A deadly passage

More than two years after the worst immigration-related disaster in American history, traffickers involved in the deaths of 53 migrants are set to stand trial. For the families of the victims, justice in American courts means little, and in some cases the tragedy isn’t enough to deter their own journey north.

• Elliott Woods

María Victoria Velasco Jiménez buys votive candles by the case. For more than two years, she has kept one lit on a shelf above the microwave and mini fridge in the apartment she shares with her daughter, Arlet, in Lomas de San Isidro, a hilltop colonia on the southeastern edge of Mexico City. The streetlights outside the apartment paint the blocky buildings in a yellow glow. Stormwater courses down the center of the unpaved and rubble-strewn street. Millions of lights blanket the ancient lake bed below, rippling out across the hills that surround the capital.

Inside, the concrete walls of María Victoria’s tiny apartment are cold and austere. The candle burns in a juice glass in front of a framed photo of her son, Marcos Antonio Velasco Velasco, offering a hint of warmth. The portrait shares the shelf with vases of artificial flowers, a pair of figurines kneeling in prayer, and a one-foot-tall ceramic Jesus draped with rosaries. Wearing a white T-shirt and sporting a fresh buzz cut, Marcos Antonio looks down from a blue sky filled with puffy clouds and soaring white doves. He has his mother’s high and wide cheekbones, black hair, and narrow eyes. He looks much younger than eighteen, which is how old he was when the photo was taken. Not long after, he’d left home for the U.S. border, encouraged by his friends to echarle ganas—to go for it.

María Victoria rode with Marcos Antonio to the bus depot on the day of his midnight departure in June 2022. Her brother-in-law, who was already working in Ohio, had arranged the journey with a coyote, and María Victoria had entrusted her son’s safety to a pair of older men from San Miguel Huautla—her hometown in Oaxaca—who had made arrangements with the same coyote and promised to look after Marcos Antonio on the journey north. “My son was going to go and work so that he could buy a house, buy a car, you know?” María Victoria says. She is dressed in a fleece vest, green plaid slacks, and running shoes. Her long black hair is pulled back in a ponytail. On one wrist, she wears a bracelet with glass evil-eye beads. Sitting at the foot of her single bed, her feet barely reach the floor. “How could I have imagined that he would come home dead?”

Marcos Antonio was among 53 people from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras who died in San Antonio in what has often been described as the worst immigration-related disaster in U.S. history. The migrants had made their way to the border via dozens of routes, some winding and treacherous, others as short and uncomplicated as a full-day bus ride. They had waded the Rio Grande in small groups, many of them getting caught and turned back by Border Patrol agents more than once before finally crossing undetected to the U.S. side, where they were herded into a stash house in Laredo. That’s where as many as 66 of them climbed into the back of a refrigerator trailer early in the afternoon of June 27, 2022, to make the last leg of a trip that had cost their families between about $7,500 and $15,000 each.

That fee included passage beyond the one-hundred-mile zone that stretches into the U.S. from the Rio Grande, where federal Border Patrol officers operate checkpoints and patrol small towns and back roads in their signature green-and-white trucks. Border Patrol agents are supported by an arsenal of technology, including towers and aerostatic balloons equipped with infrared and high-resolution surveillance cameras, facial-recognition devices, and ground sensors that can detect foot traffic. What this means for many migrants is that crossing the river is only the first step in a marathon of evasion—once they’re on the U.S. side, another dangerous game begins.

When Marcos Antonio and the others watched the doors of the trailer swing closed and heard the latches slam home, they could not have known that the trailer’s refrigeration system was broken. Temperatures soared above 100 degrees that day. By the time the semi was discovered, at about six that evening—abandoned beside the Union Pacific Railroad tracks on Quintana Road, which runs parallel to Interstate 35 in an industrial area of south San Antonio—48 of the passengers were dead from heat-related injuries. Five more would die at area hospitals in the days that followed. There were at least eleven survivors, including José Luis Vásquez Guzmán, one of the two men who had assured María Victoria that he would keep an eye on her son. The other one, Javier Flores López, a father of three, died.

The disaster briefly dominated the news cycle. But the Quintana Road incident was only the latest and most terrible in a series of similar events. In 2003 authorities discovered seventy people trapped inside a semitrailer in the South Texas town of Victoria. Seventeen were already dead, and two more died later. In 2017 a Walmart employee in San Antonio called the police to report a suspicious semi in the store’s parking lot. Thirty-nine migrants were inside the trailer. Ten of them died.

Recent data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection suggests that trucking is becoming a more prominent mode of human trafficking. And Laredo, where the Quintana Road victims first boarded that faulty trailer, has the highest volume of truck crossings of any land port in the U.S.—about 2.7 million each year.

