Blood mixes with sand, and with every painful step Román takes, it feels like he might as well be taking one back. Ahead of him there is a line of people. In the cold darkness of the desert at night, a group of 15 trudges on diligently, though a few, Román included, are faltering. His shoes are broken, the sand leaks through, weighing his steps. His toes have been rubbing together for hours, and two toenails dig their way into the flesh of other toes. He’s bleeding, he’s hungry, and he’s tired. The food is gone. The water is gone. He can’t keep walking. He stops and puts his hands to his knees; they’re throbbing now. When he walks he feels bowlegged. He hangs his head low.

“If you keep walking like this we’re never going to get there,” the guide yells back from the front of the line. “If you want to make it to the United States you have to be stronger.”

He would keep saying that again and again.

“Think about how much money you’ve already spent,” he continues. Román thinks about money all the time. About how much he’s spent trying to get to America — so far, he was down almost $1,000. But he thought about how much he hoped to make when he got there.

“Think about how much you’ve already suffered,” he says. This is their third night in the desert, coming from Guatemala, crossing Mexico and aiming for Arizona. They walk from dusk until dawn and hide during the day. They rest as little as possible. Last night, they ran out of supplies, but earlier they found a patch of land where cows had grazed, and they drank the water that was left behind. It was the only thing they’d consumed today.

“Well, staying here in the desert will be much worse,” he says. “You have to keep walking.”

It’s another two hours through miles and miles of sand when the guide lets them stop for a 20-minute rest. It’s 5 a.m. now; the sun will be out soon, and they’ll be forced to find hiding for the day. There are three others, like Román, who are hurt and having trouble walking. When they stop, the guide hands out salve to rub on their trembling knees. He gives out pills for the pain. For the weak, he has some sort of juice; it’s for energy, he says, but it’s wasted on them. There are just a few things that could rejuvenate them — a real meal, water, uninterrupted sleep and the fear of being caught.

That’s when they hear it. There’s a helicopter coming toward them. It’s still far enough away that they can’t see its lights, but they hear the buzzing of the circling blades, slicing through the distance between them. They stop and look up, for seconds frozen in fear.

“Inmigración,” says a man as he breaks the trance and they scatter. Panic takes over for reason. It’s not easy to find a place to hide in the middle of the desert.

Román finds a lone tree. Crouching beside it, he knows his only hope is that the officers in the helicopter aren’t really hunting their prey, they’re just passing through. He thinks about his wife, Ana, who’s back in Guatemala with his three daughters. Ana wanted to come with him, but, thinking about all trouble he’s been through since leaving home, he’s glad she didn’t. He thinks about his youngest daughter; she was born in July and he left in October. She was sick when he left; she was just a tiny body with dark hair and a mouth that was always screaming in pain. She had been sickly for all of her three months. Now it was almost November, and he doesn’t know if she’s still sick. He hasn’t spoken to his wife since he crossed into Mexico. But he thinks about them now, as the helicopter circles above, flown by strangers who want him to leave. And he thinks about God. He prays to God not to let him get sent back.

McCain-Palin posters decorate the lawns of houses that line the drive from Ithaca into the surrounding farm country. There were more during campaign season, but some have been left behind — neglected, along with overgrown grass and rusted tractors. The more distance gained between the city and its rural outskirts, the more obviously different the surroundings become. The ground seems a little less green, straw-like where it isn’t groomed for farming. Tall, overbearing oaks stand proudly near old houses with wrap-around porches, wood paneling and brick chimneys.

“You can tell which houses have illegal immigrants in them because they have sheets over their windows instead of real curtains,” says Sarah Lindland, a junior at Ithaca College, as she points them out to me. Sarah is one of the key members of IC Intercambios, a service-learning program that matches students with area immigrants to improve the nonnative languages of both. On a Saturday afternoon, we are driving to see Román, as we’ve done every weekend this semester, to help with his English.

As the city of Ithaca and even Cayuga Lake recede in the distance, the houses get farther away from each other. Between them are cows, cow manure dropped in the street by trailers, and, once, a dog that could only be described as scrappy eating road kill — another dog. The countryside is bleak.

But Román lives there now, and Román is a pleasant man — not bleak at all — despite his surroundings and his circumstances. He doesn’t smile excessively, but he smiles just enough. What makes him particularly pleasant is that even in the absence of a smile, he’s never frowning — yawning, quite often, but never frowning. Bronzed by years in the sun, his skin has now taken on the olive undertone of a waning tan. Maybe it’s his Guatemalan blood rejecting the cold, he says. His eyes are a dark enough brown that the irises blend with the pupils, leaving him perpetually wide-eyed and eager to take in more of the world, though in his 25 years he’s seen quite a lot already.

