Tell Me How It Ends

In 2015, Valeria Luiselli begins volunteering as an interpreter whose job it is to interview undocumented child migrants in New York City. She explains that the questions she asks these children are part of an “intake questionnaire” used by the city’s immigration court system. The first question on the form is, “Why did you come to the United States?” This is only one of 40 questions that Luiselli poses to child migrants, whose answers she translates from Spanish to English and writes on the questionnaire. Although this question might seem straightforward, Luiselli notes that the answers she receives are rarely “simple.” Instead, children tell her long and complicated stories about why they came to the United States, stories that she has to “transform” into “succinct sentences.” This, she says, is especially difficult because the narratives often have “no beginning, no middle, and no end.

After Luiselli interviews child migrants, she convenes with lawyers, relaying the information she has gathered. This is the primary purpose of her job, since what the children tell her ultimately determines whether or not an attorney will agree to represent them pro bono in immigration court. When Luiselli presents them with what she has learned, the lawyers “analyze the child’s responses, trying to come up with options for a viable defense against a child’s deportation and the ‘potential relief’ he or she is likely to get.” If a lawyer chooses the represent a child, “the real legal battle begins”—a battle that determines whether or not the child will be deported.

In 2014, before Luiselli—a Mexican immigrant herself—volunteers as an interpreter, she goes on a road trip with her husband, daughter, and stepson (who’s visiting from Mexico). She and her family are waiting for their green card requests to go through, so they decide to take a vacation in the meantime, driving from their home in Harlem, New York, to Cochise County, Arizona, which is close to the country’s southern border. Because they haven’t yet received their green cards, they are technically considered “nonresident aliens,” at least in the “slightly offensive parlance of U.S. immigration law.” “There are ‘nonresident aliens,’ ‘resident aliens,’ and even ‘removable aliens,’” Luiselli writes. She and her family, she says, want to become “resident aliens,” even though the bureaucratic process of becoming a United States citizen is quite grueling, arduous, and characterized by uncertainty.

Luiselli compares the green card application with the intake questionnaire for child migrants. Next to the questionnaire, the application seems rather “innocent,” asking questions like, “Do you intend to practice polygamy?” By way of contrast, the suspicious and “cynical” nature of the questionnaire makes Luiselli feel as if “the world has become a much more fucked-up place than anyone could have ever imagined.”

The process of asking undocumented minors questions about their journey to the United States is called “screening,” a term Luiselli finds justifiably “cynical,” as if “the child is a reel of footage.” In these circumstances, she says, their stories become “generalized, distorted,” and seem “out of focus.” As she writes down the children’s answers, she often has to leave entire spaces blank, since they don’t always know—for example—where their parents are.

During Luiselli’s family road trip in 2014, she and her husband listen to the radio and hear about the “wave of children arriving, alone and undocumented, at the border.” As they drive, they follow this story, taking note of how the nation is responding to the sudden influx of child migrants. Soon enough, people start referring to the phenomenon as the “immigration crisis,” though Luiselli points out that some people suggest it should be called the “refugee crisis” instead. As the news of these children spreads across the country, everyone wonders where their parents are, what will happen to them, and—most of all—why they came to the United States.

“Why did you come to the United States?” Luiselli asks every child migrant she interviews in New York. Their answers, she explains, often differ, though they frequently identify the “pull factor” as their desire (or need) to reunite with a family member who has already settled down in the United States. The children also pinpoint “push factors,” referencing “the unthinkable circumstances” that have driven them from their homes. These circumstances include gang violence, abuse, “forced labor,” and “abandonment.” Given these motives, Luiselli sees that these migrants aren’t chasing the “American Dream,” but simply the chance to survive.

The children who arrive in the United States aren’t always able to give an exact account of the details of their journey. The second question on the intake questionnaire asks them to state their date of arrival, information many child migrants are unable to provide. “They’ve fled their towns and cities; they’ve walked and swum and hidden and run and mounted freight trains and trucks,” Luiselli writes. “They’ve turned themselves in to Border Patrol officers.” After this long journey, they can’t always identify when, exactly, they crossed the border.

On the road trip in 2014, Luiselli and her husband try to find any information they can about the child migrants coming into the United States. They scour the news, but it’s rare that a source provides any answers to the many questions surrounding the crisis. In one online article, there’s a picture of Americans clutching guns and flags. Beneath it, the caption reads, “Protesters, some exercising their open-carry rights, assemble outside of the Wolverine Center in Vassar [Michigan] that would house illegal juveniles to show their dismay for the situation.” Another picture that Luiselli and her husband find online is of an elderly husband and wife raising signs that say, “Illegal Is a Crime” and “Return to Senders.” Luiselli studies their faces and asks herself what they must have been thinking about while showing such vehemence toward child migrants.

Some of the news sources that Luiselli and her husband read frame the crisis as something like a “biblical plague.” Reading these sources makes Luiselli wonder if “the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color.” Thinking this way, she asks herself if the child migrants would be “treated more like people” if they were white.

To pass the time in the car, Luiselli and her husband tell their children stories about the history of the American Southwest, “back when it used to be part of Mexico.” Narrating these stories, Luiselli talks about President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, when the United States forced Native Americans onto reservations. “It’s curious, or perhaps just sinister,” she writes, “that the word ‘removal’ is still used to refer to the deportation of ‘illegal’ immigrants—those bronzed barbarians who threaten the white peace and superior values of the ‘Land of the Free.’”

Luiselli and her husband try to talk to their children about the immigration crisis, but they have trouble answering their questions. “How do you explain any of this to your own children?” Luiselli wonders. When her children fall asleep in the backseat, she looks at them and thinks about whether or not they’d “survive” the journey from Mexico to the United States. Questions three and four on the intake questionnaire are “With whom did you travel to this country?” and “Did you travel with anyone you knew?” Luiselli notes that seemingly all of the child migrants travel with a “coyote,” someone who takes children across the border for a fee. Watching her children sleeping in the backseat, Luiselli thinks about what would happen to them if a coyote “deposited” them at the border. 

