Thread: One Illegals Journey Here: Circa 2000

http://www.azstarnet.com/journey/day1.html

Our $2.7 billion fight against illegal immigration is no match for a man like Marvin Hernandez. The forces that drove him from El Salvador help explain why 500,000 people a year risk everything to journey north.

By Ignacio Ibarra and Jeffry Scott
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Water rose in the wash and darkness set quickly on the Arizona desert.

Marvin Hernandez could see his dreams fading with the light.

He was certain it was all over - the year's pay he'd turned over to smugglers. The 2,000 miles he'd traveled from city to jungle to desert. The luck that had gotten him this far on his first try.

It had begun three weeks earlier, when his mother, Angela, packed three neatly pressed pairs of pants, three shirts, socks, underwear, a toothbrush and aspirin in a small bag. She rode with him to the bus station and waved as he left the poorest country in Central America to look for a minimum-wage job in the United States.

He promised to return, but his mother has lost her men to this journey before. She took in his bright smile, his deep brown eyes and his soccer player's build as if for the last time.

In the weeks since, Marvin discarded the personal items piece by piece, lightening his load as he crossed his own land of El Salvador, then Guatemala and Mexico.

The week of America's Independence Day, the 25-year-old mechanic slipped over the last border, into Arizona. With that he became one of nearly half a million people who cross illegally into the country each year.

He expected a two-hour walk to catch his ride to Phoenix. It turned into a grueling three-day march through mesquite and catsclaw in 100-degree heat.

Just five miles into the promised land, in the middle of a summer downpour, a U.S. Border Patrol agent intercepted Marvin's group. The 50 migrants had been resting in the brush, a quarter-mile south of the highway to Bisbee.

The young agent couldn't drive them all to the station, so he ordered them to wait in a culvert under the highway, protected from the rain above.

Agents returned several times to haul away another part of the group. But no one had come back for nearly three hours now.

Two of the last five migrants saw their chance and fled. But two young women, known to Marvin as Mari Reyes and Glynnis, refused to disobey the agent's orders. They waited obediently to be deported.

Marvin stayed behind to protect them, as he'd done before.

Finally, the rising water in the wash convinced the huddled women it was time to go.

They climbed out to the road. There was no Border Patrol in sight. Alone and lost, they remembered the stories they'd heard about ranchers shooting at migrants, about people dying or disappearing here.

read rest here: http://www.azstarnet.com/journey/day1.html

I'm sick of reading this romanticized crap about these people.

Want me to respect them? Then write a story about how they stayed in their country, fought corruption, elected a decent public official and fought to have a country worth staying in.

These people are playing us for suckers. Americans who want to give these people handouts do it because it strokes their own egos, "Oh we are great Americans, we can help out the poor little people who are oppressed in their land, oh we do this because we are so great."

Mexican officials are hypocrates. Mexicans deal very harshly with people coming over their southern border, yet if we try to stop the flow of illegals in the US, they cry racist, homeland crap.

Mexican law states, "Mexico has the exclusive right to arrest and deport illegal aliens Mexico deems inconvenient, and without the necessity of judicial process."

They arrest and deport, just as we should be doing. They don't want illegal scumbag aliens in their country for good reason. We don't either. Every time they cry racist, homeland crap, just pull out the Mexican civil code and say, "Hey, this is what you do to."

I'm sick of reading this Hemmingway-esque "Old Man in the Sea" struggle crap.

They should stay in their own country and struggle to make it better. They don't because stupid US lawmakers just hand over the cash to them.