of lovers as being ‘like two small chips being tossed about on a rough but friendly sea,’” I was rooting for those star-crossed potatoes. A fan of a well-set table, I concurred “Blessed are the placemakers,” rather than “peacemakers” — as suggested in a 1562 printing of the Geneva Bible — and I chuckled that a few decades later, the “Wicked Bible” urged that you “shalt commit adultery.” There is a particularly joyful flaw in a 15th-century Croatian manuscript, where “splayed across the pages are the inky pawprints of the scribe’s cat” — the modern-day equivalent of your pet presenting its rear end in a Zoom meeting. After having his fun, Simon deftly moves on to the darker side of copy mistakes: In the U.S. Constitution, “commas are placed between nouns and verbs, errant commas in the Second Amendment make it unclear as to whether the right to bear arms is reserved for individuals or only ‘well regulated militias.’” Simon likes to make you think, and after dwelling on the potential damage of a wayward comma, he moves on to our very existence: Why did the Big Bang happen? It was probably just a mistake as well. —CW

The authors used six climate models to compare the study area’s summertime temperature in 2020 with what’s projected there in 2050 under a middle-of-the-road climate scenario where governments have taken some mitigation measures but not nearly as much as they should.

The researchers had to, then, feed all this data into another model that measures the cost of environmental changes on whatever species is inputted. They were looking at temperature, sure, but also wind speed, humidity, and cloud cover. Every species has its factors that influence the model, too: metabolism, skin properties, sweat rates. For humans, even the clothing someone wears must be included in the model. It also considers geography, such as terrain slope.

Ryan Long, a senior study author and associate professor of wildlife science at the University of Idaho, has used this model to explore how climate change affects elk. He’s seen a classmate use it similarly for grizzly bears. This was his first time, however, using it for humans. In fact, this was the first time any researcher used the biological model on their own species.

ICE spokespeople and officials at the Department of Homeland Security espouse the technology-driven approach to immigration enforcement as a kinder, gentler alternative to physical detention. But for people like Ssemanda, there was nothing humane or gentle about the ankle monitor. It merely shifted the boundaries of incarceration from cell to self.

When does a journey begin? When droughts parch the land, or mudslides take entire farms and crash them into ravines, or floods drown the crops? When herds dwindle, or fish leave for colder seas, or extraction poisons the wells? When war breaks out over resources, when political unraveling echoes the steady and inexorable deterioration of the home ground itself? . . .

The journey begins or doesn’t begin long before the land no longer yields or the climate becomes unlivable. It begins or doesn’t begin with systemic exploitation of environments and their communities, with colonial greed that is centuries old and unceasing, that continues to rift our world.

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Alice Driver | Longreads | December 2020 | 12 minutes (3,442 words)

FANIA*

The doctor made a uterine incision on the woman’s body to extract the fetal arms, then grasped the baby’s feet and pulled him from the womb upside down, delivering him into the era of coronavirus. Fania*, 33, had traveled 1,726 miles from Haiti to Reynosa, Mexico. She had not planned to become pregnant nor imagined giving birth during a pandemic. “In my life, I did not want to have children. I was very careful, and I managed for four years with my husband. The idea was not to have a child who is suffering,” she explained.

When Mexican photographer Jacky Muniello and I met Fania on August 3, 2020, in Reynosa, Mexico, her C-section scar was fully healed. Muniello and I had worked together in Reynosa on several projects, and we were familiar with the risks of working in a city controlled by cartels, one whose militarized streets suggested a city at war with itself. This, however, was our first time working in the city during the pandemic, walking its streets in N95 masks. We found citizens wary, on edge, suspicious, anxious, and struggling to process the coronavirus death news cycle alongside the conspiracy theories spreading like wildfire on social media.

Like many girls and women who migrate, Fania wanted to make decisions about her body. Her story of motherhood is not about a defining act of violence. It is about the mundane issues that women and girls in many parts of the world face every day: lack of financial autonomy, the idea that girls should be the first to sacrifice their education, the stigma and shame associated with female sexuality. As Fania would discover, women seeking asylum in the U.S. face additional risks, including being separated from their children or coerced into sterilization.

Fania and her husband arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border on January 29, 2020. She was eight months pregnant. When the couple requested asylum in the U.S., Fania reported that the Customs and Border Protection agent told her that while she could request asylum, her husband could not because he was “not family.” The agent said that they were “nothing” because the “child had to be present” for them to be considered a family. “I didn’t want to be separated from my husband. It was his first child, too,” Fania explained. She and her husband returned to Reynosa, Mexico, and took refuge at Path of Life (Senda de Vida) migrant shelter. On March 2, Fania gave birth to Bilfani at the Mother and Child Hospital, a public hospital in Reynosa that serves migrants at the shelter.

