Cibola

It’s just before Christmas at Cibola County Correctional Center in western New Mexico, when all eyes veer to the kid slouched in the gray bucket chair, his oversized work jacket the bright orange of a traffic cone. “Ándale, Nacho,” a voice squeaks to my right. All eyes now pivot toward a peach-fuzzed teen in the same thick uniform, and he squirms. “Ándale, enseñales tu rap,” he says.

Nacho taps together the toes of his black Crocs, the rubber slip-ons all the detained asylum seekers must wear. Black bangs swish coolly over his eyes. “Sale, OK,” he says, and launches into a rap that’s bawdy and fresh. It’s a clever albeit shocking rhyme about cognac and a party girl who goes “wild” when she drinks it.

The visitors’ room erupts. Peals of laughter enliven a space otherwise resembling a supermarket breakroom. A TV-VCR combo sits in an impossibly high corner of the ceiling, and even the remote is locked down in a little metal cage. Bright fluorescence shines on bulletin boards swathed in government legalese.

I’m stunned by Nacho’s bravado and his rap’s R-rated lyrics. Apart from me, the handful of volunteers who’ve come to ring in the season are middle-aged women from the Albuquerque suburbs. But I’m also impressed at how well he’s mimicked the synthetic vibrato and sustain of the song. “Cuando tome Henness-ss-sss-ssss-y,” he mock-autotunes, stretching out and chopping the line like a scratched CD on hissy repeat.

Artwork by Jorge Cocco Santángelo, from the series I Was a Stranger, oil on canvas, 2017. All artwork used by permission.

Order soon resumes. They’re good kids, after all, and probably don’t want to jeopardize the alteration to routine our monthly visits afford them. This is true, I suspect, even though the activities we offer – a variation on Simon Says, origami, a birthday-guessing game, chair yoga – are more apt for either a much younger or much older crowd. Still, the smiles and laughter feel genuine, and I believe it when they tell us they’re glad we’ve come.

Pat Bonilla, a former ESL instructor who’s lived in Mexico, Ecuador, and Brazil, gets things back on track, leading everybody in a popular – and tame – villancico, “El burrito de Belén,” or “The Little Donkey of Bethlehem.” As she sings, the guys join in, beaming and stomping their feet, clapping along, and shouting out the refrain: “Si me ven, si me ven, voy camino de Belén.” It’s a moment. They’ve gotten to raise their voices and not get in trouble.

As the carol winds down, the leader of our volunteer group, Kelly McCloskey-Romero, darts a glance at her wrist. We only get an hour with the men, and learning about the conditions they face is the main reason for our visit. But she stresses another purpose of our being here: to show them there are Americans who care.

 
At this stage, a Nicaraguan named Bayron emerges as the group’s unofficial spokesman. At two months, he’s been at Cibola longer than the rest, but, verging on thirty, he also stands up straighter and more squarely, with a gravitas absent from the youngsters around him.

Bayron’s words fit a pattern we hear on other visits. The men have had their phone privileges cut, often for petty infractions, which has isolated them from family back home and potential legal allies here. There’s also something called the “icebox,” or hielera, a solitary-confinement punishment cell set at near-freezing temperatures. Medical care is deficient, Bayron adds, pointing to the case of a Dominican man who has been suffering for some time from delirium and hallucinations.

As Bayron enumerates grievances, I sense a perverse rationale. The facility’s rules seem to uphold the letter of the law. The food the men get may check an official box for daily dietary needs, but, Bayron says, sometimes the potatoes are raw and the meat so packed with chili pepper it’s inedible. Similarly, scalding hot water, which the men complain they can’t shower with lest they burn themselves, may satisfy a legal requirement for the provision of a basic necessity. But it’s also clear that such tactics represent a subtle form of punishment.

For years, such grievances have fueled human-rights accusations against officials at Cibola and Torrance, the other major detention center for asylum seekers in southeastern New Mexico. The charges, filed by the ACLU and the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, allege rotten healthcare, aggressive guards, and official treatment ranging from negligence to abuse. Of course, such charges are common to many prisons in the United States; if anything, the legal complaints underscore how similar conditions are for asylum seekers and convicted criminals.

Yet when the twenty-two young men – twelve Venezuelans, one Nicaraguan, and two or three each from Guatemala, Ecuador, Honduras, and Colombia – file out after an hour or so, there are no shackles or handcuffs or fuming guards, and no segregation by nationality. Far from their real families, they linger in their farewells, waving, smiling, and thanking with a gentleness belying the raucousness of Nacho’s rap a few minutes before.

