News21 A Journalism Initiative of the Carnegie and Knight Foundations

Project Banner

USC Immigration

The United States is a country of immigrants. Even so, the debate over immigration has never been so intense. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, concerns about securing borders and screening immigrants have dramatically escalated. The in-depth coverage from the University of Southern California looks at how both people and policy have been impacted. The USC News21 Fellows and Faculty also wish to thank California Connected (KCET) and Christina Wu for extra footage used in our stories, Lee Warner for Editing Assistance and Scott Shulman for Camera Assistance.

Human Smuggling ... And Party Shoes

An arrest at the U.S.-Mexico border
By William Etling, David Eisenberg, Diana Day, August 2, 2006

A routine day at the border is not business-as-usual for the uninitiated. A reporter reacts to the discovery of a woman who tried to smuggle herself into the U.S. -- in a car's glove box.

A just-smuggled woman on the U.S.-Mexico border walks away from the car in which she tried to smuggle herself.



Text & Photos by Diana Day
Editing by David Eisenberg
Slideshow by William Etling

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE SLIDESHOW.





TEXT VERSION:

It was the shoes that finally got me, strappy black evening sandals with rhinestone decorations.

I don’t even know where they came from. Only moments before, border patrol agents had pulled a barefoot woman in tight pink pants from the jerry-rigged hiding place where her car’s glove box should have been.

Plainclothes agents had come out of nowhere to help uniformed officers extract the tiny woman from the crummy car that had carried her over the U.S.-Mexico border from Tijuana.

But the woman’s journey stopped at the border, and suddenly, she was sitting on a curb at the busy San Ysidro Port of Entry putting on black party shoes.

Perhaps the shoes were in the trunk of the car inside the woman’s backpack, or maybe she was holding them, though I can’t imagine how even she could fit into that impossibly small hiding space.

Those shoes were the last thing I expected to see. My reporting colleagues and I were shooting supplementary material for a story about post-9/11 job pressures in law enforcement officials. We were on the American side of the border in front of guard booths as cars rolled in from 24 lanes of end-to-end traffic that disappeared into Tijuana. Suddenly, our hosts beckoned us over to one of the booths, where some border patrol officers were handcuffing a man and a woman outside of their car.

The guards led the pair away and then brought the car around to the Secondary Inspection Area. One of the officers pointed to the inside of the car where you could clearly see a pink-attired bottom in the passenger-side footwell. It was sticking out of the underside of what should have been the glove box.

Image: Border arrest
Caught at the border

Where was the rest of her body? I felt faint, thinking of the woman’s head and torso shoved into the dashboard of the car, maybe even into the engine block. The average wait time to get from Tijuana through those lines of traffic is about an hour. When did she insert herself into this little jail that was supposed to be her ticket into the United States? She was motionless. Was she alive?

When the guards helped the woman out, she seemed fine, and in spite of the cameras there documenting her capture, she appeared unaffected by the entire experience. In fact, everyone at the scene appeared to be taking the whole human-smuggles-self thing in stride except me. I’m just not used to it, I guess.

I started to analyze the woman’s apparent numbness. Had she done this many times before? Did she know that she would be deported eventually and that she would simply try again? Was she desperate and very poor and therefore depressed and unaware of what had really happened to her?

And why on Earth did she bring party shoes to smuggle herself in a glove box into the United States?

I was a conversational distance away, but I had to obey the border patrol’s rules and restrain reporterly instincts to simply ask the woman what she was thinking.

Because I couldn’t talk with the shoes’ owner, I finally decided that the most presumptuous thing I could do -- in addition to shamelessly photographing this woman’s pink-panted rear sticking out of a car glove box -- was to assume that I could even fathom the personal situations that had led her to try such a hazardous stunt.

The black shoes, the yellow curb, the pink rear end. Watching it all unfold in my camera’s view screen.

Driving home with my colleagues that afternoon, unable to shake off the images, I realized that it will all have to remain just what it is: a montage of colors and questions.

Blog Reactions

See all results ...

Meta