Seven people have been arrested and charged in the U.S. for the deaths of the Quintana Road victims. Another seven were arrested in Guatemala. Five of the defendants in the U.S. have pleaded guilty. The remaining two are scheduled to go to trial in March before a federal judge in San Antonio. The inner workings of their smuggling network will be revealed to the public during that trial, but more than two years after the tragedy, much about the victims and their families has gone unreported. 

Last summer, I spent three weeks searching for relatives of the Quintana Road victims. I met with sixteen families spread out across the migration routes that link Central America to the U.S. border, from the mountain villages of western Guatemala to diverse regions of Mexico—the tropical lowlands of Oaxaca, the dry plains of Guanajuato, and the industrial sprawl of Ciudad Juárez. I found the names of the dead and their hometowns in publicly available government documents. In some cases, I identified the names of the victims’ family members in Facebook posts or in local media reports. I was able to get in touch with a few of them ahead of time, but locating the families was mostly a matter of traveling to wherever the bodies had been repatriated and asking around.

Some families politely refused to talk, saying they were fearful of drawing attention from smugglers and criminal gangs or that they were exhausted and saw no point in reopening old wounds. But others welcomed me into their homes and refused to let me leave without offering a snack or a home-cooked meal—tamalitos, caldo de pollo, asado de chile colorado. I spent dozens of hours talking with spouses, parents, siblings, children, and neighbors, all of whom shared migration stories spanning generations.

I wanted to understand the forces that had driven their loved ones and millions like them to undertake the journey to the U.S. border. I wanted to weigh the enormity of the catastrophe from the perspective of the people who had seen their hopes of a better life destroyed by an act of carelessness, on the one hand, and by the broken U.S. immigration system, on the other. Those who died along with Marcos Antonio left behind families that must contend with the ravages of grief and the social and financial fallout of losing a breadwinner, a parent, a spouse, or a child. Many of the families drained their savings or took out loans to finance their relative’s journey. Some leveraged their homes as collateral. Others put up agricultural plots that they rely on for subsistence. All of them will endure hardships for years to come. The Quintana Road tragedy was decades in the making, and the stories that follow are but a small sample from the aftermath.

Marcos Antonio Velasco Velasco, 18

Long before María Victoria accompanied her son to the local bus depot so that he could begin his journey north—long before she built a shrine to him in her apartment—she set off on her own migration in search of a better life. She’d grown up in a Mixtec family in San Miguel Huautla, in the dry and rocky hill country of northwestern Oaxaca, one of nine siblings who all eventually left the village to make a life somewhere else. Her father had scratched out an existence by growing beans, corn, and wheat in subsistence plots, hiring himself out as a day laborer, and crafting ox yokes out of wood and leather to sell at a local market. Her mother’s days were filled with caring for children, hand-milling maize, and tending their small garden. “Sometimes there was enough money, sometimes there wasn’t,” María Victoria said of her childhood. 

At fifteen, she left for Mexico City to work as a domestic servant. On the ride to the capital, she crouched low in her seat every time the bus approached an overpass. “I thought I would hit my head,” she said. “That’s what it’s like for someone from the pueblo. That’s ignorance.” It was night when she arrived. She had never seen so many cars or so much darkness lit up by so many electric lights. “I said to myself, ‘How beautiful. It’s dark, but you can see everything.’ ” 

For her first job, she received a pink uniform and cooked and cared for the two young daughters of a working mother in the north of the city. “It’s hard at first when you leave home,” she said. “I cried when I left my parents. But with time, you get used to it.”

When she was nineteen, she met a man at a dance during a visit back to her hometown who was also working in Mexico City at the time. They became a couple and rented a house together in a colonia outside the capital. Their daughter, Arlet, was born a year later. Marcos Antonio arrived a year after that.

Marcos Antonio was a gregarious child who knew everyone in the colonia and was always looking for work. María Victoria remembers the day he helped a neighbor carry some boxes and came home with his first earnings. “He must have been seven or eight. He said, ‘Look, Mom, I already bought my own drink!’ ” When he was about sixteen, Marcos Antonio got a job butchering chickens and was proud to help support his mother. Every day when he got home from work, he would kiss her on the forehead. He called her jefa, or boss.

“Sometimes I talk to his photo, or he comes to me in my sleep,” María Victoria said. “He comes to tell me that everything is all right.”

Around this time, María Victoria left her partner. He’d become violent toward her and the children, she said. Living on her own with two kids, María Victoria struggled to make ends meet. One day, a brother-in-law called to tell her that he had an opportunity for her al otro lado—on the other side of the border, in Ohio. He said it was all arranged, that he would pay for everything, and that all she had to do was get to Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican border city across from Laredo. She didn’t ask for details. She didn’t know what the job was or even what city it was in. But she decided she had no choice but to go.