Outside, coils of concertina wire crown three concentric loops of stadium fencing. Jagged barbs glint like a million shiny razorblades in the bright, high-desert morning. A company flag with a boxy crimson-and-navy logo like a storage unit facility’s flaps at the entrance. On the path to the guardhouse, someone has planted rosebushes, but it’s months before spring, and all that’s showing are thorns and skinny green stems.

 
Some months later, Bayron writes me from Cibola to share the frustration he’s felt over the past year. Hoping to work and start a new life, he’s instead been incarcerated, while a relative who had agreed to sponsor him ended up reneging. Finally getting a deportation order hasn’t brought relief, since he doesn’t know when the order will go through. The uncertainty this creates is a widespread concern. In 2022, a twenty-three-year-old Brazilian asylum seeker named Kesley Vial committed suicide at Torrance after repeated postponement of his deportation.

Bayron is apprehensive about setting foot in his native Nicaragua. As someone who has claimed political persecution, a typical first step in applying for asylum, he fears reprisal from the left-authoritarian government of Daniel Ortega. “They did not give me the opportunity,” he writes, “to get my family out of Nicaragua.… I will have to once again confront the harshness of the dictatorship of my country.”

Jorge Cocco Santángelo, from the series I Was a Stranger, oil on canvas, 2017.

The next time we exchange messages, about three months after his deportation, he sends me a photo. It shows him beaming and clutching his toddler son and slightly older daughter. He’s working in construction in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, to provide for them. He has no plans to return to the United States anytime soon.

Torrance

The sunrise glare is blinding as we zip past chalky red cliffs and mesas and pass on to scrubby prairie so open the sky is a dome stretching to the earth’s curve. Ice and snow cling to roadside brush as we head to the visitors’ room at Torrance.

At one end of the room a composite fresco covers a cinderblock wall, showing a mix of New Mexican landscapes: alpine firs with big-antlered elk; a snowy mountain, its flanks indigo at sunset; the iconic Llano Estacado; a river. The painting honors those who came to this land and took ownership of it. A goateed, dark-haired soldier with a crested helmet and suit of armor is given pride of place. Next to him, a hatted, blue-eyed man gazes out with Charlton Heston intensity over the nature scenes below. In a small frame on the opposite wall, as if in afterthought, an indigenous woman contemplates a bush with violet thistles.

It’s a commonplace that each wave of immigration is first vilified, then exploited, and finally welcomed. As the taint of the stranger fades, new stories emerge to explain away inconsistencies in the record. Exaggerations on an immigration form and fabricated family connections are rationalized then mythologized, white lies to hasten the process of becoming American, with citizenship the reward for the audacity.

The young men in the room today might just mirror those earlier generations. Ostensibly, they are asylum seekers fleeing persecution. But many of them are rational opportunists, making the best of the circumstances fate has dealt them. Take the Venezuelans, for example, who account for half of the guys we routinely meet. From 2013 to 2021, when the kids in this room were in their formative teen years, the country posted double-digit GDP losses every year, with hyperinflation peaking at 130,000 percent in 2018. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, since 2014 more than eight million people have fled the country, with over 545,000 coming to the United States. Who wouldn’t consider escaping such a situation?

Yet when Kelly splits us into groups, I’m surprised the men sidestep conversations about the alleged persecution they face back home – persecution that, properly articulated to a judge or case officer, could qualify them for asylum. Why don’t they practice the “credible fear” rap they’ll surely have to give at their hearing or interview?

But they don’t. Perhaps that’s because of this open-plan room and the lack of confidentiality, or because we’ve not gained their trust. Maybe the cause of their persecution back home was a stigmatized identity such as homosexuality – information that shouldn’t be divulged in prison.

Instead, what the men want to discuss is work, their trades, and where they hope to land. One tells us he is eager to get to Houston to find work as a gardener, another to join a body shop there. A man from Guatemala says he hopes to secure a job at the McDonald’s his brother works at in Connecticut, while a baker from Honduras wants to get to Phoenix. A welder from coastal Venezuela is keen to find work in Michigan.

