62 MOTHER JONES |^ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
the human rights complaint to corroborate
Méndez Pineda’s claims. But first he needed
ice to release his client. Otherwise, Méndez
Pineda could be detained for months—even
years—waiting to appear in court.
Spector filed for parole, and ice denied
it. He then told Méndez Pineda to write
an op-ed in the El Paso Times. “I would be
truly thankful and appreciative if I were
to be released, since it would mean my life
was saved,” it read. Spector appeared on
TV stations, radio, in local and national
papers. “What the case symbolizes,” he told
the Washington Post, “is the criminalization
of the asylum process.”
By then ice was operating under new
rules. In Trump’s first week in office he’d
signed an executive order declaring he’d “end
the abuse of parole and asylum provisions”
that released migrants from detention.
Parole rates dropped from 92 percent to
practically zero, the aclu later found.
Under Trump, the number of migrants
detained has swollen by some 18,000
people. This is crucial to his deterrence
strategy because detained migrants are
about five times less likely to find an attor-
ney. Detained migrants without a lawyer
are, in turn, 10 times less likely to win
their case than those with a lawyer. And
as detention numbers have increased, so
have self-deportations.
ice moved Méndez Pineda to the pri-
vately run West Texas Detention Facility.
There he lived in the “hen house,” where
he recalls about 100 migrants sleeping in
a space meant for 60. At night, rats and
snakes crawled over the wooden floors.
Yellow mold covered the bathroom walls.
Next was the Cibola County Correctional
Center, another private facility, 410 miles
away in New Mexico. In 2016, the Nation
reported on widespread medical neglect in
the facility; several months later, the Bureau
of Prisons canceled its contract. (ice skirted
this issue by contracting directly with the
county.) On several occasions, agents locked
Méndez Pineda in solitary, including once
when he complained of a headache. “The
guards look at the detainees with disgust
on their faces,” Méndez Pineda wrote of his
time there, “and everything we say to them
is ignored...Honestly, it is hell.”
Méndez Pineda missed his family. He
missed his girlfriend. He called Spector’s
office every week. The guards acted as if
his life meant nothing, he said, and he’dbegun to believe it. “I realized that many
of the agents treat immigrants as animals,
not as human beings,” Méndez Pineda says.
“For them, we are only a product.”
Spector, meanwhile, worked nights orga-
nizing an international campaign. Reporters
Without Borders, the National Press Club,
and human rights groups released state-
ments on Méndez Pineda’s behalf. When
ice called the reporter a flight risk, Spec-
tor found a local priest willing to lend the
young man a bed. Spector kept pushing.
Obsessing was the only way he knew
how to work. As he recovered from cancer
in 2012, he’d fill pages with his thoughts for
Sandra to bring to the office. “He couldn’t
even speak, but he’d write down what he’d
want me to do,” she says. “It was really dif-
ficult. I was trying, and he was in excruci-
ating pain.” When a case seized his mind,
he could wander all day in mismatched
boots. Sometimes he’d sit for hours at a bar
strategizing over a tequila or staring at his
files like he was possessed. “He is a friend
of God and the devil,” says Mexican film-
maker Everardo González, who has known
and worked with Spector for years. “He is
all of it. Carlos Spector is the border.”
In April 2017, Spector sent his 68-page
appeal to ice. “Mr. Méndez is by no stretch
of the imagination a flight risk,” he wrote.
“Mr. Méndez should be saluted, recog-
nized, and applauded for reporting federal
corruption in Mexico, not incarcerated.”
Spector had organized another press
conference. On May 3, 2017, he drove to
his office around dawn like normal. Emilio
Gutiérrez Soto, his former client, would
be there to ask the government to free
Méndez Pineda. As Spector paced the green
carpet in his office, his chest throbbed. He
tried to nap. But the pressure built. By 9
a.m., he knew he was dying.it was a massive heart attack. Doctors
found four clogged arteries, each requir-
ing bypass surgery. In intensive care,
Spector’s reaction to morphine triggered
vivid hallucinations, and he clawed at the
IVs in his arms.
As his wife held his hand, he screamed
about being kidnapped. “How could you
let them do this to me, Sandra?” A three-
decade river of pain emptied into the hos-
pital room, memories of threats on his own
life, like the time a mysterious man aimed
a gun at Spector in his office parking lot,
shouting, “You’ve taken enough cases!” “I
had never seen him that vulnerable, that
scared in his life,” Sandra says.Hospital staff tied Spector to the bed,
and Sandra cradled his head. “Sandra, I’m
drowning,” he cried. “Don’t let me drown.”
The day after Spector’s heart attack, ice
denied Méndez Pineda parole a second time.
Twelve days later, rather than endure what
could have been years in detention, Méndez
Pineda self-deported. He now lives in hiding.
He does not give out his full name, keeps
few friends, and rarely leaves his apartment
except to go to work. He avoids federal
police. “I keep insisting this is not my life,”
he told me recently.
Spector spent three weeks in the hospi-
tal, another two months resting at home.
But even after he’d recovered from surgery
and returned to the office, something had
changed. “When you lose a case like that,
it makes you doubt everything—you doubt
your ability, your decisions,” he says. For
the first time, he questioned if he should
continue. What for? So I can have another
heart attack? He calls the case “the vision
of what was to come.”
In the two years since Spector walked
Méndez Pineda across the border, Trump
forced migrants to sleep on the rocks be-
neath the Ciudad Juarez–El Paso causeway,
wrapping themselves in Mylar blankets
against the cold. Razor wire now hangs
from the fence. Since January, border
agents have turned back more than 11,000
asylum seekers to wait on their cases in
Mexico, according to Reuters. Almost
one-third are children, 107 younger than 1.
This year, a former Trump staffer released
a book claiming that Stephen Miller, the
architect of Trump’s anti-immigration
policies, had told a fellow aide that he’d
“be happy if not a single refugee foot ever
again touched America’s soil.” (Then–
press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders
said the statement “certainly” didn’t re-
flect White House policy.)
After several weeks back at work, Spec-
tor again found himself surrounded by
stories of desperate people. He took on an
indigenous Rarámuri man escaping violence
in the Sierra Madre, where the Mexican gov-
ernment allows criminals to operate un-
checked. This year he represented an
entire family threatened by cartels and
who were driven by the Mexican army to
the US border because, they were told,
even the military couldn’t protect them.
Spector started telling himself he had no
option but to help as many people as pos-
sible. He was arriving at the office before
dawn. He was obsessing again, and he didn’t
have time to wait. QHOLD THE LINE
(continued from page 49)