Rosa, a 63-year-old grandmother, fled her home in Cortés, Honduras with her 14-year-old granddaughter in 2016 after an MS-13 gang member tried to take the granddaughter as his wife. When Rosa initially said no to what would have been a forced marriage akin to sex slavery, gang members came to her home and threatened to burn it down, burn her alive, and kidnap her granddaughter. Rosa knew to take the threats seriously: Three years earlier, in 2013, her grandson had been disappeared by the same gang. When I asked her—we were speaking together in a frigid, echoey, two-way-mirrored private visiting room in the El Paso Processing Center (EPPC)—if she had considered going to the police, she laughed. “You can’t try to talk to them or they’ll disappear you. If you see something [she zipped her lips with a finger] you have to keep quiet.”
