\n<\/p>\n
This story contains descriptions of sexual assaults.<\/p>\n
In the darkness before dawn,<\/span> Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr. took the last drag of a cigarette and looked out from the staircase of a run-down motel. Underneath the stark floodlights streamed a procession of weary travelers in T-shirts and jeans, reaching into the bottom of a white coach bus for their oversize duffel bags. Mendoza had arranged for them to come on this 1,200-mile journey from northeastern Mexico to a rural stretch of Georgia\u2019s blueberry country. Each of them had a work permit, which Mendoza had helped secure through a visa program called H-2A.<\/p>\n More foreigners than ever before were using the decades-old program, which lets them work for months or even several years on U.S. farms. Farmers and politicians have touted H-2A as an easy answer to a persistent labor problem: Americans are abandoning agriculture jobs and U.S. immigration policies are restricting access to undocumented workers. As recently as last month, President Donald Trump has floated the idea that if undocumented farmworkers returned home, they could come back to the U.S. \u201cwith a pass\u201d to \u201clegally\u201d re-enter the country. But over the years, the promises of H-2A \u2014\u00a0such as humane working conditions, free housing and far better wages than back home \u2014 have been undermined by the relative ease of exploiting workers due to scant oversight of the program.<\/p>\n The busload of men and women who arrived that day in September 2018, like the others before and after, came with hopes of creating better lives for themselves and their families. Mendoza, through a network of recruiters in Mexico, had sold them on that hope. The recruiters touted the promises of a visa that, for many of them, would allow them to make more in a day than what they earned for a week of work in Mexico.<\/p>\n From his perch on the staircase, Mendoza was surveying a scene that held great promise for him, too. The arrival of this batch of workers marked the beginning of his first big job as a labor broker and the end of any lingering thoughts that he\u2019d end up like his own mother and father, who\u2019d brought him as a toddler from Mexico. They\u2019d scraped together a living baling pine straw and packing blueberries. Mendoza, now 21, also had spent some time working in the fields. But he went on to attend college, dropping out so that he could focus on what he calculated to be a more lucrative prospect.<\/p>\n Around the time Mendoza was ramping up his business of bringing people over from Mexico, Georgia was more reliant on H-2A workers than any other state. He served as a gatekeeper, choosing which Mexican workers desperate for better pay would go to Georgia farms desperate for more laborers.<\/p>\n Beyond that, though, he had other ambitions related to this work. And he had plans for one worker in particular among this early batch.<\/p>\n Sofi was 24 and a single mother. She had experience working in the fields, having grown up in a close-knit farming family in a small town flanked by rows of corn and squash. But she came across more as a city girl, with her stylish clothes and penchant for pink lipstick. One of Mendoza\u2019s recruiters in Mexico was a neighbor of Sofi\u2019s family and assured him that she was a good worker. That part hardly mattered. The photo attached to her H-2A visa application drew him in.<\/p>\n Mendoza began sending her flirtatious text messages. She brushed them off. He pressed on, telling her he\u2019d waive most of the fee he charged people to apply for the visa.<\/p>\n Sofi thought about it some more. Her father, who she trusted more than any man, had picked up seasonal farm work in the U.S. when she was a child, and she was aware of how much he appreciated the stable housing and steady pay. Though she worried about leaving her toddler son, she began to worry more about what would happen to him if she didn\u2019t leave. The wages Mendoza offered could change her son\u2019s future, or at the very least secure it the way her father had done for her. She owed her boy that much, she told herself. She would go.<\/p>\n The description of Sofi\u2019s experience in the H-2A program is detailed in police records, court documents and testimony in federal court. Her name is redacted in federal filings to maintain her anonymity. We are identifying her by a first name she formerly used on social media. Mendoza declined multiple requests for an interview and did not provide comments in response to ProPublica\u2019s letters detailing the case.