When she told Marcos Antonio, who had just turned eighteen, he begged to take her place. “Jefa, I’m the man of the house,” he told her. “I’ll go.” He promised to build her a house in Oaxaca near her mother and to pay for Arlet’s school. Though she worried for his safety, María Victoria was comforted to know he’d be traveling with two family friends.

Marcos Antonio sent regular updates during the roughly twenty-hour bus ride to Nuevo Laredo, telling María Victoria how much fun he was having. The last time she heard from him was June 23, a Thursday. He was preparing to cross the border. “I’ll call you once we’re on the other side,” he said. “I love you very much.”

That Sunday, María Victoria was out shopping when a black butterfly flew three circles around her, then fluttered away. “After that, I had a bad feeling,” she said. The next morning she woke up nauseated and felt sick with worry. On Tuesday night, her sister—the one whose husband had arranged the trip—called her about the tragedy in San Antonio. “I started going crazy,” María Victoria recalled.

She was summoned to a government office in Mexico City, where she looked at photographs of Marcos Antonio’s corpse to confirm his identity. She decided to have his remains returned to her home village, where he could be with her ancestors. With Arlet by her side, she dragged herself as if sleepwalking through the burial in the village cemetery, which sits on a high clearing overlooking the surrounding rocky hills. The grave marker she chose for him is shaped like a chapel. Behind a pane of glass on the headstone, María Victoria placed a copy of the same photo that sits by the candle in her apartment.

For a month and a half afterward, she struggled to get out of bed. She hardly ate. But soon her savings started to run out, so she returned to work. Her monthly expenses amount only to about $200, but even that is tough to cover on her part-time income as a maid. “It’s enough for food and bills, but nothing else,” she said. The threat of being forced out into the street is a constant concern. “This month, the cooking gas ran out and I had to buy more, so there wasn’t enough money for anything else,” she told me when I visited last summer.

She and Arlet, who’s now 21, share a single cement-block room and live more like sisters than mother and daughter. They never go out to eat, preferring instead to cook Oaxacan dishes on a comal that sits next to a dinette at one end of the room. Most of the space is taken up by their two twin beds, which are pressed against opposite walls, separated by a tall dresser and piled high with stuffed animals—Scooby-Doo, a unicorn, the Disney character Stitch. “They’re our little brothers,” Arlet said. “They keep us company.”

But the absence of a brother and a son still lingers. “All of the days since he died have been sad,” María Victoria said.

If Marcos Antonio had survived, he would have made more in three days—around $240 at $10 an hour—than his mother earns in a month. She imagines the day that he would have come home to her, how he would have kissed her on the forehead. “Sometimes I talk to his photo, or he comes to me in my sleep,” María Victoria said. “He comes to tell me that everything is all right.”

Aracely Marroquín Coronado, 21

On the farm where Aracely grew up, near the town of
Comitancillo in Guatemala’s western highlands, the maize is so tall in July that it swallows her family’s house whole. Towering stalks are a source of pride in the highlands, where Indigenous farmers grow the same varieties their ancestors have cultivated for centuries, though the leaves on many of the plants are now streaked with yellow and brown—signs of stress from yet another season of drought, which has become more common and severe in recent years because of climate change.

Aracely shared a dirt-floored room with her seven siblings, in an adobe home with no running water perched on a muddy hillside. Walking home from school as a child, her book bag and her long braid bouncing on her back, Aracely would have seen smoke from her mother’s wood-fired kitchen rising from the bottomless green of the maize. Aracely loved school and was a star student. Her parents, Reina Florentina Coronado and Daniel Delfín Marroquín, primarily speak the Mayan language Mam. Neither of them know how to read, but they have prioritized education for their children. Technically, primary and secondary education are free in Guatemala, but costs for mandatory uniforms and school supplies are prohibitive for many, which contributes to high dropout rates. In the western highlands, only about one in three kids make it to high school. Aracely wanted to be one of them, and she begged her mom and dad to keep her enrolled. “If you help me graduate, I will go to work for you, so that you don’t have to keep working,” she promised.

Reina and Daniel raised pigs on scraps and corn silage to sell at a local market to bring in what little money they had. Much of their food they grew for themselves. They were proud to support Aracely, regardless of what she pledged in return. “It was our dream for her too,” Reina said.

