The Lost Girls
For the thousands of women who have been trafficked into Houston and forced to work as prostitutes in the city’s underground sex trade, escaping from captivity may be the easiest part of the nearly impossible road to recovery.
Kimberly McCall says: Dear Editors and Book Reviewers: While Mexican Cartels have been active in drug and human trafficking for many years on this side of the Mexico/Texas border, they are often shielded by “legitimate†businesses. While author Ernie Hunt’s riveting new novel Terror on the Border is fiction, it depicts more than an element of truth in its vivid illustration of how narcotics and human trafficking go hand-in-hand in the real life dramas that take place across our borders. Please read the following press release and let me know if we may schedule an interview with this gifted writer, or if you would like to receive a copy of his latest book for a review. Thank you. Kimberly McCall Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 133032 The Woodlands, TX 77393 kmccall@ascotmediagroupcom Direct: (713) 679-9708 Office: (281) 333-3507 www.ascotmediagroup.com FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE True Life Mixes With Fiction As Five Heroes Help The Oppressed In A Battle Against Drugs And Human Slavery Dallas, TX, May 26, 2011 - Dave Cunningham, author of Travel Within: The 7 Steps to Wisdom and Inner Peace says it all with: “Terror on the Border is a gripping story. The last 120 pages will take you on a breathless ride.†With stories of Mexican drug cartels and the devastation they wreak taking center stage in daily news reports, the realism in Ernie Hunt’s latest novel, Terror on the Border (Unrivaled Books), will have readers gripped by fear and unable to put the book down! Ernie Hunt knows how to capture the attention of readers. Fans of his pulse-pounding, epic adventures will be thrilled to learn that Jack Cassidy, the fearless ex-sniper from previous novels, is back – and he wants justice! Now married to Juanita Delgado, herself a victim of human trafficking, readers share his heart-stopping journey as the pair set out to heroically fight a malicious cartel led by egotistical Hernan Cortez and his evil enforcer Manuela, in an attempt to help the poor citizens of San Miguel, Mexico, a town ravaged by violence inflicted by the Los Lobos gang. Trouble looms when Juanita’s cousin Orlando, an American Border Patrol Officer, is kidnapped by the notorious Lobos while he is on duty. He and Juanita, who was also taken hostage, manage to escape the torture chamber where they were being held for ransom by Cortez who hoped to make their rich uncle pay for their release. After their daring escape, they reunite with Jack and two private detectives from Dallas as they try to warn their uncle of the impending danger from Cortez. The action escalates in bloody confrontations near the border and the unexpected twists and turns of this thrilling novel grab the reader’s attention and hold it all the way to the explosive ending! Ernie Hunt’s gripping novel might be fiction, but unfortunately narcotics and human trafficking are only too real. The story pinpoints real-life drug cartels - and one in particular that is born of Mexican Army Special Forces deserters whose members include corrupt former federal, state and local police officers. Sadly, the human slave trade in Mexico is a $20 billion a year enterprise, second only to drug trafficking that is estimated to bring drug cartels around $64 billion a year from sales to users in the United States. Ernie Hunt has lived a very diverse life in places like California, Texas, Missouri, New York and even Paris, France. He is the author of five dynamic novels whose stories embrace a similar goal – to promote a common sense of human decency amongst practitioners of all faiths worldwide. For more information on this very creative writer, please visit his website at www.eehunt.com . ### (May 26th, 2011 at 3:42pm)
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On the other hand, she couldn’t sit still. She spent like crazy. She once blew $500 on panties at Walmart. “I’d say, ‘Kiki, we don’t have money to eat,’ ” Enrique told me. She would come home at all hours and beg him to go out dancing or suddenly disappear for two or three days. Then he’d get a call from New Orleans or Washington, D.C., or even Hawaii. She would deposit $300 in her account one day, $400 a few days later, $900 after that, and then, broke, she’d call Enrique for money to get back home. “Baby, take care of your money,” he’d tell her, “because you’re not gonna have it forever.” But Kiki didn’t listen. “Se fue donde ponía su nariz,” Teresa said—she went wherever the wind took her.
By the fall of 2005, about a year after Enrique had first brought Kiki home, the women in the Aguilar family had begun to question their decision to take her in. Enrique’s bills, and his sisters’, started running past due as they tried to cover Kiki’s spending. Enrique was drinking heavily, and the two fought bitterly whenever she came back home. They went to couples therapy, and the psychologist told Enrique to let Kiki go. “Open your mind,” he said. “She’s going to kill you. Leave her alone. You’re going to lose your family.” Dottie told him to let go too, but he couldn’t give her up. One night he took her passport and set it on fire. He just didn’t want her to disappear.
In September 2005 Dottie left the YMCA because of political infighting. She took a temporary job in California as the administrator of the Orange County human trafficking task force but kept her old cell phone number, in case her Houston clients needed her. In early 2006 Enrique began to call. Something wasn’t right, he told her. Kiki was in trouble. As the weeks passed, the calls became more frantic.
“Decompensation” is a fancy psychiatric term for when a person falls completely apart, which is what happened to Kiki in March 2006. She took an overdose of pills and landed back at the psychiatric hospital, where this time doctors diagnosed her with bipolar disorder. According to the application for emergency detention, Kiki was paranoid and claimed that she wanted to die. When one of the nurses tried to talk to her, she just said, “People are mean in America.”