<\/p>\n But not long after she and the other workers arrived in Monterrey, Mexico, to board one of the buses Mendoza sent for them, she began to have doubts. One of Mendoza\u2019s associates was waiting for them. The associate handed each worker a stack of cash.<\/p>\n The way he explained it, the U.S. would question any large wire transfers from Mexico, so they would need to bring the money to their new boss. He told them not to put the money in their suitcases. U.S. officials were likely to check those. It would have to be on their bodies. He didn\u2019t say much else, just that anyone who got caught would need to claim the cash as their own. So don\u2019t get caught.<\/p>\n The closer her bus crept to the border, the more nervous Sofi grew. She started tallying just how much money was hidden on the people riding the bus. She figured it was almost a quarter of a million dollars.<\/p>\n In some regards,<\/span> the deal Mendoza had struck with a blueberry farmer named Charles King was typical. Mendoza would ensure a steady supply of workers, recruiting them from across Mexico and Guatemala, assisting with their H-2A applications and arranging for their journey to the U.S. The workers could be employed only by King and only for up to 10 months at a time. King would pay a fair wage \u2014 just under $11 an hour \u2014 and cover the costs of their housing and transportation to his farm.<\/p>\n There was another part of their agreement: Mendoza would oversee King\u2019s workers himself. That meant Mendoza would actually find the housing and pay for it with King\u2019s money. And he would be the one to see that the workers got to and from the fields and the one who handed out their wages. It was a common practice for farm owners to outsource those tasks to labor brokers. It freed farmers like King from the hassles of managing people who don\u2019t speak much English. And it granted brokers like Mendoza immense power.<\/p>\n Like Mendoza, King was fairly new to this business. The longtime train engineer had decided only a few years earlier, in his mid 40s, that he wanted to start a farm on the nearly 40 acres passed down by his late grandfather. Around the time he met Mendoza, his blueberry bushes were about to yield their first fruit. He estimated he needed 150 people to work in his fields.<\/p>\n Mendoza advised King to request twice as many; Mendoza had a plan for the others. King, for his part, stood to get a cut. All King had to do was sign the paperwork. Mendoza would handle much of the rest.<\/p>\n King signed off. And Mendoza, who up until then had only brought over a few smaller batches of workers for other farmers, got to work on sourcing 300 of them for King.<\/p>\n Sofi was among the first groups of people recruited to work for Kings Berry Farm. She initially felt some relief when she stepped off the bus in the parking lot of the dingy motel, after making it past customs and having spent more than 20 hours on the road. But she was taken aback by how she and the others were treated by the people there to meet them: The workers were unloaded like prisoners, their heads bowed so they couldn\u2019t see what was happening.<\/p>\n One of the people who received the workers separated Sofi from the rest. She recalled that she was taken to a motel room. She found another female worker waiting there. Guards were assigned to watch them.<\/p>\n It was in the motel room that she first saw Mendoza. Short and stout with a shaggy chinstrap beard, he spoke with a strong lisp because of a congenital disorder. It could be hard to understand what he was saying, but that day he had no problem making his message clear.<\/p>\n Sofi recalled that the other woman asked Mendoza if she could have her passport back. Mendoza said that if she had it in her mind to leave his operation, she\u2019d have to do so without her passport. She wasn\u2019t getting it back.<\/p>\n He already had Sofi\u2019s.<\/p>\n Sofi was not sent out to work<\/span> in the fields like the others. Mendoza ignored what her contract said. He kept her by his side, and he gave her a different set of responsibilities. One was that she would accept wire transfers on his behalf from Mexico. Another was that she would write the checks to workers. She would not be paid for this work. She would not be paid at all.<\/p>\n Mendoza forced her to live at his house. While she was with him, he talked openly about his business and she paid attention. It was easy to begin piecing together how his operation worked. He was charging some applicants thousands of dollars for the chance to get an H-2A visa. She heard him speak with his contacts in Mexico, describing how he\u2019d bring in more and more workers that the farmers didn\u2019t actually need, just to get those up-front fees. He\u2019d even bring her to meetings with King. It was an effort, she thought, to show off Mendoza\u2019s power over her.