Aracely was about fifteen when she decided to become a teacher, and five years later, in 2021, she earned her certification. Then reality hit. No matter how far away she looked, Aracely could not find an open position. According to the Guatemalan news outlet Prensa Libre, no new permanent teacher posts were created from 2013 to 2024. Competition for existing jobs was intense, as many considered them a pathway to a middle-class life. Eventually, Aracely gave up the search and left home to work as a maid in San Marcos, the region’s capital city. But she didn’t give up on her dream of taking care of her family. After about two months, she asked Reina and Daniel to help pay her way to the U.S., where she hoped to join her older sister in Worthington, Minnesota, home to a meatpacking plant that in 2006 was the target of one of the largest immigration raids in U.S. history.

“I don’t have a husband or a family,” she told them. “There’s no work here, and I’ll earn much more over there.” Reina and Daniel agreed to pay the first installment of her coyote fee, taking out a mortgage for about $10,000 on their property from a local bank, which they’re still struggling to pay back. Aracely was accompanied by two other women from their small town: Blanca Elizabeth Ramírez Crisóstomo, who was 23, and Deisy Fermina López Ramírez, who was 20. None of them survived the trip.

Now a mural with their names and a symbolic depiction of their journey north covers a wall in the center of town. Reina and Daniel say they will never again help one of their children travel north. “I’ve had enough sadness and sorrow,” Reina said.

Gustavo Daniel Santillán Santillán, 27

About two hours north of Mexico City, Miscelanea Alma—or Alma’s Corner Store—sits across from a muddy lot where rebar sprouts from columns of half-finished houses. It’s a one-story building made of concrete blocks, painted white and trimmed in Coca-Cola red, located near a major highway and a Pemex gas station at the southern end of Santa María Ajoloapan, a sleepy town of about 10,000. The store’s sliding glass doors tempt passersby with views of floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with chips and refrigerators stocked with soft drinks. There’s another store just like it on the same block, and countless others like it throughout rural Mexico, where local merchants are holding out against supermarket chains.

Micaela Santillán Soto is one of those merchants. At fifty years old, she’s short and round and tends the shop’s counter with her thin eyebrows fixed in the gaze of a shrewd trader. Miscelanea Alma is much more than a business for Micaela—it’s her family’s financial anchor and the realization of a lifelong dream. It’s also what allowed her to help her son, Gustavo, when he asked for a loan in 2022.

Gustavo, who was 27 at the time, wanted to pay a coyote about $7,500 to smuggle him across the U.S. border and all the way to San Antonio. It was a lot of money, but that wasn’t Micaela’s biggest concern. She was worried about Gustavo’s safety, because she knew the migration route had grown much more dangerous in the years since her husband had made the journey north in 2001.

There was the threat of cartel violence and the prospect of drowning in the Rio Grande, and once on the U.S. side, the risks were still daunting. Since 1985, increases in Border Patrol funding have consistently been linked to increases in migrant deaths. The more the U.S. spends on border security, the more migrants die. Meanwhile, there is no clear evidence that the intensifying militarization of the U.S. side of the border since the mid-nineties has significantly reduced the number of undocumented people who make it into the U.S. or had any durable effect on the number who try. Instead, the border-security apparatus only pushes migrants to take bigger risks. This will almost certainly remain true despite Donald Trump’s promise to close the border. As a practical matter, the U.S. simply cannot place enough officers along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border to intercept every migrant. And as long as U.S. employers continue to offer much higher wages than laborers can earn south of the border, people will continue to risk their lives to work here.

Despite her reservations, Micaela agreed to front Gustavo about $2,600, enough for him to get to the border and pay the first part of his coyote fee, and one of her brothers in the U.S. agreed to loan Gustavo the rest upon his arrival. “It’s really difficult here. Everything is very expensive and the salaries are very, very low,” she said. In 2022 the average monthly salary in the State of Mexico, where they lived, was about $172. “It’s always been: Go, work at whatever job you can find, make a little bit of money, and then come back.” Her brothers had done it, as had her husband, Daniel Santillán Trejo.

Daniel is shy and soft-spoken. When I met with the family in June, he was relaxing on a love seat covered with a pink-and-brown striped blanket in the living room of their home, which is connected to Micaela’s store by a passage through the stock room. The purple-painted walls were adorned with graduation and wedding photos, a hand-carved crucifix that Gustavo had given Micaela, and a memorial portrait of Gustavo. Rafa, Gustavo’s eleven-year-old son, sat quietly next to his grandfather. Micaela, whose hair was pinned up with a plastic panda hairclip, was nestled in an easy chair, taking a break from the counter. “She is my strength,” Daniel said, looking at Micaela. “She keeps the whole family together.” Their daughter Alma, Gustavo’s older sister and the shop’s namesake, sat by her side in an aluminum chair, cradling her one-month-old daughter, Génesis.