As Kelly unfurls a laminated map of the United States, the men gather around to marvel at the expansiveness of the country, perhaps dreaming of where they might go, if they ever get the chance. Some with family in the country locate where they’re living, and we volunteers point out our birthplaces.

Carlos is the most charismatic of today’s eleven detainees. Along with a fellow Venezuelan, Daniel, who once had a white-collar position in a state-owned oil company, he emerges as an unofficial spokesman. While Daniel’s delivery is deliberate, Carlos is effusive. “For the first time since I’ve been here, I’ve laughed and smiled,” he compliments us.

I ask Carlos about his prospects. He’s hopeful he’ll land on his feet, but is vague about where he plans to go, not seeming to know exactly where his sponsor, a contractor in Florida, is. What surprises me more, though, is the date he gives me for his asylum hearing. “It’s on the 27th, then?” I repeat. But I’ve misheard. “No, it’s in 2027!” he says.

I’m still incredulous at this when Carlos asks if he can work in the meanwhile. “I don’t know,” I tell him – we’ve been coached to deflect requests for legal advice. I wonder, though, how anyone but the very rich could survive so long without work.

 
A month or so later I learn that Carlos made his way to Florida, but then we lose touch. I do stay in contact with Daniel. After leaving Torrance, he has wound up in Athens, Georgia, where his sponsor lives. The quintessential southern college town is also where Laken Riley, a nursing student, was murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan border-crosser in February 2024. Her death fueled anti-immigrant polemics nationwide.

Some months afterward, I phone Daniel to ask how he’s doing and if he’s experienced any backlash from the killing. “Todo tranquilo,” he says, as a screen door slams and cicadas buzz in the background. “I feel good. I have the permiso from ICE. I have the permiso from the court. That doesn’t affect me. I’m legal.”

I’m glad Daniel is not worried about retaliatory violence. Instead, he says, he’s focused on more prosaic concerns: rent, food, work. Right now, he’s unable to pay the $300 in attorney’s fees he says he needs to apply for a work permit. The authorization is crucial. Without a job, how will he feed himself when his asylum hearing also isn’t slated until 2027?

Jorge Cocco Santángelo, from the series I Was a Stranger, oil on canvas, 2017.

After hanging up, I wonder about Daniel’s decision to emigrate. His closest relative, his daughter, is thousands of miles away. He can’t legally work yet. It’s unclear whether his sponsor is reliable. And his asylum hearing, a daunting three years from now, could go either way.

The social science literature indicates that immigrants are different from the rest of us. Compared with the general population, they are more likely to possess those qualities especially rewarded by the labor market: ambition, drive, work ethic, and intelligence. This is a common refrain in the paeans Americans make to our bold, tough, and smart forebears. But what other qualities do they share? Are migrants less tolerant of their present circumstances? More likely to believe that something better lies just over the horizon?

 
It’s a chilly December morning at a chain hotel near the Albuquerque International Sunport. I’m here to pick up a Venezuelan family of asylum seekers whom a local charity has put up. Like many, they crossed at Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, before requesting asylum in El Paso, Texas. Yesterday they took a bus from the border and now they’re flying to Kentucky, where sponsors have agreed to host them. I’m to escort them to their gate.

Carla, the family’s twelve-year-old daughter, is showing off the new mall clothes the charity has bought her: a purse, crisp slacks, a white blouse with ruffles. She can hardly contain herself. Long curly brown hair frames a face frequently lit up by bright, candid smiles.

Geidy, the mother, tells me of the danger and risk the family endured on their journey to arrive here. She describes a hopscotch-like set of jumps, first west to Colombia, then south to Chile, and finally north to the United States. All told, the family has been on the road for four years. Like her daughter, Geidy is also wearing a brand-new outfit, with one additional accessory: an electronic monitoring device, courtesy of ICE, Velcroed to her left ankle – something I notice as she’s putting her shoes back on after the security check.

Carlos, the father, tells me that the most nerve-wracking stretch of their journey was through the Darién Gap, the remote jungle region straddling northern Colombia and southern Panama. Poor migrants with no other choice form ad hoc bands, then hike for days through marshes and mountain passes. Human bones are a common sight
on the trek.

Carlos shifts closer to show me photos on his phone: migrants, bundled against the wind and cold, flash grins and make hand signs from atop moving trains in Mexico. There are many women and girls among them, even a toddler in a pink coat. The images are unexpectedly cheerful, given that so many migrants call Mexico the most dangerous and violent country on the journey. When I first started airport escort a few years ago, two Cuban women confided that they’d been held for months near the Mexican city of Monterrey while their families in Florida arranged ransom payments to secure their release.