For the past two of them, Román has worked at a dairy farm in Central New York, living in a wood-shingled house he can barely leave unless it’s for the quick walk to the dairy. To most of the world around him he’s hidden, but willingly so because he knows he needs to be. The fear of deportation is too real and too strong.

It took Román just four days less than a month to get to upstate New York from Guatemala. He arrived to the welcoming arms of aunts, uncles and cousins on Nov. 5. When he got here, he couldn’t walk on his own. During a month of travel he had been crammed into the back of trailers like cargo, him and up to 30 others. They were loaded into cars for hours without stopping and told not to move; he had gone up to six days at a time without food and crossed most of the desert without water. During his first two weeks in New York, he was forced into convalescence. His cousin had to help him walk — to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to bed. He said the emotional scars were worse.

But that’s the price he’s paid to live a privileged life, as he would call the opportunity to work and earn a decent wage. As soon as he was well he found a job watching the cows — “What do you do at work?” “I watch the cows,” was a particularly hard dialogue for Román to master in English.

The job offered him what freedom it could; he moved into a house with five other workers and earns about $800 a month. The dairy keeps $12 a week for housing, and the government takes about $70 a month in taxes. He’s not a citizen, but they can do that because he uses a fake Social Security number. He bought it, as many illegal immigrants do, for about $300. As far as his employers know, he’s legal.

Every month, Román sends home $500 and lives on the remaining $150.

In Guatemala he worked in construction with his father and uncles. It wasn’t that the money wasn’t good, he says, but that it wasn’t consistent. In a 20-hour work week, he would make about 200 Quetzales, or about $300 USD, but the people there are poor and he was never sure when the work would run out.

“With $500, my wife can buy tomatoes, onions, peppers, firewood,” he says. “If someone gets sick, or she needs something else for the house, she calls me and I send her another $300. If I don’t have it, I borrow it from someone here.”

He starts work at 5 p.m. and goes until 5 a.m. five days a week. He has two days off; on one of them he just sleeps. On the other, he learns English. He seems to want to learn — but even more, he enjoys any time he can spend with people. The house is lonely, so he even looks forward to work. He insists the cows can understand Spanish, and so few people he comes in contact with do.

“I have three daw-ters,” Román can say in English, though it’s one of his hardest phrases to pronounce, and that’s even when he draws out the vowels and continues to roll the “r” at the end. “Their names are Gabriela, Lourdes and Sofía.” But he doesn’t know what ‘their’ means.

Gabriela, Lourdes and Sofía now live alone with their mother, Ana, who’s just 23; they’re 8, 5 and just about 3. They live in a small house in Cuilco, a rural town a good six hours by car from Guatemala City, Román says. When Román left, Sofía was sick again. There’s something wrong with her lungs and she’s had intestinal problems since she was born. Her stomach inflates like one of the African children Román sees in commercials here in the U.S. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with her. But Román says if he could afford to take Sofía into the city, or bring her to the United States, he’s sure the doctors could figure it out. The doctors he can afford, though even they are a strain, don’t know enough.

“Me preocupa ella va a morir,” he says plainly. I’m afraid she’ll die.

He doesn’t know how to say that in English. But he can say “I have a problem,” “The machine is broken,” and “That cow made 12 quarts of milk last week,” because those are the phrases he needs to survive here in the United States, working himself into exhaustion just to send home enough money to try to sustain his family.

“Espero que no.” I hope that she doesn’t.

“We lost one of our guys,” Sergio Pedro, the adviser of Intercambios, tells his students one Wednesday night in February, when the first was deported. He hangs his head as he announces the news.

For whatever reason, Sergio says, immigration services is cracking down. More illegal immigrants are being deported all the time. For programs like Intercambios, which is Spanish for “exchange,” it means losing more contacts. It also means a stricter adhesion to the rules: Don’t take the workers out of their homes, don’t stay for longer than the allotted time and don’t go meet your Intercambio alone. The rules exist for a reason — personal relationships are jeopardizing because it’s natural to want to help the workers, to take them out of the house, show them a little excitement, Sergio says, but it’s just too dangerous.

In fact, the government has been cracking down ever since 2003, when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency created the first Fugitive Operations Program to “dramatically expand the agency’s efforts to locate, arrest and remove fugitives from the United States,” the program’s Web site says. In the Buffalo region, defined by ICE as all regions in New York north of New York City and Long Island, the program has removed 4,111 illegal aliens in the 2008 fiscal year, an increase of 1,430 since the same period five years ago. The increase follows the national trend, said Michael Gilhooley, a press representative for ICE’s Northeast region.

He said the Fugitive Operations Program is an investigative unit. They seek out illegal aliens based on specific targets they’ve identified.

“We have targets and we know where they are and how to get them,” he said. “We use all the normal investigative measures. It’s good old police work.”

As a founding member of Intercambios since before it became a class this year, Sarah has seen the program evolve. Román was one of the first contacts — hers, in fact. He is someone she’s become friends with over the almost two years she’s been helping him learn English.

