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But if he loses his asylum case, he does have the right to pick a third country for his deportation. He is thinking maybe Cuba or Venezuela because perhaps they will take him for the pleasure of humiliating the United States on human rights grounds.

He is a man who has moved into a reality I cannot reach. He is almost beyond everyday concerns because he has lost everything and eventually may lose his life.

He tells me, “I have learned to like myself, to be thankful to God, to love my son even more. The only happy people in Mexico are the politicians and the army officers.”

Two days later, Emilio holds a press conference with two other Mexican nationals, Jorge Luis Aguirre, the creator of a Web site of gossip and news in Juárez who has also fled for his life, and Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, the supervising attorney for the State Committee of Human Rights in Chihuahua. They are forming an organization, Periodistas Mexicanos en Exilio (Mexican Journalists in Exile, or PEMEXX). They all say the same thing: that the Mexican army is terrorizing the nation and killing people out of hand.

One reporter asks Jorge Luis Aguirre if he will also apply for asylum, and he answers that he has to think carefully about it since Emilio was jailed for seven months. He says that there is a kind of discrimination by the American government toward Mexican journalists in terms of asylum. Aguirre was on his way to the funeral of a reporter murdered in Juárez when he received a call over his cell phone saying he would be next. He promptly fled to El Paso.

And then Carlos Spector says, “This is precisely the reason we formed this organization. Jorge’s fear is legitimate and his concerns are real. . . . We couldn’t even talk about this until we got Emilio out. This was part of the Bush administration’s ‘Guantanamization’ of the refugee process. By locking people up, especially Mexican asylum applicants, and making them, through a war of attrition, give up their claims there at the camp. I’ve represented ten cops seeking asylum, and not one of them lasted longer than two months. Emilio lasted seven months. On the basis of he had his son and he knew he was going to be killed. There was nowhere that he could go and practice his profession.”

There are forty reporters in El Paso—print, radio, and television. Only one or two tiny reports are published by any of them. And the matter of the Mexican army killing innocent Mexicans is not mentioned at all. Like the U.S. government, they apparently believe the Mexican army is some force of light in the darkness of Mexico.

Spector is a man on fire. He is fifty-four, red-haired, big, El Paso born and raised. He has built an immigration practice. He’s half Jewish, half Mexican in ancestry. In his twenties, he moved to Israel under the law of return and lived on a kibbutz. But eventually, the border claimed him. He has been looking for a case like Emilio’s for years, a case of a clean reporter seeking political asylum from the government of Mexico. Now he thinks he has it and can make precedent.

When Emilio was taken into U.S. custody, he was interviewed at length on his motives for fleeing Mexico. He gave a long statement about why he believed the Mexican army would kill him and why he could not stay in Mexico in any capacity and stay alive. Accidentally, without knowing U.S. law, he made Carlos Spector’s case.

Political asylum is only possible under U.S. law if the applicant has some immutable characteristic—say, the person is a homosexual in a place where government persecutes homosexuals, or has a religion whose members the government slaughters. A policeman fleeing for his life would not be eligible, because the U.S. government would insist the cop could become, say, a plumber and live happily ever after. But Emilio’s deposition gave him an immutable characteristic: those three stories he filed in 2005 about the army. After that, he apologized. He ceased writing anything bad about the army, even