The intake questionnaire’s fifth question is, “What countries did you pass through?” Following this is, “How did you travel here?” Luiselli explains that the vast majority of the children she interviews come from Mexico, though there are also migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. To answer the sixth question (about how they traveled), almost every child says that he or she took “La Bestia,” or “The Beast.” This is a freight train that runs throughout Mexico, upon which roughly 500,000 Central Americans ride every year. On La Bestia, Luiselli notes, “the most minor oversight can be fatal.” It is a very dangerous mode of transport, since the train often derails, and people frequently fall off during the night. “But,” Luiselli writes, “despite the dangers, people continue to take the risk. Children certainly take the risk. Children do what their stomachs tell them to do.”

Once child migrants reach the United States’ border, the “coyotes” leave them. At this point, the children try to find Border Patrol officers, wanting to turn themselves in because they know it’s safer to be “formally detained” than to wander in the desert. Luiselli notes that the children will most likely remain “undocumented” forever if the “legal proceedings” don’t begin shortly after they arrive in the country. “Life as an undocumented migrant is perhaps not worse than the life they are fleeing,” she writes, “but it is certainly not the life that anyone wants.”

Once child migrants are detained by Border Patrol, they’re put into a detention center known as the “icebox.” It is called this because it’s operated by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and because the entire facility is kept at extremely cold temperatures, as if the children are meats that must be refrigerated. Worse, children experience “verbal and physical mistreatment,” often have nowhere to sleep, are unable to use the bathroom when they need to, and don’t receive enough food. To illustrate the negligence that runs rampant in the icebox, Luiselli references a mishap that took place in 2015, when a Texan detention center gave 250 children adult doses of hepatitis vaccinations. “The children became gravely ill and had to be hospitalized,” Luiselli writes. According to the law, migrants are only allowed to stay in the icebox for 72 hours. However, many children stay much longer than this.

Driving through New Mexico in 2014, Luiselli and her family pass groups of men driving pickup trucks. These people are “vigilante, patriotic men who carry pistols and rifles by constitutional right and feel entitled to use them if they see a group of aliens walking in the desert.” While they’re in this region of the country, Luiselli and her husband avoid talking about the fact that they’re Mexican. Still, Border Patrol officers stop them several times. One asks what they’re doing in New Mexico, and they say that they’re writers working on a “Western.” This isn’t true, but they feel they need a concrete reason for visiting the American Southwest.

The intake questionnaire’s seventh question is, “Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?” This, Luiselli explains, rarely elicits answers from the children. They are reticent to speak about the hardships they’ve encountered, but Luiselli knows that most of them have experienced trauma. Because she herself is Mexican, she feels “ashamed” by this question, since she knows that these children have most likely seen horrible things on their journey through her country. The statistics, Luiselli says, are illustrative of this “horror.” To that end, she notes that 80% of “women and girls” who cross the border are raped at some point in their travels. “The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north,” she writes. Furthermore, vast numbers of migrants are “abducted” and “disappear.”

Luiselli relates a story from 2010, when 72 migrants from Central and South America were found dead in a mass grave in Mexico. “Some had been tortured, and all had been shot in the back of the head,” she writes. Three of these migrants pretended to be dead, which is how they escaped to tell the tale. Apparently, the drug cartel Los Zetas killed the 72 migrants because the migrants “refused to work for them and did not have the means to pay a ransom.” Stories like these are why Luiselli hates asking children if anything terrible happened to them during their travels. Whenever she asks this, she wants to block her ears, but she knows she can’t. Instead, she forces herself to listen intently, understanding that the children might say something that will make it possible for her to match them with a lawyer and, thus, avoid deportation.

Violence isn’t the only danger migrants face when trying to reach the United States’ southern border. Starvation and dehydration in the desert are also very real threats, as over 2,200 “human remains” have been found since 2001. Most of these remains are “unidentified,” which is why a nonprofit organization called Humane Borders created an “online search mechanism that matches names of deceased migrants to the specific geographical coordinates in the desert where their remains were found.” With this tool, people can search for missing family members and see if they have perished in the desert.

Luiselli upholds that “numbers and maps tell horror stories,” but she also points out that the true horror stories are the ones that never get told. “And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us,” she writes. “Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable.” In the current political climate, she upholds, “horror and violence” have been “normalized.” This, she asserts, is unacceptable, since “we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.”

Luiselli’s family returns from their road trip to find their green cards waiting for them in the mail. Luiselli’s, however, isn’t among them. Her lawyer asks if she’s ever visited “Muslim-majority countries,” but Luiselli says it has been ten years since she last traveled to such a place. She also can’t think of any organizations she belongs to that would qualify as “a threat to the United States.” Determining why she hasn’t been issued a green card takes up much of her time, as she’s forced to file “petitions” and place calls to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Fortunately, she has already obtained a temporary work permit, meaning she can continue her job as a lecturer while she waits to find out more about her green card.

While Luiselli is sorting out the problems related to her green card, her lawyer gives her case to a colleague, since she herself has decided to take a job at a nonprofit organization advocating for undocumented child migrants. This is because the Obama administration has recently made a “priority juvenile docket in immigration courts to deal with the deportation proceedings of thousands of undocumented children.” This means that the courts are suddenly in desperate need of Spanish-speaking attorneys. When Luiselli’s lawyer tells her why she’s leaving, Luiselli asks if there’s any way she too could become involved, perhaps as a translator or interpreter. Consequently, her lawyer connects her with someone from the American Immigration Lawyers Association.