<\/p>\n She recalled that Mendoza crammed a couple dozen people \u2014 workers and their children \u2014 into a trailer. She noticed that a few didn\u2019t have enough money to eat. Sofi believed that the workers were being shorted. She remembered Mendoza occasionally picking up calls in the middle of the night, alerts that people were escaping.<\/p>\n Those calls reinforced for Sofi the feeling that she, on the other hand, couldn\u2019t even try to flee. She didn\u2019t have her passport. She didn\u2019t know a single person she could turn to. She didn\u2019t speak any English. And she was scared.<\/p>\n From the first time he touched her, on her very first day in the U.S., Mendoza made it clear she would have no say. Still, she told him no. It didn\u2019t matter. Month after month, closed up in his house with him, he did what he wanted to her.<\/p>\n Within a few months, Mendoza took her on a drive to a nearby courthouse. By then, Sofi had come to believe that Mendoza considered her a prize \u2014 something he had bought. At the courthouse, he told her she needed to sign a piece of paper. If she didn\u2019t, he repeated the thing he always said when he was mad, which was often: I\u2019ll call immigration, she remembered him saying. I\u2019ll have you deported.<\/p>\n Only after she signed did he explain what the document was: a marriage license.<\/p>\n He started introducing her as his wife and telling her that she should bring her son to Georgia. He\u2019d help her. But she worried that he would treat her child no better than the children of the other workers.<\/p>\n One day, she saw a few young Guatemalan children at the field where their parents were picking fruit. They were hungry. Their parents hadn\u2019t been paid.<\/p>\n Sofi took some of Mendoza\u2019s money and the keys to his car and drove the children to a gas station to get them some food. Mendoza caught wind of it and tracked her there. He took the car and made her and the children walk back. And he beat her for what he saw as her defiance.<\/p>\n If he had no problem hitting her, she told herself, imagine what he\u2019d do to her son.<\/p>\n After the first four months, she asked if she could go back to Mexico, just for a visit. Her father was sick with cancer. She recalled Mendoza saying that if he were to let her go and she didn\u2019t come back to him, he\u2019d see that she was never able to return to the U.S., that he\u2019d have her blacklisted from the H-2A program.<\/p>\n With that warning, he let her go.<\/p>\n Once she was home, she thought about staying. Then she looked at her son, who had just turned 3, and realized what she\u2019d be giving up: the chance to provide him with a better life. She believed what Mendoza said about blacklisting her was true. And she believed those months of suffering his abuses would be for nothing if she were kicked out of the program.<\/p>\n If she could just endure Mendoza for a few more months, until she reached the end of her 10-month contract, she would fulfill her obligations. And then she could apply for another H-2A visa. She would find another labor broker, someone honest and decent, and things would be right. The H-2A program would make good on its promise to her. And she would make good on her promise to lift up her son.<\/p>\n Back in Georgia, she knew better than to expect Mendoza to change. But the months ahead wore her down. That summer, after close to a year spent with him, she felt she couldn\u2019t take any more. He climbed on top of her one night, smothering her with his weight, the tattoo on his chest \u2014 of La Santa Muerte, a grim reaper in a black hooded robe, known as the lady of death \u2014 bearing down on her. He tried to rip her clothes off. She was almost out of breath. She got away. She ran. She found a phone and called the police.<\/p>\n But even from jail, Mendoza figured out how to control her. She had found a place to hide, but he was able to reach her. He sent a peace offering \u2014 a bouquet of yellow flowers and a box of chocolates \u2014 and also, later, delivered a threat. It wasn\u2019t the same old warning about calling immigration. She recalled him telling her over the phone that if she didn\u2019t stay with him, he would kill her son. She feared that with all his connections in Mexico, it was possible he could. She arranged with her parents for the child to be hidden far away.