But less understood is that the violence that befalls migrant women happens not just during the perilous journey through Mexico: Much of it happens after women reach the supposed safety of the United States.
In July, a 23-year-old Honduran woman told the authorities that she was sexually assaulted in a bedroom closet by a smuggler who had helped her and her sister cross into the South Texas city of Mission. The following month, a sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio was charged with sexually assaulting the 4-year-old daughter of an undocumented Guatemalan woman and threatening to have her deported if she reported the abuse. In 2017, a guide leading a group of migrants through the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation in Arizona raped a woman from El Salvador twice during a seven-day desert hike, threatening to leave her stranded if she resisted. “I hope I leave you pregnant so you have one of my kids,” he said, the woman told the authorities.
In 2016, a migrant woman fled a stash house in the South Texas city of Edinburg, where she said she had been raped by a smuggler who brandished a machete. In West Texas that same year, two teenage girls reported that they had been sexually assaulted by a Customs and Border Protection officer, who they said forced them to strip, fondled them, then tried to get them to stop crying by offering chocolates, potato chips and a blanket. In an unusual turn, the girls filed legal claims against the federal government, which settled the case in 2018 for $125,000.
At least five of the women who were assaulted — in one case, bound with duct tape, raped and stabbed — were attacked not by migrant smugglers, who are often the perpetrators, but by on-duty Border Patrol agents and Customs officers.
Experts say the actual number of sexual assaults is almost certainly much higher than those documented by prosecutors and the police, because most attacks are never reported. And such attacks don’t end at the border. Women have reported being assaulted in immigration detention facilities, and the federal government over a recent four-year period has received more than 4,500 complaints about the sexual abuse of immigrant children at government-funded detention facilities.
The Times interviewed eight migrant women from Central America who were sexually assaulted between 2013 and 2016 — women still struggling with nightmares, depression and in some cases, thoughts of suicide. One reported that she was attacked in Mexico; six said they were assaulted in South Texas. One said she was attacked in both Mexico and South Texas. The oldest victims were in their early 40s when they were attacked; the two youngest were 14.
Most of their attackers were never prosecuted or identified, and The Times was not able to independently verify the women’s accounts. But all eight women either gave sworn testimony or submitted statements under penalty of perjury to the federal government in order to qualify for visas, and cooperated with the police in the investigation of their cases.
