Asylum seekers show dangers of home

An MS-13 gang member left eight voicemails on Brenda Mendez’s cellphone demanding that she turn over her teenage boy. If she refused, he said, the gang would dismember both her sons.

“I’m going to send you a finger from each hand. You are going to see what the (expletive) happens to your son,” one message said. “Show up or you’re dead. We know about Little Gustavo and also about your baby boy. What the (expletive)? You want him turned into pieces too?”

The family soon fled Guatemala with hopes of getting into the United States, being careful to bring along the voicemails and a copy of the police report Mendez filed against the gang member known as El Gato.

Other migrants are doing the same. As the Trump administration puts up more legal barriers for asylum-seekers, some immigrants take steps to arrive at the border with evidence to show U.S. authorities the dangers they are trying to escape.

The documents are often carried inside protective folders, and they are sometimes all that the migrants bring with them, except for the clothes on their backs.

On July 1, the Mendez family waited on the Mexican side of the international bridge to Brownsville, Texas.