<\/p>\n Two months after Mendoza\u2019s arrest, he was released after a grand jury chose not to indict him. Around that time, Sofi reached out to someone she\u2019d met only briefly but who she thought could help her. She typed a message into a translation app and texted it to the farmer who she was supposed to be working for. King responded, with concern, that she should go back to Mexico.<\/p>\n Before she could, Mendoza caught up with her.<\/p>\n On a brisk and rainy Friday in November 2019,<\/span> a police investigator named Jeremy Stagner picked up the phone to call a federal prosecutor about a scene he hadn\u2019t stopped thinking about for the past four days.<\/p>\n Stagner described how he\u2019d gotten home from a shift with the Glynn County Police Department when his phone buzzed with an emergency alert from work. A young woman had been watching children play outside the house in Brunswick where she had been staying when a silver truck skidded onto the lawn. A man got out, a purple bandana masking his face. She tried to fight him off, but he forced her into the truck at knifepoint.<\/p>\n A neighbor called 911 and helped a police officer find the woman\u2019s backpack, which had her driver\u2019s license inside. The officer\u2019s colleague was able to track the location of her cellphone, so Stagner followed the lead, speeding 30 miles northwest of the city. After cruising down a dirt road, past some mobile homes, he and other officers spotted a stocky man on his cellphone, smoking a cigarette. As they shined flashlights at the face of the suspected kidnapper, one of them shouted his name: \u201cMendoza!\u201d<\/p>\n When the man looked up, they knew it was him \u2014 the hearing aid in his ear matched one in a booking photo. Mendoza turned toward his truck. One of the officers cuffed him. Stagner moved past him and headed inside Mendoza\u2019s trailer.<\/p>\n Stagner had seen a lot of messed-up things in his life, from explosives in Iraq wounding fellow Marines to the gruesome aftermath of shootings in Brunswick. This was one of the most haunting scenes he\u2019d encountered. On a small wooden table, objects were arranged in an offering of sorts: fruit, cigarettes, a bottle of tequila, flickering prayer candles. In the middle was a photo, placed upside down, of the woman who\u2019d been kidnapped. She was holding a bouquet of yellow roses and a box of chocolates. Looming over the photo was a statue of La Santa Muerte, known among law enforcement as a saint invoked to protect criminal acts. There was blood \u2014 what he later learned was the victim\u2019s blood \u2014 smeared on the statue\u2019s scythe.<\/p>\n Over the next few days, as the investigation continued, Stagner learned that Mendoza had driven the woman from the front yard of the house where she was staying to a remote cemetery. According to evidence police collected, on the way to the cemetery Mendoza sought advice from a colleague in Mexico on what to do, and the colleague said he should kill her, that it wasn\u2019t convenient to leave her alive. Once he arrived, he climbed into the back seat of the truck and began beating her so badly that her blood splattered across the cab.<\/p>\n He then headed to a nearby trailer where he sometimes stayed. He took out a knife and grabbed Sofi\u2019s hair, slicing off strands of it for the shrine. He took blood from her nose and wiped it on La Santa Muerte\u2019s scythe. Then he stepped outside to make a call. That\u2019s when the cops caught up with him. In the doorway, they found Sofi, bloodied but alive.<\/p>\n A makeshift altar to La Santa Muerte was adorned with prayer candles, cigarettes, alcohol, fruit and flowers.<\/span><\/p>\n Obtained by ProPublica<\/p>\n The white scythe of the La Santa Muerte statue was marked with Sofi\u2019s blood.<\/span><\/p>\n Obtained by ProPublica<\/p>\n At a nearby hospital, after a doctor examined her wounds and tested her for a concussion, investigators snapped photos of the bruises on her face. Sitting in a bed under the room\u2019s fluorescent lights, she explained through an interpreter that Mendoza had kidnapped her not only because she had left him. It was also because she knew too much about his business. \u201cThey don\u2019t want me to be found,\u201d she said. \u201cThey don\u2019t want me to say that he does illegal things.\u201d She told the officers exactly where to look for proof of all he was hoping to hide: One of his phones had extensive info about workers who had paid him illegal fees to get their H-2A visas.