Daniel said it was hard on six-year-old Gustavo when he went north in 2001. Daniel had been working at a rebar plant and could never seem to earn enough to move Micaela and their growing family into their own home. “We said that if we wanted something better, then we would have to suffer, I would have to go,” Daniel said. “I remember when Gustavo found out I was going to the United States. I took out a big suitcase, and he said, ‘I’ll go with you, Papá. I’ll pack myself in your suitcase.’ ” 

Daniel spent three years in Atlanta working at restaurants, cleaning and washing dishes for $8 an hour. With his earnings, he was able to build their home and the corner store for Micaela, but the years away from his family took a toll. “I missed my kids’ birthdays, Christmas Eve and Christmas, all the feast days,” he said. When he returned to Mexico in 2004, Daniel decided he would do whatever it took to never have to leave his family again. “It was my first and last trip,” he said.

For Gustavo, though, going north had suddenly become an obsession. He had two kids to take care of and had just gone through a bad breakup with one of their mothers. He was restless and depressed, desperate to get on sound financial footing. With the cash his mother had lent him, he took a 23-hour bus ride to Ciudad Acuña, across the river from Del Rio. The first two times Gustavo attempted to cross the Rio Grande, he got caught and was turned back by Border Patrol. “Why don’t you just come home?” Micaela pleaded with him over the phone. “No, third time’s the charm,” Gustavo insisted. And it was.

On June 27 he called Micaela from the stash house in Laredo. It was between one and two in the afternoon. “Mamá, a trailer just showed up,” Gustavo told her, sounding panicked. “I thought they were going to put us in the bed of a truck. I’m not okay with this.”

Micaela did not allow herself much time to grieve—she had a store to run and a family depending on her. “My business doesn’t allow me to shut myself in here crying.”

Micaela tried to persuade him not to get in the trailer, but she could hear the coyote in the background telling him it was safe, that it was all totally normal, that they’d be in San Antonio in three hours. Finally, Gustavo gave in. “It’s okay, Mamá,” he told her.

“Make sure you have water,” she told him.

“Yes, Mamá, I have water.”

Those were Gustavo’s last words to his mother.

It was about ten that night when Micaela, scrolling her phone in her bedroom, saw the news about the trailer on Quintana Road. She burst into the living room, frantic, and soon the whole house was awake, anxiously scanning the internet for news of survivors. Around five in the morning, Alma started calling San Antonio hospitals, but he had not been admitted anywhere. Eight days later the family finally received confirmation from the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Gustavo was dead.

“It was a horrible day,” Micaela said. “My daughters were out there on the patio screaming, and I was here inside, just devastated.” The house soon filled with family members and neighbors who came to offer their condolences. Micaela could not make sense of why her son, of all the millions of migrants who travel to and from the U.S., had died. He was young and strong. Why hadn’t he been one of the survivors? And there were other questions that tormented her: Why had she given Gustavo that loan? Why hadn’t she tried harder to persuade him to stay?

Sixteen days after his death, Gustavo’s body was returned to Mexico in a steel coffin. The first thing Micaela did was swap it out for a wooden one. “I didn’t want him in a steel box, because he died in a steel box,” she said. She took some solace in being able to give him a proper funeral. Micaela also received Gustavo’s wallet, which she now keeps in a cookie tin. When she opened the lid to show me, she removed the frayed leather bifold with care, as if it might crumble. She pulled out a few dollar bills, which she said are wrinkled from being submerged in the Rio Grande. She paused briefly to gaze at the photo on Gustavo’s driver’s license—his black hair is combed back, and he has a hint of scruff—before putting everything back in its place and shutting the relic in its tin. “This is my treasure,” she said.

Micaela did not allow herself much time to grieve—she had a store to run and a family depending on her. “My business doesn’t allow me to shut myself in here crying.” As time passed, her sadness gave way to anger at the smugglers. She doesn’t blame them for the crime of human smuggling itself—which, to her mind, is a valuable service that migrants depend on to access the better-paying U.S. labor market. It’s the smugglers’ negligence that enrages her. “You have to see to it that the trailer has air-conditioning, that everything is in perfect working order,” she said. “The coyote was in the wrong because he didn’t take care of his merchandise.”

A deeply religious woman, Micaela is not placing her hopes for justice in the American courts. “They might deserve the death penalty. But I’m a believer, and for me, there’s only one judge,” she said. 