Knowing this, I wonder why Geidy and Carlos risked traveling from Chile through the Darién Gap and up the length of Mexico with their preteen daughter. “Why didn’t you just stay in Chile?” I ask. Carlos mumbles something about Geidy’s family being in Kentucky and how Chileans are “gris,” or boring. But I still have a hard time understanding. Chile is no Venezuela. It’s politically stable, and from what I gather, Geidy and Carlos’s economic position was OK. They both had jobs there, and Geidy, who worked as a maid, shows me photos of a trip she took with her boss to Valparaíso, a Chilean beach resort.

But there’s no time for more questions as the gate agent calls their boarding group, so we hug and exchange contact information. They’re happy to finally be on the very last leg of their journey. A week or so later, I check in with Geidy on WhatsApp. Her profile picture now shows a living room with a dressed Christmas tree. Through the room’s parted curtains, snow falls on a lawn. “Merry Christmas from Louisville,” it says.

Deming

It’s a blazing hot southwestern spring day. Green shoots fringe the banks of the Rio Grande as it meanders south. Waves of heat and exhaust rise from the nearby interstate as rigs rumble toward Los Angeles or Jacksonville.

Ariana Saludares grew up here in New Mexico. Today, she helps run Colores United, a nonprofit serving refugees and asylum seekers. We meet at the group’s shelter in Deming, a small town thirty-six miles from the border. Apart from Saludares and her children, Jack and Caia, the rambling, one-story building – an erstwhile motorcycle shop with corrugated white aluminum siding whose original sign still sits atop a pole outside – is empty. Saludares has given the volunteers, mostly local moms, time off to recharge.

But the break is also for planning the shelter’s next chapter: a move later this year to a ranch in the countryside. There, near the otherwise inhospitable desert, migrants from Turkey, Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere will finally get to exhale. “We’re more of a respite than a shelter,” Saludares says, as we tour the new site, a thirty-acre former pecan farm. “We first want to help people heal emotionally as they make the last leg of their journey. What does that look like? Descansar, comer, dormir. A warm bed, a hot meal, a good night’s sleep.”

Jorge Cocco Santángelo, from the series I Was a Stranger, oil on canvas, 2017.

Saludares plans to build stables for equine therapy, and wooden dinosaur replicas on which kids can climb and play. Woods with deer, squirrels, woodpeckers, and quail will foster a sense of peace. “People will be coming off the worst three to six months of their lives (both in transit and in custody),” Saludares says, as we pause in the shade of a cedar tree. “So we choose just to give them space. I can’t change their experience in detention, but I can change the experience they have here.”

The shelter’s inconspicuous location has an added benefit. Away from town, it’s more insulated from Colores United’s political enemies, who, Saludares says, have insulted her on Facebook, told her, “Go back to where you come from,” and threatened to “bury you in the desert.” “My family is extremely concerned,” she tells me. “The far right are not very happy with what nonprofit organizations are doing with immigrants.” A shelter in San Diego, California, recently had a prominent online provocateur show up posing as a pest exterminator, while in Texas the state attorney general is actively trying to shut down several leading faith-based service providers, claiming they encourage illegal immigration.

To cope with the hostility, Saludares has staked a low profile for the organization while at the same time constructively engaging some of her critics’ concerns. For example, she’s tried to allay perceptions that migrants overuse community resources by opening the nonprofit’s food pantry and discount clothing store to all the area’s residents.

Like similar facilities along the border, the ranch is meant to be a temporary stop. Qualified asylum seekers will stay a short time before transitioning into permanent housing, generally under the roof of the citizen or legal resident sponsoring their case. Besides a place to sleep, the shelter will provide meals and basic healthcare, with space for about a hundred people at a time. For its part, Colores United will be eligible for reimbursement for those in its care, thanks to an $800,000 allocation in 2024 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter and Services Program.

Colores United is not religiously affiliated, and Saludares uses the term “interfaith” loosely to describe its orientation. “Even if we don’t identify with a single faith, it doesn’t mean we’re all not spiritual,” she says, adding that it’s common at the downtown shelter for guests to say grace before communally served meals, and that many volunteers belong to local churches.

