‘They treated us like we were animals’: Honduran mother’s nightmare journey trying to find a better life in the US

Ruth Gomez joined a caravan heading north. Things didn’t go as she had planned. Andrew Buncombe reports

Ruth Gomez back home with her son and daughter, Dorian and Alejandra (Getty)

She was resting on a hill overlooking the town, readying herself for the hardship that lay ahead, yet weighted with pain over what she had left behind. Ruth Gomez had an open face and bright, vivid eyes, but she wept as she explained how she had made the decision to leave her two young children with her mother in Honduras, and join a caravan of migrants trailing its way towards the US border.

“There are no opportunities for us in Honduras,” she said, holding up a phone to display an image of a boy and a girl – Dorian and Alejandra. “I do not think it will be easy to cross the US border, but also not impossible.”

The young woman sleeping in a park, where someone had placed a white banner that bore the words “May peace and God be with us”, was among tens of thousands of desperate, ambitious Hondurans who joined the caravan in the autumn of 2018, first passing through Guatemala and into southern Mexico. Donald Trump denounced the migrants, claiming without evidence that dangerous people from the Middle East were among them, and he would dispatch troops to shore up the US-Mexico border after declaring a national emergency. He later termed them “an invasion”.

Yet anyone who bothered to speak to the migrants would have been struck by a few basic facts. Firstly, how they were united in a simple desire for a better life: one with real opportunity to study or work, away from the dangers of gang violence, or the ravages caused to their land by climate change.

The other, was just how many people in this particular caravan were from Honduras. Elsewhere, thousands of migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and Venezuela, were also trying to enter the US. But the caravan which Gomez, now aged 25, had joined, starting as it had in the city of San Pedro Sula was made up almost entirely of Hondurans.

Finally, one was struck by how similar the migrants’ testimonies were. The details may have changed – a person’s name, or their hometown, for instance – but their stories echoed one another’s with metronomic consistency. Ruth Gomez was speaking for herself, but she was representative of something bigger, broader, and much more powerful. “I want to work,” she said, that morning in the Mexican town of Pijijiapan, when asked what pushed her to rise each day, long before the sun came up, and walk for 12 hours. “I want to be able to provide for my two children that I had to leave.”

Among the training punched into journalists for when interviewing people, is the necessity to note down someone’s name, age, address and profession. Check it twice, or even three times. Even the most brilliant, consequential story, one wise news editor once pointed out, is made less by a sloppy error such as the wrong spelling of somebody’s name, or the street where an event took place.

These days, smart reporters know to take down a person’s email address or cell phone number, better to check any questions you may have forgotten to ask. It also allows a journalist to update that article with a follow up. Like a news event itself, any story may be published on a certain day, but in reality it is not fixed in time. Rather it is a snapshot located along a curve. There is a before, and there is a what happens next.

Ruth Gomez hoped to reconnect with her father, who she had not seen since she was a child (Getty)

For whatever reason, we failed to ask Ruth Gomez for her contact details, and did not follow up on her story. Yet when, six months later, The Independent travelled to Honduras to investigate the pressures that were persuading so many to take to the road, it was hard not to think of her.

Working with a Honduran reporter, Paulo Cerrato, we visited villages in the hills near the border with Guatemala, once an important part of the nation’s coffee industry, that had seen up to half its men and young boys head north. Having been hit by blight and a global drop in prices, the climate crisis was now making the plantations barely viable, a story repeated across the region. Most in the village appeared to be surviving off remittances sent from relatives in the US.

In San Pedro Sula, a city filled with stark divisions of wealth, a pastor explained how he had brokered a deal with gangs to allow children and their parents to attend his church, but only after he had twice failed to enter the US illegally. At the city’s airport, a family waited for a flight operated by US immigration authorities that would return their teenage son, who had gone north to try and provide for his mother and sisters.

Everyone, it appeared, had either tried to leave, thought about doing so, or had someone close to them who had. It felt as if the nation of 10 million people was somehow stuck on a StairMaster climber you find in gyms, its population being persistently refreshed by those leaving, and those being returned. “We don’t want to leave this country but in some cases it is necessary because we don’t have the opportunities here,” said the aunt of a young man as they waited for him to appear from the airport’s gates.

And then, Ruth Gomez appeared once again. Having returned from Honduras and searching the Getty Images database for photographs to accompany the reports I had written, I instantly recognised a young woman who had been pictured with her children. It transpired the images had been taken by Orlando Sierra to accompany an article published by the AFP news agency about Gomez’s ultimately failed efforts to enter the US.