While we talked, Gustavo’s son, Rafa, sat quietly, kneading a deflated balloon that he’d filled with flour and decorated with a smiley face. Micaela and Daniel took him in after Gustavo’s death. Surrounded by love in his grandparents’ busy house, Rafa still struggles to cope with the loss of his father. And even though Micaela’s store is successful, he knows that he won’t be able to lean on his grandparents forever. He enjoys taking things apart and putting them back together—“Mostly old telephones,” he said—and he dreams of becoming a mechanic. But Rafa said no matter what happens, he’ll never go north.

Francisco Tepaz Simaj, 23

There are two ways to get to Chuitzanchaj, and both
are grueling. The tiny Kaqchikel Mayan-speaking community sits at 7,400 feet, high above the volcano-rimmed shores of Lake Atitlán, in the western highlands of Guatemala. To get there by car or bus requires an hours-long, bone-rattling ride on rugged roads from one of the market towns to the north. The other way is to take a water taxi from one of the lakeside tourist towns to a village called Tzununa, then hoof it up steep switchbacks for about two hours. Because of its isolation, there’s not much work in Chuitzanchaj, which means that many people migrate to elsewhere in Guatemala or to Mexico and the U.S.

For Ana Miguel Miguel—who grew up in a sweltering, lawless town near the Pacific coast—the seclusion of the community also meant safety and something close to salvation. Ana had spent her childhood in a dirt-floored shack with walls made of dried sugarcane stalks and no door. Now she sits in a plastic chair in a concrete-block room with walls painted baby blue, in a house she once shared with her husband, Francisco Tepaz Simaj. Ana, now 27 years old, is small, with a round face and a sad but gentle demeanor. She wears a long-sleeved T-shirt with a black-and-red-checked silhouette of Texas embroidered on the front. Their two young daughters, Cruz Eulalia and María Isabel, climb in and out of Ana’s lap, whispering in her ear and begging to play with her cellphone. It’s unlikely they remember Francisco, who was only 23 when he left for the U.S.

Growing up, Ana didn’t attend a single day of school because her family didn’t have enough money. “Everything my father earned, we ate,” she said. She was around fifteen when she left home to pick coffee for the first time. Her father—worn out from work on sugarcane and banana plantations—could not meet the family’s needs alone. From November to April, she traveled to farms throughout the coastal highlands, following the harvest, sleeping in migrant camps, laboring alongside generations of migrant workers.

Ana worked with pregnant women and old people with gnarled fingers and bent backs and small children who picked alongside their parents. Guatemala prohibits children under fourteen from working, but in a country where two-thirds of families survive on less than two dollars a day, putting kids to work can mean the difference between starvation and survival. The U.S. Department of Labor includes Guatemalan coffee on its list of goods produced by child labor, and in recent years, children have been found working on farms that supply beans to Nespresso and Starbucks. (Nestlé Nespresso issued a statement calling child labor “unacceptable” and pledged to take “immediate action that puts the protection of child welfare first.” Starbucks asserted that they have “zero tolerance for child labor anywhere in our supply chain.” The company is currently being sued by a consumer group for “documented, severe human rights and labor abuses” in Brazil, Kenya, and Guatemala, including child labor, some of which occurred after 2020.)

Ana and the other pickers were organized into work parties of a few dozen under the charge of a caporal, or foreman. In her fifth season, she was assigned to a foreman named Francisco, who was well-liked by his crew. He hustled up and down the rows, teaching the inexperienced how to pick more efficiently, and he helped his workers shoulder the heavy, bulging sacks at the end of the day.

Francisco was around sixteen, three years younger than Ana, but he had already been a foreman for several years. “He was young, but he loved to work,” she said. “It was his personality that I liked more than anything.” They kept in touch by phone during the offseason. The next year, Ana made sure to get on Francisco’s crew again, and by the end of the harvest, they had become a couple. She moved into the small house in Chuitzanchaj that Francisco had inherited from his father. They got married, and soon Ana gave birth to their first daughter, Cruz Eulalia. María Isabel followed two years later.

Ana did not speak Kaqchikel, the local language, but she felt embraced by the tight-knit community. Neighbors’ doors were always open, and Francisco’s siblings, in-laws, nieces, and nephews often dropped by. Even in the middle of summer, the nights are cool and breezy in Chuitzanchaj. There is plenty of firewood in the nearby hills. Compared with the cane and sheet metal neighborhoods of Ana’s childhood home, it seemed prosperous. “People are humble and peaceful here,” she said.

Ana decided to quit traveling after María Isabel was born, but Francisco stayed on the migrant circuit, returning home about once a month to spend time with Ana and the girls. He took out a nearly $8,000 loan to buy a parcel of land so that he could grow avocados, tomatoes, potatoes, and maize. She hoped that cultivating the crops would keep Francisco closer to home. But one day in June 2022, Francisco called to tell her that he and a few friends were in Mexico. More precisely, they were on the U.S. border, just across the Rio Grande from Laredo, and they were preparing to cross. It was the first Ana had heard of the plan.