“We took them into The Commons once,” she says about an excursion she and her boyfriend, who was part of the program last year, dared. She knew it was dangerous and she says she would never risk it again. But it was worth it to show Román a little bit of the world around him. “When we said goodbye that day he had tears in his eyes,” she says. “He hugged us and he started to cry.”

It’s about trust and connections, Sarah says. The program is designed to teach English, but, especially when working with migrant workers who have so much reason to fear outsiders, there has to be some sort of relationship.

“You can’t just go there and let them down by being a robot,” she says.

What she says has merit. On days that Sarah can’t make it to see Román, he’s not as willing to try. On the other hand, when she’s around, he talks to her like an old friend — he talks about his family, things happening in Guatemala and at work, a cow that was sick that week.

When we’re ready to leave, accomplishing a few new sentences that day, he thinks of something else.

“Quieres ver el video de Ana?” Do we want to see the video Ana sent him?

A shaky camera pans over a yellow and green landscape. A river runs through the town. Like a sports fan calling the shots on a game he’s already seen, Román announces every scene change, every new character and every interesting action that plays out on the screen. He’s smiling now, at nothing in particular.

“That’s my house,” he says. “I built it with my father and my uncles.” On a piece of dirt land sits the boxy, stone structure. Since he’s been gone, it’s been painted a bright yellow inside and out. The exterior walls are split, the bottom half are a deep maroon. There’s a small window on every wall. They’re covered by black cast iron bars, twisted and melded into patterns.

“Do they do that here?” he asks. “Do they keep bars on the windows?” Sarah says it’s not that common.

“Oh, over there it’s very common. It’s so that no one can get into your house,” he says. “Oh, look. That’s Sofía. She’s going to pick the leaf.” His whole face lights up when he sees the daughter he’s barely known. Off-screen a woman tells her to say something. Instead, she walks to the edge of the screen, stands up on her tiptoes and picks a leaf off the ivy-like plants that climb the fence around Román’s house.

Román turns to us with an amused “I told you so” sort of look.

A jump cut shows three girls on-screen, standing awkwardly at the side of the house. Ana, with thick black hair that reaches the backs of her thighs, stands over them, coaxing her daughters to talk. “Say something to your Daddy. Say something,” she says in Spanish.

“Send me some money,” Gabriela, Román’s oldest daughter yells as she darts away, embarrassed. Román laughs as if he’s seeing it for the first time.

“Román,” Ana begins, her voice drowned out by the wind. Pink flowers on long vines swing from the roof of the patio where she stands. “I’m happy that you got to see the house. I’m glad you got to see all this and your daughters. I love you very much; I miss you.” The rest of what she says is almost inaudible. But her lips continue to move and Román continues to try to listen.

I ask him how many videos Ana has sent him in his two years here. This is the second.

“It’s not a lot,” he says, still watching her.

“I think it’s very hard for Román,” says Miguel, Ana’s 22-year-old brother.

Though the two had never met in Guatemala — Miguel emigrated when he was just 14 years old. Román heard he was having trouble in Tennessee, where he’d lived ever since, and invited him to come to New York.

Román and Miguel don’t get along very well, but they agree on one thing — it’s the loneliness that’s the worst part of the way they live.

“He had a very hard time getting here,” Miguel says. “And he has a hard time here. He misses his daughters. And you know where we live. There’s nothing here.”

Sitting on a beige chair that doesn’t match any others in his living room, Román ignores a call from Ana on his cell phone. He’ll call her back later; it’s less urgent to talk to her now that Sofía is healthy. When he talks to his daughters they want to know what he’s doing, where he is and when he’s coming home. He’s ready to go back to them now, though he realizes his youngest child barely knows him. He’s OK with that, for a while — he didn’t think he would have a youngest child to return to.

“We took her to every doctor possible, and the only doctor that could help her was God,” he says. “She’s alive because God wanted her to live.”

He wants to go back to Guatemala in November, if he can save enough money by then. He thinks it’s ironic that it will be so easy to get back — just four hours to New York City, two hours on plane to Guatemala City and six hours by car or bus to his town. It will be getting back here that will be hard.

He says he wishes the U.S. government would do something for people like him, and in fact, legislation might not be far away. President Obama has said he will begin to address the issue later this year, looking for a path to legalization and to open a debate on health care. Román should pay attention to things like health care and Social Security; he pays for them but will never reap the benefits. He doesn’t though. He just wants to work and see his family every now and then.

“If we had a visa it would be so much better,” he says. “We wouldn’t have to hide from the law. We wouldn’t have to travel wondering in our minds if the police are around, if I’ll run into immigration. We’re always scared.”

Names of migrant workers and their families were changed to protect identities.
Some interviews were conducted in Spanish and translated by the author.