Kiki spent three weeks in the mental hospital, got out, and went back to work on the spa circuit. Meanwhile she waited for her T visa. Ever since she had learned she might qualify, Kiki had pinned her hopes for survival on getting this document. But while a fair amount of T visas have been granted, obtaining one can be difficult. Approval can take up to a year, a long time for a woman with a mental illness. (In the Mondragon case, just 67 out of 120 women had received T visas three years after the bust.) And success is also often contingent on cooperation with law enforcement; a supplemental form showing the support of police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or the FBI is usually submitted with the application. Dottie knew that the HPD hated to take trafficking cases, much less sign the forms, so she began to look elsewhere for authorization.
The idea of providing information about her traffickers was terrifying to Kiki, but she loved Dottie and did not want other women to suffer as she had. She agreed to help and in May 2006 met with an agent from the Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance, a local group that includes the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI, ICE, YMCA International, and others. Kiki provided the agent with information about the places she had been, the names of her “bosses,” and how much money she had been paid. According to her lawyer, Ortiz-Taing, the information was passed on to the FBI, which seemed most interested in her years in Philadelphia. Kiki traveled there at her own expense to show agents where she had been held; she waited at the appointed time, but the agents never showed.
Early in 2007, Kiki got the news: Agents had not been able to make a case from her information and, as often happens, had declined to support her T visa application. Inexplicably, the FBI had deemed her noncooperative. “To me,” said Ortiz-Taing, “someone who meets with the FBI three or four times to give their statement and travels to another city to pursue that, and someone who is open to their interrogations—to me, that defines someone who is cooperative.” Feeling the situation was hopeless, Ortiz-Taing never submitted the application.
It was the beginning of another self-destructive cycle of hurricane force. Kiki continued to work and spend frantically and was careless with her own safety; at one time Enrique received a call from someone in Oklahoma City urging him to retrieve her before she ran into trouble wandering around in bad neighborhoods at night. Back in Houston, Kiki tried to get mental health services at the county hospital but was turned down, the first time because, the form letter said, she needed to change her visa status and then later because there were no slots available. She married a client, hoping for a green card, and then sunk deeper into depression when it didn’t come. She began spending more time and money at casinos in Louisiana, believing they helped her relax. In August 2008 she was accused of trying to use a fake ID to enter one and was arrested. Enrique sold his car to make her bond, but the U.S. government had taken note: A Louisiana judge scheduled a hearing on her immigration status.
Kiki looked for jobs in Houston, hoping to stay put. She tried a massage parlor near River Oaks; she had known the woman who ran it in Bangkok. But the woman had heard that Kiki had appeared on a news program about trafficking and thought she was with the police now. She wouldn’t even speak to her. Kiki was paralyzed with fear—if the people who had trafficked her to the U.S. also thought she was working with the police, she believed they would kill her the minute she was deported. Even her attempts to land honest work failed: She found a job at a legitimate massage parlor run by Thais, but they fired her, figuring she was bad luck.
Once more, Kiki took solace in the casinos. In July 2009 she got into an argument with a valet, who accused her of stealing a car. (She says the valet wouldn’t allow her to go inside to find her friend, the car’s owner.) She was arrested and sent to jail. As frantic as she was, Kiki knew that missing a court date would put her on the fast track to deportation. The guards at the jail were not sympathetic. “I want . . . help about phone call to know about my court day today and what going on,” she wrote on an Offender Request Form the day she was to appear. Five days later, she got a response: “[Kamchana], Allen Parish [where the charges were brought] will let us know when you have a court date. Since you are an escape risk you will stay in your cell.”
In late October, she was transferred to the LaSalle Detention Center, in Jena, Louisiana. By December, the Thai embassy was readying the paperwork for her deportation. An ICE officer visited Kiki and told her that they were ready to deport her and asked for her signature on an official document. For one crucial moment, Kiki’s depression fell away. She refused to sign. “I am a victim of human trafficking,” she said, and then she gave him Dottie Laster’s phone number.
Dottie had returned to Texas and was living in New Braunfels. She was teaching law enforcement officers to recognize trafficking victims and making ends meet by training horses and substitute teaching. After the call from ICE and several more calls from Enrique, Dottie spent the 2009 holidays trying to piece the story together. For Kiki, services from the YMCA were exhausted; Dottie would have to find her a lawyer who would work for free. In December, she went to Louisiana to visit Kiki for the first time in four years. Through the glass, Kiki beamed and pressed her hands to her heart. “That’s the person I have to believe I’m saving,” Dottie told me.
On February 23, 2010, a federal immigration judge ruled that Kiki’s case should be reopened but gave her only until March 9 to prove that she was a victim of trafficking, a very tight deadline. As this story went to press, Dottie was optimistic, hoping that once all the paperwork was filed, the judge would grant a continuance if more time was needed and eventually allow Kiki to stay.
Meanwhile Kiki tries to make the best of things. I saw her on a recent trip to the detention center in Jena, where even in a baggy orange jumpsuit, she radiated warmth and beauty. Despite the prison diet, her dark hair is still shimmery and thick. She wore it in a jaunty ponytail off to one side, which made the guards laugh. The day I was there, she kept them in stitches, cracking jokes with her nasal voice, which sounds like a cat yowling and purring at the same time. She was unfailingly polite, ending most conversations with “teng yew.”
Kiki busies herself cleaning tables in the prison’s lunchroom for $1 a day and tries not to remember when she used to bring in $1,200 a day, even if the traffickers allowed her to keep only a little of it. Her eyes lit up with pride at the memory, and she pronounced the word “muh-nee” wistfully, as if her riches were candies that had dissolved too quickly on her tongue. She spends her free time coloring pictures of Disney characters and sending love letters to Enrique. “I be back to be good wife, okay baby,” she writes, trying to make amends. Enrique wishes she could get out and come live with him; Dottie wishes she would go to a restorative residential program. When I asked Kiki what she wished for herself, she struggled with the word: “What do you mean, ‘wish’?”
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