Francisco was part of a wave of roughly 230,000 Guatemalans who headed to the U.S. in 2022, a fivefold increase over the course of just two years, equivalent to about 1 in every 75 residents. This surge was part of a broader trend, according to a study published in the academic journal World Development. Migration rates of Guatemalan farmers have more than doubled over the past two decades, partly a result of the devastation wrought by a plague called coffee-leaf rust, which is linked to climate change. Francisco sounded upbeat when he told Ana to go see his father if she needed money before he could start sending wages home. “You’ll see: I’m going to do my best for you,” he told her. A few days later he was dead.

In the weeks that followed, Ana’s in-laws did what they could to help her and the girls. Her sister-in-law arranged a fundraiser with a local journalist, who streamed a live video on Facebook and asked for donations. In the video, Ana stands on the porch of her home with María Isabel on her hip, sobbing as she speaks about Francisco. She doesn’t recall receiving any money from the effort. Neighbors have occasionally offered what they can, a sack of beans or a bit of money, but she’s mostly on her own.

A man from the bank where Francisco took out the $8,000 loan has come by a few times. Francisco had put the house up as collateral, and Ana is worried the bank will force her out. “I collect firewood and sell it to people. I wash clothes. That’s how I manage to take care of my daughters and keep them in school,” she said.

The girls’ backpacks hang from nails on the cement wall just inside the front door, one of them decorated with characters from Frozen, the snowman Olaf and Princess Elsa. “Sometimes I get sick thinking about how I’m going to be able to take care of them,” she said. “Sometimes I get this pain in my stomach.”

She has contemplated suicide. “And then I think about the girls.”

Pascual Melvin Guachiac Sipac, 13,
and Juan Wilmer Tulul Tepaz, 14

Casimiro Guachiac Suy was working at a supermarket in the Detroit area when his son Melvin, who was back home in Guatemala, started begging to join him in the U.S. It was Casimiro’s third stint as an undocumented worker, and it was the best job he’d ever had—his boss paid $13.50 an hour and put him up in an apartment, rent-free. But it wasn’t easy being away. He’d first traveled north as an eighteen-year-old, unencumbered by the pain of leaving a family behind. Now he was married with two sons. When he’d left home for Detroit, he’d slipped out while his wife, María Sipac Coj, and their two boys, Melvin and Yonathan, were sleeping. “I couldn’t bear the sadness of saying goodbye,” he said. “Leaving your family when you don’t know if you’ll ever come back—it’s extremely painful.”

They lived in Tzucubal, a village in the forested mountains east of Quezaltenango, Guatemala’s second-largest city. Casimiro said that more or less everything that’s new in Tzucubal has been paid for with U.S. dollars sent home by migrants, including his own home, a single-story green bungalow that is tucked back from the street, with a shaded porch that shields their clothesline from the rain. “Here, you basically earn nothing,” he said, “so the majority of men migrate.”

In 2022 Guatemalans abroad sent home about $18 billion, some $2.2 billion more than the country’s exports that year. In Tzucubal, as in many villages in the area, multistory houses with reflective glass windows and high metal fences stand next to more humble dwellings, making it clear which families have someone working up north. For kids like Melvin, those houses and the new pickup trucks parked behind their gates are also powerful symbols of the rewards of migration.

His father had been gone less than a year when Melvin started hounding his mother to let him go north. She told Casimiro, who knew the dangers of the journey, and he pleaded with Melvin by phone to wait a few years, to finish school and try to get a visa. After all, Casimiro was in the U.S. working so that Melvin and Yonathan wouldn’t have to quit school and migrate like he had. But Melvin had become consumed by the idea. “If you don’t let me, I’ll go by myself,” he told María.

María’s cousin Magdalena and her husband, Manuel de Jesús, were facing a similar dilemma with their fourteen-year-old son, Wilmer. The boys were best friends—“They were more like brothers,” Casimiro said—and had hatched a plan to migrate together. Fearing that they might set off on foot, both couples eventually made arrangements with a coyote, which they considered the safer option. Casimiro agreed to pay smugglers around $13,600 upon Melvin’s safe arrival in Houston, where Casimiro planned to retrieve him. Wilmer’s parents made similar arrangements. He had two uncles in Houston who agreed to take him in. Both families agreed to pay extra for what the coyote, a local fixture who went by the nickname El Señor, called the viaje especial, a package that would guarantee the boys a seat on a vehicle the whole way to Houston—no walking across the desert and no trailers. “It was all lies,” Casimiro said.