Before giving birth, doctors informed Fania that she had preeclampsia, which caused swelling and high blood pressure. She explained, “I was in a risky situation, so they gave me a C-section.” She said of the hospital staff, “I really liked the people. They were friendly and provided good service. I have nothing to say but ‘thank you.’”

Dr. Evelyn Gloria Córdoba García, 38, a gynecologist who works at the Mother and Child Hospital, provides care to migrant women like Fania. She explained of her work at the public hospital, the only one in the area serving migrants, “We don’t care where you are from. Whether we provide you medical service or not, the hospital offers a family planning method. They [women] can decide what they want, but the majority don’t accept anything. We tell them that, look, maybe you’re not going to go to your country soon, you’re not going to be able to cross into the United States soon. They are at great risk because sometimes women in that situation, nobody takes care of them.” Fania was thankful for the treatment she received from the hospital, noting that, “If I needed something, when I had the baby, they told me to choose an option, a method,” such as birth control pills. “But I didn’t want to because I knew many things about the methods. I always used a condom, and they gave me many, but still here, it is complicated.”

Héctor Silva de Luna, 52, the director of Path of Life, believed that Fania had been lucky, because as coronavirus spread, hospital staff at the Mother and Child Hospital had been overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. He detailed, based on the experiences of the roughly 25 women who had given birth at the shelter during coronavirus, “Look, families and migrants have always suffered given the needs of pregnancy. But then this disease arrived. Now they are suffering much more because there is nothing, no medical care for people living in the city, much less for a family or an immigrant girl who is pregnant.” He is right. According to a 2015 study, women and girls in humanitarian crises experience 417 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, which is 1.9 times higher than the global estimate of 216.

Fania, with the help of supportive medical staff, survived a difficult birth. Upon her return to the shelter, she confronted motherhood during the pandemic. When Bilfani was 16 days old, President Trump used emergency powers to suspend laws that protect minors and asylum seekers. The Trump administration defined the move as part of an effort to stem the spread of coronavirus, but in reality it was a pretext for the administration’s efforts to end asylum. In practice, this meant that the U.S. government could immediately turn away or deport asylum seekers like Fania and her family. For Fania and mothers at the shelter, unable to request asylum, one day dissolved into the next, endless hours of heat, childcare, boredom.

On August 3, one day after Bilfani turned five months old and eight days after surviving Hurricane Hanna, Fania sat on the edge of a bed in a large shared bedroom at the shelter, sweating in the late afternoon heat as her son slept. She shooed children away from Bilfani because they wanted to touch, kiss, or hug him. “I have become a lioness so that other people don’t touch him without washing their hands with water, chlorine, or gel,” she explained.

When she heard the news that Hurricane Hanna would arrive in Reynosa on July 26, she said, “Before, when I didn’t have a child, I had another voice, other thoughts. Now, do you know? I don’t know. Are you a mother?” I told her that I was not a mother. Like her, I wanted control over my reproductive choices. “When something scary happens, you always think about your baby, about your child.”

Fania and migrants at the shelter made a collective decision not to evacuate, betting that Hurricane Hanna would not flood the shelter. The U.S.-Mexico border has been increasingly affected by climate change issues. Dr. Roberto Sánchez-Rodríguez, a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Studies at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico, explained, “In recent years, the speed at which the hurricane can change intensity is shorter. Before, it took two or three days for them to change from a tropical storm to a hurricane or a category four hurricane, for example. Now it’s 24 hours.” According to Dr. Sánchez-Rodríguez, a greater binational effort is needed in terms of planning to mitigate and respond to climate issues in the region.

FÁTIMA DEL CARMEN

Fátima, a mother of two from Honduras who was also at Path of Life shelter during Hurricane Hanna, said, “We were afraid because we thought that the river was going to get in here, inside the shelter. And then the pastor [the director of the shelter] told us to move to higher ground because he was afraid that the river would get in here. And then we would truly drown.” Although 50 mph winds knocked down trees in the area, no migrants were harmed, nor was there extensive flooding at the shelter.

A week after the hurricane, Fátima stood in the kitchen at the shelter, warming food over an open fire. She was small, had large, weary eyes, and her sentences were slow, halting. Her sons — Henry Anael, 5, and José Israel, 7 — played nearby next to the navy blue and orange camping tent where they slept. Inside the tent, a pale pink bra, recently washed, hung from the netting. Her husband, who had migrated with her and their two children, hovered close, watching her as she spoke. “The truth is, I don’t know how to read. I don’t know how to write,” she said, looking down at her hands.

She did not want to become pregnant when she was 13. She said that she “didn’t know anything” about contraception. The father of the child, now her husband, was 21 years older than her. Fátima explained, “When I got pregnant, they scolded me a lot at the hospital. They told me I was just a girl. I didn’t know anything about having a child, but I had to put up with it.”

