In our latest story, “Scorched,” Lauren Markham recounts the harrowing saga of a young woman and her daughter who are caught between social unrest in their native Honduras, the immigration debate in the U.S., and California skies that just won’t rain. The piece appears in print as well as online today with our media partner, Pacific Standard.
“Since Clara—which isn’t her real name—crossed the border last June and ended up in California, immigration officers had been stopping by every other week to check up on the 40-year-old would-be farmworker,” writes Markham, who met Clara at her apartment in Mendota, California.
Clara told Markham that she had fled Honduras after getting death threats for her support of El Partido Libre, an opposition party. She hired a coyote to guide her and her 13-year-old daughter north, where her husband was working on farms in California’s Central Valley.
But the two were picked up by Border Patrol agents in Texas, where they were detained for seven days in a cramped detention center. “At times,” Markham writes, “Clara felt she might not survive; more than 30 mothers and children shared a cell so small that the adults slept sitting up.” Markham notes that, like Clara, many more unauthorized migrants to the U.S. today are fleeing sociopolitical turmoil rather than chasing higher-paid work.
Clara eventually was reunited with her husband in California, but put on house arrest and required to wear an electronic tracking device. Even though the family desperately needed the money, she was too “terrified” to risk taking work, lest immigration agents raided the field and discovered her bracelet.
In February, when authorities finally removed Clara’s tracking bracelet after more than four months, she was caught in a new trap: The epic drought gripping California had cut deeply into the demand for farmworkers. In the Central Valley, Markham notes, farmers have fallowed 428,000 acres, and “between January and May 2014, there were 17,100 fewer seasonal jobs than the year before.”
Clara and her husband must scramble to find what work there is. They paid several thousand dollars for a lawyer to help her apply for political asylum. Without it, she will have to return to Honduras.
You can read the full story at Pacific Standard, and here on our website.