<\/p>\n The lead investigator interviewing her had never heard of H-2A before. But Stagner had, from reading the news. Labor trafficking fell outside Stagner\u2019s lane as a county investigator. But he\u2019d spent time on an FBI task force and had worked with a federal prosecutor on a gang case. So he called to ask if the prosecutor might be interested.<\/p>\n As it happened, the prosecutor was working with several federal agents looking to build a case that exposed the trafficking of H-2A workers in Georgia. The agents had been following leads from an anti-trafficking organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that in 2015 had uncovered the abuses of harvesters at an onion farm near Vidalia. That collaboration enabled the agents to expand their investigation. They questioned farmers about their use of the H-2A program and surveilled labor contractors who seemed to have lied on visa applications.<\/p>\n Now the agents were poised to get data from phones that belonged to Mendoza. And they had a potential witness, one with firsthand knowledge of his alleged labor trafficking and one who could recount how she was held captive and brutalized for a year.<\/p>\n Sofi knew the perils of cooperating with the federal government. Mendoza had already warned her that he was going to have her family killed if she talked to anyone. She wanted to help the other farmworkers, but she was terrified \u2014 for her son and for herself.<\/p>\n Out of fear, she wanted to stay silent. But from that same fear came another realization: Only by exposing Mendoza\u2019s operation did she have a shot at saving herself.<\/p>\n Sofi sat calmly<\/span> in the courtroom, trying to stay focused. More than two years had passed since she last saw Mendoza. She\u2019d tried to start over, working at a restaurant. She\u2019d met someone new. They had a baby.<\/p>\n Now, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him again. She thought about what prosecutors had told her as they\u2019d prepared her for today. She\u2019d be helping others, they assured her. Just tell the truth.<\/p>\n While Mendoza was out on bail, federal agents spent nearly a year building the case against him. In that time, according to their investigation, he picked up where he left off, charging workers for the chance to get a visa, holding some against their will and even kidnapping others. Mendoza was indicted in September 2020 for sex trafficking. It was the first big indictment of what was known as Operation Blooming Onion, which exposed widespread abuses of H-2A workers across Georgia.<\/p>\n His charge was followed by a flurry of others \u2014 including forced labor and money laundering \u2014 against two dozen other participants in what the federal government described as a sprawling, transnational criminal organization. It was one of the largest H-2A trafficking investigations ever.<\/p>\n Federal investigators claimed that Mendoza made more than $25,000 a month by charging workers unlawful fees before he would submit their H-2A applications. They also turned up evidence that he\u2019d inflated the number of workers he needed so he could collect more of those up-front fees and that he\u2019d sold the labor of some of the additional workers to farmers not authorized to participate in the program.<\/p>\n The defendants included crew leaders at the onion farm near Vidalia, a well-connected businesswoman who prepared applications for hundreds of visas, and two farmers \u2014 including King, who would plead guilty to the lesser charge of mail fraud and be sentenced to a year and a day. (King, who declined to comment for this story, apologized at his sentencing hearing, saying his \u201cactions were not acceptable.\u201d)<\/p>\n Altogether, prosecutors alleged that defendants filed petitions seeking more than 71,000 H-2A visas, leading to thousands of applicants getting approved when there was no legitimate job for them. They also estimated that the operation raked in more than $200 million in profits by illegally charging workers thousands of dollars to get a visa and by having them work for other, unauthorized employers, not all of them farms, which violates their H-2A contract. One of those workers died of heat stroke after working on a farm where he wasn\u2019t supposed to be.<\/p>\n Federal prosecutors entered as evidence photos of the housing that defendants had provided to H-2A workers.<\/span><\/p>\n Obtained by ProPublica<\/p>\n Federal investigators seized a trove of passports that they say had been confiscated from H-2A workers by the defendants.