Fátima grew up in a rural community in Santa Rita de Copán, Honduras, one of 11 children. Her father was a farmer. In 2009, the same year Honduras earned the nickname Central America’s Dry Corridor, a drought killed over half the region’s crops. Fátima was 10, and her parents told her she would no longer be attending school. Her education ended because, as she explained, “When I was little, we lived very far from the school, and my mom told me that she wouldn’t let me go because it was dangerous for me to go alone.” She and her five sisters stayed at home to help the family while her brothers continued to go to school. Climate change in Honduras has often taken the form of drought, as it did in 2009, affecting Fátima’s family. When climate change causes economic hardship for farming families, girls like Fátima are often the first ones to be required to sacrifice their education.

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Britt Basel, director and lead scientist at Ecothropic, works on projects with communities in Latin America to help them confront climate change challenges. She said, “Climate change is not happening in a vacuum. It is at the same time as extreme resource extraction, growing populations, policies, etc. And it is being exacerbated by all of those factors.” Women and girls are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change because, in many societies, they have less education and decision-making power than men. Their needs and choices regarding education, family planning, marriage, and work are often secondary to those of men or the community.

Fátima and her family fled Honduras on May 11, 2019. She explained, “We received threats,” saying they were threatened by MS-18. Asked to describe the situation in detail, she said, “They arrived at midnight, and we fled. We didn’t know them.” They walked and hitchhiked to Reynosa, begging along the way. Some days they had food to eat, some days they didn’t. The family arrived in Reynosa on February 27, 2020, around the same time as coronavirus hit the city. Being a mother and a migrant, Fátima said, was “very harsh, because we suffered.” She described her life in Honduras, where she stayed at home and cooked while her husband worked in agriculture planting cotton. She added, “In the United States, I would like to study, to work.”

One hot day in August, Silva de Luna sat in the shade of a large tree at the shelter’s entrance. He founded the shelter and had run it for 24 years. With coronavirus’ arrival in Reynosa in March, he decided to stop accepting new migrants. “We are interested in prevention,” he said, explaining why the shelter followed strict guidelines to protect migrants from getting coronavirus because “we know that this is going to be long-term.”

As he spoke, migrants, still as if dead, lay on mattresses on the floor of a room open to the patio, felled by the heat, by the weight of months of uncertainty. People slept and napped there, they said, to be at the lowest point in the room, away from the large windows where a stray bullet could enter as warring factions fought for control of territory, a common problem in Reynosa, a city controlled by cartels. During the afternoon, when temperatures near 100 degrees, mothers took children by the hand, as if sleepwalking through the humidity, and led them to a cold shower for a few moments of relief.

Migrants at the shelter had spent months or years in constant movement. Their migration stories, if drawn on paper, look like a long zigzag. Many of them knew little about Reynosa and were surprised by the heat, hurricanes, and the ferocity and size of the mosquitoes near the Río Bravo, the water border that separated them from the U.S.

Silva de Luna talked about Hurricane Hanna, which affected 50,000 people in Reynosa and flooded the Mother and Child Hospital. “It was very, very strong. The storm, Hurricane Hanna, knocked down some trees, broke some glass in the dining room. We thank God for these very well-built facilities,” explained Silva de Luna. Asked if climate change had made hurricanes more severe, he replied, “It is normal,” adding, “We are almost used to all of this.” Almost.

Climate change will cause the temperature to increase 1-5°C over the next 20-80 years in arid regions along the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, in Honduras, climate change experts predict increased hurricanes, tropical storms, floods, droughts, and landslides. Such changes in temperature and weather will continue to affect water supply, critical infrastructure, and crops. These changes in weather will affect women and girls in specific ways. Gemara Gifford is the international director of Trees, Water & People, an NGO that works on climate change adaptation with communities in Latin America. She explained, “Typically in Central America, especially in rural areas, women and girls are pretty much, you know, their gender roles are to raise the kids, maintain their homes, do the cooking and the cleaning, collect the firewood and water.” When resources like water and wood become scarce, girls and women spend their days, no matter how many hours it takes, doing what is necessary to maintain the home.

Fátima was not familiar with the term climate change. When she described her parents telling her to stay home and help with chores rather than attend school, she did not mention her brothers. She did not make a connection between being forced to quit school and drought or climate change. She did not discuss gender equality or make any comment about the injustice of the situation.