And what a story it was: having made her way from southern Mexico, she had been tear-gassed at the border by security agents, paid a coyote to transport her into Texas, and was then captured almost immediately afterwards. She had spent six days in a freezing detention centre, where she said she had been unable to contact anyone. She had also lost her cell phone, which contained images of her children.

Finally, she had been unceremoniously deported, unable to join her father, who years ago had gone to search for work in the US and was employed as a taxi driver in New York. “For me it was the worst experience,” she told AFP, at her home in Siguatepeque, 80 miles northwest of Tegucigalpa. The reporter who interviewed Gomez, Noé Leiva, was kind enough to help put me in touch, and I recently called her from my home in Seattle. A Seattle friend who moved to the US from Venezuela and who sometimes volunteers as an interpreter for immigration cases, helped with the translation.

Over the course of an hour or so, the story she recounted underscored the complexity of the migration crisis, confronting not just the US and Central America, but most parts of the world. Like many migrants, Gomez could rattle off the key dates in her story, the result of being quizzed so frequently by immigration officials, or lawyers trying to secure them asylum. She had left Honduras on 13 October, 2018, accompanied by two of her brothers.

On 25 October, she arrived at the city of Tijuana, located on the US-Mexico border. A month later, she had been caught up in the chaos when US border patrol agents fired tear gas to clear a group of migrants who had reportedly rushed the border area on the Mexican side. The incident at the San Ysidro crossing that links the Californian city of San Tijuana, sparked widespread outrage as images emerged of a mother and her young children – probably much the same age as Gomez – being hit by the gas. One of the children was wearing nappies, and some questioned whether the CBP’s actions were proportionate or even legal.

Soon afterwards, Gomez and her brothers left by bus for the city of Monterrey. There, her family paid for a coyote to take her across the border into the US, close to the Texan city of McAllen, crossing the Rio Grande. They were seized almost immediately. “We had not got very far. It was just a short way.” She says she and five other women were held by immigration authorities in conditions she said were “horrible”.

“They treated us like we were animals,” she says. “It was very cold. The AC was very high. We slept on the floor and there were no blankets.”

They were given some bread and ham to eat, but claimed it was rotten. The conditions operated by the CBP have triggered widespread controversy, despite the agency’s insistence it does not keep them intentionally too cold. A 2018 report by Human Rights Watch titled In the Freezer, claimed “US immigration authorities routinely detain men, women, and children, including infants, in frigid holding cells, sometimes for days”.

Asked if she believed the cells were kept intentionally cold, Gomez says: “It’s a form of psychological torture. They keep it so cold, so you don’t want to try again. That is what people told me. Some had been there for 20 days.”

Gomez says she and the other women were not permitted to take a shower, despite asking. “There were only bathrooms,” she says.

During her time in the detention facility she was unable to tell anyone of her whereabouts. She felt desperate thinking about her children. The young woman says she spent six days in detention, before being placed on a plane and deported to San Pedro Sula. There was nobody waiting for her. She called her sister, and boarded a bus for Siguatepeque. It was 18 January, 2019.

Gomez says her children and family were pleased to see her, but there was bad news too. Her mother, Daisy, 47, had cancer and had to undergo surgery. She also felt disheartened. She had failed to reconnect with her father, whom she had last seen as a child, and she had been unable to find a way to create a better future for her children.

Now, she works 12-hour shifts in a restaurant, a job that pays around $160 a month. She also has to care for mother, who remains in recovery. Asked about her hopes for 2020, and the new decade, Gomez is realistic. She would like get a better job that would enable her to continue her education and perhaps study law. Yet if her story is to have a happy ending, it has yet to be written. Gomez believes Honduras’ president, Juan Orlando Hernández, a US ally whose brother was recently convicted in New York on narco-trafficking charges, must work to create more and better jobs.

She says “a lot of people want to leave, but that is not for me”. She also wishes Trump would change his rhetoric about migrants such as her. Asked what she would like to tell him, she says: “That we are all equal. That we are all people. We are not animals. We are not coming to his country to cause harm. We are trying to make a better life.”

Additional reporting by Paulo Cerrato in Tegucigalpa

Read the first part in the Beyond the Border series here: Honduras: Inside ground zero of the Central American migrant crisis​

Read the second part in the Beyond the Border series here: Honduras: Where climate change and mass migration have created a village of women

Read the third part in the Beyond the Border series here: Meet the Hondurans trying to forge their own American dream

Read the fourth part in the Beyond the Border series here: How a pastor in one of world’s deadliest cities brokers deals with violent gangs