Yolanda's Crossing

2003

Susana Loera works in a world of law laced with machismo.

From the second floor of the Mexican Consulate, she has seen thousands of immigrants come for help navigating the justice system. Help with child custody cases. Deportation orders. Criminal arrests.

But beaten and raped women, she is convinced, have been ignored by the consulate to keep Mexican men out of U.S. prisons.

It is the morning of Sept. 20, 2004, when Mexican Vice Consul Luis Lara provides a chance she has waited on for months.

I have a victim ... he says, sticking his head into her office. She's claiming an uncle had raped her ... and I need you to help her. Susana puts her hand on the phone.

If I help her, Luis, I'm going to help her the whole way.

Susana calls Dallas police, reports that she has a domestic abuse victim in the office, hangs up and walks next door.

She sees a tiny 17-year-old girl with a glazed look of fear and something tiny wrapped in her arms. It is Yolanda and her baby, Aidelin, just days after they escaped from Juan and went to live with Cristina Santana. They have come to the consulate with Yolanda's tattered birth certificate to get emergency picture identification. After consular officials heard her story, they sent her upstairs to meet with the protection department.

Susana shakes her hand, and Yolanda lets off a slight, nervous smile.

I'm here to give you what you need, Susana says. The police are on their way. I just want to tell you that you are very brave for doing what you did.

There is a bond, but neither knows its depths. Susana, her broad face and wide shoulders at once empathetic and imposing, tells Yolanda little about herself. She sits atop the office desk and listens. Yolanda begins with the first time she was raped on the riverbank in La Barra del Potrero in rural Oaxaca. Of her journey along the winding highway to Oaxaca City and by foot across the Sonoran Desert and into American fields and motel rooms.

The 33-year-old woman's instinct tells her this is all true. Too real not to be true.

Two police officers take a report. Before they can arrest Juan, they need to know his birthday and need DNA tests to confirm he is the father. Yolanda doesn't know the birthday, and a DNA test will take days.

But they have to arrest him, she pleads with Susana. He's going to come after me.

Susana leaves a message with the Dallas County district attorney's office, saying she needs help for a victim. She needs a protective order and needs somebody to shepherd Yolanda's case through the system. Within an hour, she gets a call from Martha Hollowell, co-chief of the office's family violence division.

Martha is suspicious.

In all her years in the office, she cannot remember hearing the consulate's office ask for help with a victim or prosecution of an abuser.

Usually, such calls come on behalf of defendants to get cases dismissed or downgraded. In December 2003, the acting consul general had gone so far as to send a letter asking for dismissals or deferred adjudication in some cases of domestic violence, citing cultural differences and the destruction of families caused by jail and deportation. Juan José Salgado would later say he signed the letter to help U.S. authorities understand the culture of rural Mexico but not to trivialize domestic violence. The consulate's office added that they believed Yolanda's story but have an obligation to help any Mexican citizen who requests it.

If Susana is being honest, Martha knows Yolanda is in danger. Of women who are slain by abusers, about 75 percent die during or shortly after their escape. And if Juan catches wind of an impending arrest, he could run south as many do, crossing back into the safety of Mexico.

She says to bring Yolanda into the office the next morning.

That night, Susana can't shake the day.

If anybody ever does anything to you, you can tell me. I don't care who it is. Your uncle, your dad. It could be anyone, she tells her 10-year-old daughter, Alexis.

Why are you telling me this?

For now, Susana mentions nothing of Yolanda. But Alexis knows the darkness in her mother's past.

•

They were in a green station wagon in Grand Prairie. Susana was 9, motherless and from a family of 12. Her relative was in his mid-40s, an upholsterer.

He spilled spools of string and thread on her lap, reached across and began touching her, fondling her. He had been touching her since she was 7, since the time he gave her a five-dollar bill as hush money and threatened to kill her father if the incentive was not enough to ensure silence.

On this day, they drove to his apartment building. She knew she could not go inside. Unspeakable things would happen inside that building.

She got out of the car, broke his grasp and ran into an empty field. For hours, she hid behind a big tree, the man screaming as he searched. Night came and the girl, scared of the dark, emerged. He took her home.

The molestation would continue until she was 14. She kept it a secret, from her family and priests and friends, until she turned 28.

By that time, Susana was a divorced single mother, battling a string of abusive relationships.

On April 1, 2002, she hit bottom. She and her live-in boyfriend had been fighting again, this time about the dog sleeping on the bed. Again, it had become physical. When Grand Prairie police showed up, she told them how he spat on her face, shoulder-butted her, smashed her television and threw a can of white paint in her car. Alexis, then 8, saw and heard everything.

The boyfriend moved out for good. Susana nursed her wounds. She moved into her sister's house and returned to school in September. She began work at the Mexican Consulate in January 2004 while she finished classes. Months later, she became the first child on her mother's side of the family to graduate from college. She worked inside the consulate for a private attorney helping Mexican citizens.

Everything had been building toward this moment.

•

The morning of Sept. 21, 2004, Susana picks up Yolanda in Oak Cliff and drives her to the district attorney's family violence division at the Frank Crowley Courts Building. Martha meets them and sees what Susana first saw: a shell of a teenage girl, emaciated and dirty with her long, black hair tumbling down toward the small of her back. Cristina has been trying to feed the girl four times a day. Liver. Fritos. Chicken soup and spinach. All to no avail. She still weighs less than 90 pounds, malnourished from one-meal days in America.

Martha knows the distrust she has to overcome. She has seen it dozens of times.

Women failed by their government, by their families. She says defense attorneys have told illegal-immigrant victims they'll get deported if they testify against their abusers. Then there's Susana, whom she still doesn't know whether to trust.

Martha speaks to Yolanda in Spanish. Her mother is from Chihuahua, her father from Victoria. She explains that the way they do things in Dallas isn't like Mexico. She explains the system, the options, things that the girl never knew about.

The first step will be a protective order.

The next day, Susana takes Yolanda across town to meet with Dallas police Detective Glen Slade at the Children's Advocacy Center. Detective Slade is a veteran of cases like this, working nearly 1,000 since 2001. He remembers the Mexican father who abused his daughter and took her across the border to live above a bar before the girl escaped. The mom who had two daughters abused by a baby sitter but never knew she could do anything about it.

Many women in Mexico, his experience narrates, remain second-class citizens who don't know much about legal protections when they come north.

He talks to Yolanda, takes a DNA test but still needs Juan's date of birth. Yolanda has Juan's phone number and gives it to Susana. She calls in the lobby from her cellphone.

Who's this? Juan answers.

Susana lies: I'm calling from the state of Texas.

She tells him she is working on Yolanda's Medicaid application and needs to know when he was born. He tells her.

She thanks him and goes back upstairs and gives the detective the date.

Back at the courthouse, meanwhile, Martha has called Saundra Arrington, an attorney with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to see if agents can immediately arrest Juan.

They can raid the apartment, but everyone else inside will be deported. The message is relayed to Susana. She knows the Mexican Consulate might have a problem with the prospect of deporting an apartment full of illegal immigrants.

Get 'em all. I don't care, she says. The consulate's office has nothing to do with it at this point.

In the early morning, less than a week after Yolanda first entered the consulate, there is a knock on the door at Apartment 303.

Juan answers. He and the other men inside are taken away.

Susana calls Yolanda to let her know she is safe. Yolanda screams, then calls Martha and cries.