Vilma Peraza, 29, says her biggest regret is leaving her daughter behind in Honduras. But she didn’t know what else to do. She has been separated from her husband for five years. As a single mom, she made the difficult decision to leave her home with a migrant caravan in 2018, in hopes of being able to fight for a better future for her children in the United States.
She was concerned about making the dangerous journey alone with two young children, so she left her 10-year-old, Adriana Rosemary, in Honduras with her parents and brought her son, Jefferson, who was 3 years old at the time. Peraza’s eyes fill with tears as she shares their story. “It was a very difficult moment. I’m sorry.” Jefferson, now 6, sits next to her, and he reaches out to softly scratch her back. Peraza regrets leaving Adriana behind, she says, “because it is not the same for the children to be with their mother as it is for them to be with someone else.”
Peraza and Jefferson arrived in Mexico in 2019 and tried once to cross into the United States. From Honduras, Peraza’s dad paid the equivalent of $10,000 to a coyote who promised his daughter and grandson would make it safely into the US. “Our guide didn’t tell us that we were going to be caught by immigration,” Peraza says. “He didn’t say a word, and they caught us. They kept us locked up for eight days. … They told us to wait here in Mexico. Then they deported us here to Tijuana.”
Peraza feels cheated by the coyote. “If he had told me, ‘You know they are going to catch you,’ I wouldn’t have gone to the other side. I would have waited for them to give me asylum and I wouldn’t have crossed.”
Being alone as a single mother in a foreign country, uncertain of your status, is daunting, Peraza says. “Since I knew absolutely nothing about here, I had zero help. Then I met some friends and they brought me here [to Mexicali]. I had no help at all, so I couldn’t go to the court. I couldn’t tell you what the court is. … They just say, ‘You have to go to a court here.’ But I didn’t even have a phone. … I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t even travel. I was afraid. I had no idea. So I missed the courts. I missed the date.”
Peraza and Jefferson have been in Mexicali for three and a half years now. Peraza works as much as possible and calls home often to check in on her daughter. Whenever she can, she tries to check the TV to see if there’s news of the ever-changing and complex US immigration policies that affect her case.
“I always watch the news and feel hopeful about President Joe Biden giving us asylum. … Therefore, we are waiting for the necessary time to see what happens next.”
“I’m waiting,” she says, “to see if I’m given another chance.”
María Serrano, 61, and her 11-year-old granddaughter, Asli González, have been waiting for two years now. It is hard, Serrano says, to see other migrants who came after them successfully cross the border before them.
She tried to keep the business, to provide for her child. But the gang began extorting her too. “I had no way to pay, and the truth is that if I do not pay, they will do the same to me as they did to my husband,” she said.
Fearing for her life, Castillo fled her home on March 9. She brought her 2-year-old son, Jesua, with her, but made the gut-wrenching decision to leave her other two children, 6-year-old Axel and 4-year-old Mareli, with her mother in Honduras. She didn’t know if she could make the difficult journey alone with three children. Now, when she calls home, she says, “It makes me very sad, because I know that I don’t have them with me.”
Since arriving in Mexico in April, Castillo tried twice to seek asylum, both times at the border crossing in Los Algodones, Mexico. The first time, she was immediately deported to San Luis Río Colorado, a border town in the state of Sonora, Mexico. The second time, Castilo says that CBP officers began asking her questions. “At the beginning, the second time, I felt happy, because I said to myself, ‘They are paying a little more attention to me!’ Because they asked me if I had relatives? Why did I come? I felt a little more comfortable than the first time. But…my disappointment was when they put us on the bus to go back to San Luis.”
Here in Mexicali, Castillo feels trapped between a home she cannot return to and family members across a border that she cannot reach. “The word ‘home’ makes me remember my family, when I was united with them,” she says. Living with her son in a shelter here is difficult. “I feel like I’m alone, because I don’t have family or anyone to be here for me. [In the United States,] I have family.
“My plan is to cross again,” says Castillo. But she worries, “I think if I tried again and the same thing happened, I would give up hope.”