<\/span><\/p>\n Obtained by ProPublica<\/p>\n Mendoza himself brought over 565 people, with pending visa applications for hundreds more. He wasn\u2019t the biggest player of them all. But a lead investigator testified that he was, unquestionably, the most brutal. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in forced labor in exchange for dropping the sex-trafficking charge. And he faced a longer sentence than any other defendant in the case.<\/p>\n Sofi had been surviving on the pay from her restaurant shifts, help from her coworkers and the hope that if she fulfilled her obligation to the government she\u2019d be reunited with her son. She had helped agents find Mendoza\u2019s records and decipher them. She also connected investigators to other labor-trafficking victims, ones who\u2019d been afraid to speak up. And her sworn statements corroborated information that turned up in the investigations of other agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Labor and the FBI. And in March 2022, she would testify at Mendoza\u2019s sentencing hearing.<\/p>\n From the witness stand, Sofi locked her eyes on the prosecutor asking questions. She described the work she was forced to do for free, the ways that Mendoza controlled her, the beatings, the deception. She spoke of the Guatemalan children she was punished for trying to feed and the trip to the courthouse where she was tricked into signing a marriage license. As it turned out, Mendoza never finalized the paperwork. It wasn\u2019t until after she escaped that she found out they weren\u2019t married.<\/p>\n She was asked about the first time he touched her, the first time he had sex with her.<\/p>\n \u201cHow many times did he rape you?\u201d the prosecutor asked.<\/p>\n \u201cMany,\u201d Sofi said.<\/p>\n \u201cHow long were you with him, do you remember?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne year.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd during that year, did he rape you on a weekly, monthly or daily basis?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhenever he wanted to.\u201d<\/p>\n The prosecutor turned to the day of the kidnapping. It was a day that made Sofi fear she\u2019d never see her son again \u2014 or, worse, that she\u2019d see her son killed. If the police hadn\u2019t arrived, Sofi explained, \u201cI probably would be dead.\u201d<\/p>\n After hours of testimony, there was only one significant point Mendoza\u2019s lawyer objected to: that Mendoza forced Sofi to be with him. He said it was his client\u2019s assertion that he and Sofi had had a \u201cconsensual relationship.\u201d When Mendoza spoke, briefly, he asked the judge for forgiveness. \u201cI learned from this,\u201d he said. \u201cI will turn away from the past.\u201d<\/p>\n As the hearing drew to a close, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood explained that she had watched Sofi\u2019s body language and studied the tone of her voice as she testified. And she could see how much Sofi had to lose, especially in the face of threats to her and her son. She couldn\u2019t find a single reason not<\/em> to believe Sofi. \u201cI would find by any standard of proof that she\u2019s telling the truth,\u201d Wood said. \u201cAs a result I find that the rapes did occur.\u201d<\/p>\n Wood turned to Mendoza. \u201cPeople think that there\u2019s no slavery anymore,\u201d she told him, moments before sentencing him to 30 years in prison. \u201cThere is, and you were doing it right here in our state.\u201d<\/p>\n But though this case revealed how easy it is to exploit and abuse visaholders, little has changed. Most defendants have pleaded guilty, avoiding the worst charges and ending up suspended from H-2A work for just a few years. The remaining four are expected to go to trial this December. In the years since Mendoza\u2019s sentencing, as in the years before, only a tiny fraction of farms are investigated for potential H-2A violations. The Biden administration increased protections for H-2A workers, but several lawsuits filed by states including Georgia have prevented them from fully going into effect. This past June, the Trump administration went one step further, suspending any enforcement of the new program\u2019s rules until that litigation is resolved.<\/p>\n The number of H-2A visas issued has increased every year since Sofi arrived. The escalation of Trump\u2019s deportation efforts this year has led to arrests of undocumented farmworkers \u2014 who account for over 40% of all field laborers \u2014 and sparked enough fear to convince others to no longer show up to work. If farmers are squeezed further by the shortage of farmworkers, the H-2A program can fulfill that demand. There\u2019s no limit to how many visas can be issued.