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“The Mexicans,” he explains, “are treated the worst. The staff curses us and calls us rats, narcos, and criminals. The work of the prison is done by the Mexicans and Central Americans. It is ironic, the illegals are arrested for working and then put in prison and made to work for nothing.”

When he crossed, he imagined that the U.S. government would take him to some safe house, perhaps guard him and protect him. He did not expect jail. Now he feels impotent. He is angry at the United States because they criticize other nations for human rights abuses, and when he flees for his life, they treat him like a criminal. He has nightmares of being deported. And he is desolate because he cannot learn anything about his son. He remembers those moments he loved: making his son’s breakfast, washing his son’s clothes. Now he can do nothing for him. Emilio cries a lot.

For a month, he is not allowed to speak to his son. He is tormented by the fear that the boy is being mistreated. He worries that older boys might molest him. The prison officials refuse to tell him anything. Finally, he gets a ten-minute phone call. The boy says he is doing okay. Emilio tells him they will not be able to go back to Mexico. He can sense his son is bitter—he has lost his home, his friends, even his dog. Emilio wants to hug him and kiss him as he did each day at home.

Eventually, they get to talk briefly twice a month, and the boy has his fifteenth birthday in a cage. Emilio finally gets a lawyer, but often he cannot even talk to him when he visits because he is too depressed.

The lawyer explains the facts of life to him. He says, “Maybe the United States does not want you, but we know Mexico does not want you. Think of your son.”

The prison is haunted by a Cuban ghost. Twenty years before, the man hung himself in the shower. And now at night, sometimes all the showers come on, or the toilets are emptied of water. Security cameras see the Cuban in the library in the middle of the night reading. There are sounds of a guitar playing. The ghost is a message that tells Emilio what prison can do to a man.

His son is released to relatives in El Paso after a few months in jail. He tells his father not to give up. He tells the press, “I really miss him, and I miss my home, too, but for me, my dad is more important. Because if something happens to him, I think that I would die. Because he is the only person I have, and I love him more than anyone in the world.”

At the end of January 2009, Emilio Gutiérrez is suddenly released from prison without any warning. When they called him to the office, he assumed he was being shipped to another prison in the American gulag. His lawyer, Carlos Spector, also had no indication of the release.

Now Emilio sits in the sun and tries to teach me Mexico as it is today. He has a hearing coming up in March, but this could be postponed because the U.S. government loves postponing such hearings in the hopes that migrants will give up and go back home. Emilio cannot even work, because the U.S. government has yet to give him a work permit. He stays with friends.

“Mexicans,” he explains, “know the army is a bunch of brutes. But what is going on now is a coup d’état by the army. The president is illegitimate. The army has installed itself. They have become the government. They are installed in all the state governments. They control the municipal police. They are everywhere but the Ministry of Education—after all, they are too illiterate to run that. The president has his hands tied, and he has tied them.”

But Emilio is a creature of hope. He does not think he will be deported. He has faith in the new U.S. administration because “the race Obama belongs to has been enslaved. I think he shares this history of discrimination with Latinos. And he will realize the huge human rights abuses in Mexico. There are thousands of people like me here. There are thousands of abandoned homes in Juárez alone. If I am sent back to Mexico,