The day after they met the coyote, the coyote met them and others in a park and they began walking. They walked through the desert for three days. It was extremely hot. The first two days they had water but the third day there was none. They stood in the middle of the desert for four hours while the coyote went to fetch water. They stopped walking when they reached Tucson, Arizona. They were placed in a trailer that had four rooms and 8 to 10 people in each room. They were not permitted to leave the trailer for two days and two nights. Then all 30 of them were crammed into a passenger van with no backseats and driven for three and a half days without being fed and with one bathroom stop for 15 minutes, roadside, with no bathroom. They arrived in [state of exploitation located in northeast region]
and were placed in another house and began work the next day.
He first went to Cuenca where he was locked into a building for five or six days and was told not to make a noise. From Cuenca, they boarded him and other travelers onto a bus which took them to Pedernales. He was then led with other travelers by foot over 12 hours during the night until they arrived at the beach. Once they arrived at the beach, he was boarded onto a small boat with other travelers. He was on the boat for eight days, during which time he suffered from stomachaches, headaches, and vomiting and sunburn. He then landed in Guatemala and was met by a man with two body guards. They boarded him and the other travelers onto a truck and took them to a house. He was told that if he tried to escape he would be killed. After two weeks he was boarded onto a bus and eventually taken to the Guatemalan side of the border with Mexico. He was led by foot to Mexico. When he crossed the border into Mexico, he was boarded into a narrow wooden partition at the top of a truck. He could not sit up in the space and he was given a pill so he did not have to go to the bathroom. He eventually arrived in Cananea, Mexico. He was then taken to the Mexican countryside, and joined 250 travelers. They were divided into smaller groups of approximately 50 people and each group was guarded by about four armed men. They were forced to walk during the night; during the day they slept in tall grass. They walked for four nights; had open sores and blisters on their feet and were only provided with a garbage bag to keep them warm. He arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, on May 15, 2004. After arriving in Phoenix, he was placed in a van with six other travelers and taken to LA.
First he tried to cross the border from Sonora, Mexico, with several others but was caught by border control and immediately returned to Mexico. So then he arranged to walk across the border from Sonora with about 60 other people being led by a coyote. The group agreed to pay this coyote $700 per person. He crossed the border in Arizona and walked through the desert with the group for five days. He was taken to a house in Phoenix, where he was told that the coyote fee was now $2,000 per person. The smugglers threatened to beat him and leave him out in the desert. He was able to leave that house eventually and contacted the trafficker, who sent his "grandson" to pick up the victim and another worker from Phoenix. They were then driven to [southwestern state of labor trafficking] in a van where they were made to lie on the floor for the entire journey and were not given any breaks for meals or the restroom. They started work the next day.
Although the land journeys described in box 5.3 involved more methods of transportation than those that involved flight, they were similar in that the movement often consisted of limited numbers of meaningful stops after the victim had crossed the border. That is, with only a few exceptions, after entering the United States, the traffickers typically transported the victims to a major metropolitan city near the border before moving them to the location of their victimization or simply moved the victims directly to the city where the labor trafficking would begin.
Similarly, our interviewees indicated that, when flight was not involved, their journeys often involved travel by foot and the use of cars or vans. These victims had crossed the Mexican border or were recruited within the United States. Approximately 14 percent of the labor trafficking survivors we interviewed stated that their method of transportation involved walking; all these individuals were from Mexico or a South American country. One individual, who traveled to America on foot with his friend to seek work in agriculture, responded as follows when asked if he was concerned about crossing the border:
No, at that point I had no concern. I wasn’t preoccupied because he [his friend] told me we’re probably gonna walk about two hours and then we’ll get there . . . so when we came, when we crossed the border, then we arrived in Tucson, Arizona. (site 3, survivor 4, male, agriculture)
This survivor eventually made his way to Omaha, where he came into contact with a contractor who transported him via trailer truck to the city of his victimization. Another survivor described her journey, which originated in Mexico and involved multiple methods of transportation, as follows:
No, no, they went for me. I traveled from where I am from—from Jalpan. From Jalpan to city of Valles and from City of Valles to Reinosa and there in Reinosa, they came to pick me up [by car]. And from there they took me to a—like a house—but it was very humble and old—and I was there and at night, they crossed me over here in a tire tube, on top of it, and I crossed the river and then after, we went walking . . . when they picked me up [after crossing the border], when they picked me up when I had crossed the river and we had walked half an hour, another car came to pick us up. It was like, it wasn’t a car but like one of those trucks that carried food, in the back like in a cooler. It smelled like fish. And the man told me there, we are going to pass a lookout post, it is one stop and in the second, that is where you leave. Yes, and after they got me down to take me out of the ice cooler, Yes, and after they got me down to take me out of the ice cooler, I got in the front with the man and then from there, until [state of labor trafficking]. (site 2, survivor 2, female, domestic servitude)
The smugglers’ and/or traffickers’ reliance on cars and vans during the movement process also emerged during our interviews with stakeholders. Two victim service providers described the preferred method of transportation used by traffickers after unauthorized immigrant victims had entered the United States along the Mexican border:
The recurring story or anecdote that I hear about the transportation actually is a 16-passenger van. That’s the . . . that’s been sort of the norm lately. I’m not sure why. I guess it’s the biggest van
you can get without another type of license? Because that’s usually what . . . usually contractors will use these 16-passenger vans or sometimes you get the 12-passenger ones with the little front and they’ll stuff them. I mean, I’ve heard you know, some . . . I’ll give you an example of 25 people in a 16-passenger. I don’t have direct experience with this but [service provider/outreach worker] has heard about people being stacked to the extent that they break . . . they’ll arrive up here with like, broken ribs. I mean obviously it’s an extreme case but it still goes to show the type transportation that they are utilizing and the safety of these interstate trips. . . . But when it comes to labor trafficking, it’s just a numbers game. You know, they want to bring as many people as they can. So they will sort of pack these vans to capacity. (site 4, victim service providers 2 and 4) In summary, in both our labor trafficking victim case record dataset and analyses of interviews, flight was most often the primary method of transportation. Typically, the movement of individuals traveling to the United States via flight was limited in terms of the number of meaningful stops before reaching their final destination. This lack of stops is primarily due to the fact that the majority of our sample entered the United States with a visa through a border checkpoint. Visas were primarily obtained for the job victims were recruited for, and victims were fairly quickly transported to the job location. For those journeys that did not involve flight, the movement and migration patterns tended to be more complex. Victims often crossed the US–Mexican border on foot (sometimes with the assistance of a smuggler if they did not hold a visa)34 and were then transported to major metropolitan cities in border states or to other regions of the country where the labor phase of their victimization would take place. Although their movement often involved more methods of transportation, their journeys were also direct in that there appeared to be a limited number of stops throughout the process.