<\/p>\n In October 2023,<\/span> a year after she wrapped up her efforts to expose the dangers of the H-2A program, Sofi got approval to be reunited with her son. He could come here on the same kind of visa she was about to receive, for victims of severe human trafficking and their families. There would be a path to citizenship for both of them.<\/p>\n The life she\u2019d fought for was so close and, yet, just out of reach. Her past was still present. She was reminded of it constantly, by flashbacks to her days in captivity, by fear that seized her when an unfamiliar car cruised her street, by migraines she chalked up to those final blows from Mendoza. And it wasn\u2019t only the memories that were hard. Even now, she struggled to survive.<\/p>\n That winter, she worked at a nursing home. But after she and the father of her toddler split up, she couldn\u2019t stretch her $450-per-week paycheck to cover rent, utilities and car insurance \u2014 let alone send any money to Mexico for her older son\u2019s tuition, uniform and shoes. The stress wore her down. She developed facial paralysis, but the nursing home wouldn\u2019t give her time off to address it. Then she slipped and broke her ankle. She couldn\u2019t walk, much less work, until she recovered from surgery. Without health insurance, the bills piled up, roughly $24,000. The one thing that could help her \u2014 the more than $16,000 in court-ordered restitution for unpaid H-2A wages \u2014 had yet to materialize.<\/p>\n Even if she could afford to send for her son, she told herself, she couldn\u2019t afford to support him.<\/p>\n Her mind drifted back to Mexico. The comfort of home. The chance to see her parents again. But she was jolted out of that dream by the fear she still felt from the threat against her son\u2019s life. She felt they\u2019d never truly be safe in Mexico, not after her testimony against Mendoza. In the U.S., they\u2019d at least have some protections.<\/p>\n It ended up taking more than a year from the time he got his visa, but finally, right around when Trump was elected, Sofi\u2019s son arrived. She hugged him for the first time in five years and introduced him to his 3-year-old brother. Her excitement was clouded just slightly by the fact that she could only buy her oldest a few sets of clothes. The three of them crammed into a single room in a small blue house full of Spanish-speaking laborers. For a week, she tried to make do on a single pack of soup. She ended up skipping meals.<\/p>\n Sofi wants to believe that this country is in fact a land of opportunity. But sometimes her faith wears thin. \u201cNot all of us get to be smiled upon by the United States,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Sofi hasn\u2019t been able to finish her and her son\u2019s applications for green cards. After paying $1,000 for the required medical exams, she couldn\u2019t come up with the $400 to cover vaccines or a reference letter from an employer. But she still dreams of her son in a military uniform. She can see him as a Marine in the blue pants and dark jacket and white hat.<\/p>\n Not long after he started at his new elementary school in January, he asked what would happen if immigration agents came to the school and confused him with someone who\u2019s undocumented. From that day forward, Sofi sent him to school with a photocopy of his passport and visa in his backpack. She told him not to worry, that maybe, because of everything she\u2019s been through, nothing bad would happen to him.<\/p>\n With every passing day of school, every new word of English he picks up, she gains more hope. He\u2019s one more step away from a life of picking fruit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This story contains descriptions of sexual assaults. In the darkness before dawn, Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr. took the last drag of a cigarette and looked out from the staircase of a run-down motel. Underneath the stark floodlights streamed a procession of weary travelers in T-shirts and jeans, reaching into the bottom of a white coach<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4924,12895,337,6400,6821,247,202],"class_list":{"0":"post-21022","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-ended","9":"tag-h2a","10":"tag-life","11":"tag-nightmare","12":"tag-promised","13":"tag-propublica","14":"tag-visa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Deal With the Farmer<\/h2>\n
The Threats<\/h2>\n
The Cemetery<\/h2>\n
Modern-Day Slavery<\/h2>\n
The Reunion<\/h2>\n