María hardly slept the night before Melvin’s departure. When she went to wake him at four a.m. on the morning of June 14, 2022, he was already up and bursting with excitement. “What time does he get here?” he asked María over and over, referring to the coyote. It was still dark outside when Melvin left home, dressed in a black T-shirt, a black hoodie, black pants, and a black wool hat. He carried only a backpack with a bar of soap and a change of clothes.

The boys reached the border without incident, regularly updating their worried parents along the way. The last time Casimiro heard from Melvin, he and Wilmer were in Nuevo Laredo, preparing to wade the Rio Grande. “This is my last message,” Melvin said in a voicemail. “We’re at the border, Papá. Today we’re going to cross.”

Casimiro had traveled about 1,300 miles from Detroit to Houston, where a friend of his brother held a job at a sushi restaurant and offered him a place to stay. He was in the apartment, anxiously awaiting word from Melvin, when his phone rang. The friend had seen the news about a trailer full of dead migrants on the restaurant television. “I don’t want to scare you, but you need to look on the internet,” he said.

Casimiro called El Señor’s cellphone again and again, but the coyote didn’t answer. The next day Casimiro visited the Guatemalan consulate and gave officials details about Melvin’s appearance. It didn’t take long for them to discover that a child matching Melvin’s description had been found among the dead. One of the officials showed Casimiro photos that cleared any doubt. “I started to cry right there in the consulate,” he said. He also learned that Wilmer had died.

“He still cries every day for Juan Wilmer,”
Magdalena said.

The consulate helped secure a passport for Casimiro so that he could fly home to be with María. Nineteen days after the incident, the boys’ remains finally arrived in Tzucubal. Hundreds turned out for their funerals, walking alongside the coffins through maize fields to the cemetery. A constant stream of visitors filled the courtyards of both homes. The boys’ teachers held a memorial, and classmates and friends made posters and hung them all over their school. “It hurts to have a person in your heart without being able to hold them in your arms,” one of them read. Today those posters are the only mementos that Casimiro and María have to remember Melvin. No personal items came back with the body. “Just the box,” Casimiro said.

They keep the posters in an armoire in the living room of their home, tucked inside of Melvin’s book bag along with his Spanish-English dictionary, a protractor, and a spiral-bound notebook. Almost every page is filled with notes from his natural sciences class, printed in his tidy handwriting. At thirteen, Melvin had already realized one of Casimiro and María’s dreams for him: that he would go to school and learn to read and write well in Spanish, something they were never able to do.

When I visited Casimiro and María, they sat side by side on plastic chairs in the bedroom of their home. Their younger son, ten-year-old Yonathan, lounged on the bed as his parents spoke. Yonathan still asks where Melvin is and when he’s coming home. “He’s lonely,” Casimiro said. “It’s almost like he doesn’t understand my son’s death.”

Down the street, Wilmer’s little brother, Eugenio, who is also ten, keeps a drawer full of photos of his deceased brother. His mother, Magdalena, who is forty, said Eugenio often takes the photos out before school, spreading them on the floor and studying them quietly. “He still cries every day for Juan Wilmer,”
Magdalena said.

Wilmer always looked out for Eugenio, who adored his big brother. The boys slept together in a small space that the family cordoned off from the entryway of their house by hanging a sheet. Magdalena’s husband, Manuel de Jesús, who is 42, traveled to the U.S. once, before they were married, where he washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant. Now he works as a day laborer, tending plots of maize with a long-handled hoe. Sometimes his weekly earnings only get them through a handful of days. Wilmer, who had quit school after sixth grade to work alongside his father, was conscious of his family’s poverty. Before heading north with the coyote, he had attempted to soothe his mother’s fears with promises to send money home for food and for the education expenses of Eugenio and their sister, Claudia. “His dream was to get us out of poverty,” Magdalena said.

While we were talking, Eugenio came in from playing soccer in the courtyard with his friends. He pulled out his photos of Wilmer,
who sported a small stud in his right ear and wore his hair long and mussed on top like a boy-band star, his bangs hanging down over his eyes. Eugenio wears the same haircut now. He has also taken up his brother’s dream. When I asked if he’s ever thought about traveling north someday, he responded without hesitation. “Yes, I want to go and work there, where I can get more money.”

I told Eugenio I would be scared to travel to the border if I were his age. But he said he isn’t afraid, even after what happened to his brother. Listening to Eugenio, Magdalena looked worried. “I already lost one son,” she said. She knows there is little chance she will dissuade him, but she hopes he’ll at least wait until he’s older. Eugenio has promised to wait until his sixteenth birthday.