DEISY CONTRERAS

A week after Hurricane Hanna, Deisy, 36, from Venezuela, mother to Andreisy, 16, admitted that she was emotionally exhausted. She sat on a bunk bed in the room at the shelter that she shared with her daughter. She explained, “I say ‘emotionally’ because one is fleeing a country, a situation, physical and psychological abuse, and to come and get stuck here for so long that I can’t manage one urgent need before I’ve got another. I am not doing anything. I have not advanced in any way.” However, Deisy was lucky to have the financial support of her sister, a U.S. citizen, which gave her options many migrants didn’t have.

At the shelter, Deisy helped combat COVID-19 disinformation, using her training as a nurse to explain coronavirus to other migrants. Some of them believed conspiracy theories they had read on Facebook. Deisy said she planned to adapt to and learn to live with the pandemic, and she encouraged others at the shelter to make plans accordingly. She explained, “We know it takes years to make a medication or a vaccine to eradicate diseases given that such diseases affect our organism and remain there.”

On the night of August 22, 2020, Deisy and her daughter paid 5,000 pesos ($225) to a smuggler to help them cross the Río Bravo. The smuggler took them to Acuña, Mexico, to a remote part of the river, and then ushered them into an inflatable raft. When Deisy and her daughter stepped onto U.S. soil, their plan was “to cross the river and turn ourselves into the border patrol.” As they walked away from the river, a border patrol car approached them, at which point Deisy told agents she and her daughter wanted to request political asylum.

Agents got out and searched them to see if they had weapons or drugs, and at that moment, Andreisy had what her mother described as “a crisis of nerves.” According to Deisy, “The officer was very courteous, very attentive to us. He offered us water, sat us down, waited for my daughter to calm down so that he could check that we didn’t have anything hidden in our clothes. We reported that we had not received anything or been harmed when we crossed the river, that nobody had hurt us. From there, another patrol car arrived and took us to a real detention center. I don’t know what it is called or where it is, but vulgarly it is known as the perrera [kennel], while others call it the hielera [icebox].”

Deisy and her daughter spent three days in detention in what she described as “large cages.” During that time, agents at the detention center required that Deisy and her daughter take a pregnancy test and a DNA test. Of the DNA test, Deisy wondered, “I don’t know if it was to confirm that we were mother and daughter.” On the third day, agents transferred them to a different detention center and gave them food, clothes, shampoo, and toothbrushes.

On August 31, Deisy sat for her credible fear interview in which she recounted why she and her daughter were requesting asylum. Deisy, a nurse, explained how she had been increasingly pressured by her superiors and the Venezuelan government to provide or withhold medicine based on political whims. In a country where medicine was often in short supply, giving medicine to backers of the political party in power meant playing with the lives of those less fortunate. In December 2017, Deisy was at work when a group of the president’s supporters arrived, demanding medicine. She refused to hand it over and described, “They took out a firearm. They placed it on my head. They told me that if I didn’t cooperate, they were going to kill me.” In Venezuela, between 2012 and 2017, some 22,000 doctors and 6,000 nurses migrated. Deisy, refusing to compromise her ethics and fearing for her life, would follow in their footsteps, her daughter by her side.

They had enough money to get to Lima, Peru, where Deisy took odd jobs waiting tables and working as a nanny, and Andreisy enrolled in high school. But both mother and daughter suffered from constant discrimination and harassment in a city flooded by Venezuelan migrants. Andriesy reported increasingly alarming sexual harassment to her mother, who could not accompany her to and from school due to work. By 2019, Deisy’s sister in the U.S. had saved enough money to pay for their plane tickets to Reynosa, hoping that they would be able to request asylum and be reunited with her.

On September 2, 2020, agents informed Deisy that she had passed the credible fear interview, and they would release her and Andreisy into her sister’s custody. ICE fitted Deisy with an ankle monitor and granted her humanitarian parole, allowing her one year to request asylum. Deisy was relieved because she had heard conflicting news about the asylum process in the U.S. However, as the Los Angeles Times reported, Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection agency, “said asylum and other humanitarian protections are still available to migrants seeking refuge in the United States. Those who show ‘an appropriate level of fear,’ he said, ‘will be processed on a case-by-case-basis.’” Deisy, who demonstrated an appropriate level of fear, is not allowed to work, and ICE will monitor her movements. Andreisy attends school, and both of them are studying English. They have hired a lawyer who will help them request asylum.

On October 21, 2020, Deisy read the news of the coerced sterilization of migrant women in U.S. detention centers. She wrote to me via WhatsApp, “I had never heard about that, and when I was in detention, at no time did they propose it.” Meanwhile, Fania and Fátima remained in Mexico, waiting, trying to guess the best moment to cross the border and request asylum, knowing their choice could cost them their children or their uterus.

* * *

Alice Driver is a freelance journalist and the author of More or Less Dead. She writes and produces radio for National Geographic, Time, CNN, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Las Raras Podcast, and Oxford American.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photographer: Jacky Muniello