Ruth Elizabeth Gomez, a Honduran migrant, all but gave up on her American dream, when she found herself locked in a cold cell and then deported her back to home.
The 25-year-old, after arriving in Mexico by foot, said that she paid a “coyote” to smuggle her across the US border in a boat, only to be arrested after setting foot in Texas.
Gomez told reporters that “after the whole journey, (the detention) was the hardest part. Until then I had never suffered, even though I’d walked for long days feeling hungry.”
On October 13, 2018 Gomez and her brother Jose Tulio joined the first Central American caravan that set off from San Pedro Sula in Honduras. She left her five and eight-year-old children with her mother. Her hope was to successfully join her father, who is a taxi driver and emigrated approximately 14 years ago to the United States, he hasn’t return back to Honduras since.
Things really hit rock bottom for Gomez on November 25, when she tried to scale a border wall between Mexico and the US. She was among the almost 2,000 migrants at whom US immigration agents fired tear gas to force them back. According to Gomez, “that moment I felt like I was going to lose consciousness… I was on top (of the wall), I fainted and fell.”
Gomez recounted her experience calling it the worst. After the tear gas incident she was transferred to the northwest Mexican border city of Tijuana, where she spent six hours in a hospital and received treatment for her injured back. She then remained in Mexico working in a supermarket before he decided to try at it again. Being caught the second time, she was deported in January to San Pedro Sula in chains.
She stated that she won’t try again for “fear of the American migration.” Gomez said she was kept in a “cooler,” a very cold room where she had to sleep on the floor and the detention center was “totally overcrowded.”
While she’s given up on the hope of a new life in the US, Gomez said she met some people who had far more to lose than her. She said, a friend took her three children because (gangs) wanted her oldest son, who’s 12, to sell drugs.
The Honduran government blames people smugglers and political opponents for organizing and instigating this form of collective mass migration, though Gomez say the fault lies with President Juan Orlando Hernandez himself and that “the situation was better” with previous governments.