In explaining the shelter’s mission, Saludares strikes a balance. On the one hand, it carries out a vital humanitarian duty, particularly in its care of women and children. On the other, it has an important public safety function, since it ensures a secure, central location for authorities to bring asylum seekers when detention facilities can’t hold them.

Otherwise, migrants might get dumped on the streets with no place to go, becoming easy prey for sex traffickers and other criminal elements. “Our community is safer when we take care of these individuals,” Saludares says. “If they are on the street, then the traffickers come, the coyotes come.”

 
Saludares’s own journey to this point was circuitous. After leaving home she did stints in Arizona and the Pacific Northwest, where she soured on a career in luxury property management – “It’s frivolous,” she says. It was in Sicily, while her husband was stationed at a US Navy air base, that she discovered her calling.

It was the height of the Syrian civil war, with thousands fleeing daily aboard rickety boats in the Mediterranean. “There were refugees all over Sicily,” Saludares says. “I would keep oranges in my car to give away.” She was intensely moved by the image shared around the world of a little boy in a red shirt and blue pants washed up like flotsam on a Turkish beach.

While Saludares talks, I look at her twelve-year-old son, who, with his coppery tan and sun-streaked mop of hair, looks like he belongs on the cover of a skateboarding magazine. Refreshingly, he’s entertaining himself without a phone, alternating between bouncing a ping-pong ball on the downtown shelter’s cement floor and jerking the controls of a vintage Pac-Man arcade game. He’s around the same age the boy in the photo, Alan Kurdi, would be had he lived.

“I stay awake at night thinking about the children who migrate,” she says. “A child doesn’t make the decision to walk the Darién Gap. After seeing that photo, I knew I had to do something.”

In 2019 Saludares got her chance when a major surge brought thousands of asylum seekers to Deming. With a population of just fifteen thousand, the town’s resources quickly dwindled, and, in May, authorities declared a state of emergency in a bid to unlock federal and state help. They also called on nonprofits and churches to house migrants temporarily while cases wound through the courts.

But, located less than an hour from Mexico, this is a small community where migration politics hit hard and many see large numbers of even legal, asylum-seeking individuals as something like an invasion. Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection have an outsized presence here, with some five hundred officers and agents and their families living in the area.

The politics were daunting, Saludares says. Some townsfolk grew resentful, believing that new arrivals overused local resources while needy citizens went without. Others argued that charities such as Colores United fueled even more migration by offering incentives for asylum seekers to cross the border. The upshot: impoverished frontline communities unable to cope. “It was so polarized, with some Deming folks wanting to help, others opposed,” Saludares says.

Five years on, the situation seems more balanced. Authorities are no longer releasing over one hundred migrants at a time onto downtown streets. And those who fear migrants will overuse scant resources seem less vocal. This is thanks to the shelter’s success in moving people on, she says, but also to the organization’s efforts to serve the wider community.

I ask Saludares how recent policy developments, such as the government’s decision to drastically limit the number of asylum seekers, will affect her work. She tells me she doesn’t think the overall volume of migrants will drop, but that the balance will simply shift, with more people attempting to enter undocumented if fewer people can apply for asylum. “Migration is never going to go away,” she says. “You can build a hundred-foot wall, but people with a mission will always make it, no matter. People don’t come all this way to just turn around and head back south.”

From the artist: When I decided to work on the series of paintings I Was a Stranger, my purpose was not to chronicle an event, past or present. My main idea is to express a human drama, ­individual and collective, and perhaps help people gain more sensibility toward our brothers and sisters in the human race. I named this series in reference to the words of the ­Savior cited in Matthew 25:33–40: “I was a stranger, and ye took me in.…”

To convey some of the feelings a stranger might go through, I used ­geometric blocks, with a number of human figures all boxed together, some more realistic and some more abstract. The reality in which we live can be so daunting at times that everything seems abstract. These paintings interpret uncertainty, no sky or ­heavens, no progress, no front, no back, no future, no past. These are the feelings of the strangers.

Another idea I demonstrated by boxing the strangers together is that people unite and form one compact, consolidated group when they share the same experiences. They react with more empathy as they are affected by an extreme situation. The individual human shapes almost melt into a new, larger entity. The group is reduced to one small place. The rest of the space is great and abstract, not understood, not comprehended. They are surrounded by no one and nothing; they only have each other. Will we stay immobile or will we be moved to action?

—Jorge Cocco Santángelo