Meet Cokky
©Pamela Kerpius/Migrants of the Mediterranean
by:
Pamela Kerpius
Recorded:
29 May 2024
Published:
16 December 2024
Meet Cokky.
49 years old and from Chilpancingo, Guerrero, Mexico.
Her name has been changed and she is unpictured to protect her security.
To reach the United States, Cokky (pronounced “coke-E”) crossed north through Mexico. The journey began on 2 March 2024, with her son, when she left her home on a bus for Mexico City. From there, she boarded a flight to Hermosillo, in the northern state of Sonora that borders the U.S.
The trip was short, about 24 hours total until she reached the border city of Nogales. Her travel was on the surface mundane. A bus and a plane are standard modes of movement, and although there were many familiarities, the local language included, she felt foreign.
Her southern accent told people she was an outsider—some in Mexico City and Hermosillo told her outright she didn’t belong. She was scared. So what may have appeared as a normal bus or plane ride to an outside observer, obscured the fact that this was actually the biggest event of her life. The open secret, of course, was that her movement north signaled she was escaping for a more secure life northward.
Cokky was leaving behind violence that she feared at home, which is prevalent in Guerrero. When she arrived in Nogales, Sonora, she was asking people around her where she could go for assistance. She got word of the Kino Border Initiative (KBI) and went directly to their shelter, that sits just at the edge of the border with the United States in Nogales, and stayed for 12 days.
The shelter is only able to accommodate people up to 14 days, so Cokky found a rental house in Nogales with her son and remained there for one month and five days, while she prepared her approach the United States port of entry.
She did everything above board, not crossing illegally at open points along the border, or by breaching the border wall itself. Instead, on 20 April 2024, she arrived at the port of entry, dutifully put her name on a list for an appointment with authorities, and waited. She was proud of herself for ticking these administrative boxes, imagining the respect her case would be granted for acting so transparently with border authorities.
But without the CBP1 app* and a formal appointment through it, she and her son were about to encounter outcomes they could not foresee. Her name was called from the list, along with her 26-year-old son, and they were arrested. They were separated. She had no idea what to expect. This was confusing. Hadn’t she done everything right?
It was a Saturday around 12:00 or 1:00 pm when she was taken by bus with four others, one woman and three men, and transported to what she thought was a temporary shelter for people in the migrant community. It was three hours on the bus wondering what would await them.
At a detention facility in Florence, Arizona, at 4:00 p.m. she and the others were taken in for processing. Authorities took her fingerprints and photo, and then she waited in the temporary space until Monday at 2:00 p.m.
Two from the group remained in Florence, where her son would remain in holding. As for Cokky, she was transferred with the two other women in the group to Eloy, Arizona, which to her surprise, like the Florence facility, was not a shelter at all, but detention—another, more palatable, term for prison.
The waiting room was cold like a walk-in refrigerator and the women braided their limbs together to keep calm and warm. But they were simply too frightened.
“‘Why am I here?’ she cried, ‘I didn’t steal. I didn’t lie’”
She was told in prison that her stay could be two weeks. Or it could be 90 days. Later, she met another woman who had been there for months. Many people stayed six, seven, eight or nine months in federal holding with no sense of when their situations would change or by what criteria. The treatment felt arbitrary, uncomfortable and painful to experience, of course. But there was something about being taken by surprise by cruelty that struck her.
“Why am I here?” she cried, “I didn’t steal. I didn’t lie,” she said in the huddle with the other women.
They were joking with each other to relax. A Venezuelan woman and her daughter, 53 and 21 years old, respectively, had crossed with a CBP One appointment, but here they found themselves anyway. Cokky found the woman elegant and beautiful. She felt scrappy and unkempt in her shadow, and in the bleak cloak of this scenery. She wanted to feel pretty, like herself.
At 4:00 a.m. came a breakfast and uniform change. She removed all of her own clothes, and from top to bottom slipped into the layers that erased her further. Brown underwear, and a green tee shirt over the sheath of a green jumpsuit. On her feet, gray socks and blue shoes. When she saw her reflection she cried out again.
I’m not a criminal! The frustration was streaming through her blood. Was this a prison movie? There must be a mistake.
“Why are they treating me this way?” everyone asked themselves in a silent chorus. Cokky would cry it out loud. Her cell partner, a Guatemalan woman who had been already been inside for two or three months, consoled her. “I’ve seen myself in this position too,” she said. She told her to be wise, intelligent and strong, things that are easier said than done.
“Did you abandon me, God?” Cokky shouted from her knees.
Her new address was B-115, the number of the shared prison cell. She was humiliated by the lack of privacy. The shared toilet was out in the open. Everyone could see her bare behind when she would go. She felt helpless and defenseless. The quality of the food made matters worse, but here she had some agency, taking $3 a day from her work earnings at the onsite laundry facility to buy food, fresh sandwiches.
Cokky also heard from her son, at long last. Family members had stayed in touch with each of them separately and communicated each other’s whereabouts.
She formed bonds with the women during her period of incarceration of 1 month and four days. Nobody inside anticipated this would be their fate. The women supported each other and gave each other encouragement and hope to go on.
One friend has had three trials for her asylum case, and had been inside for 9 months. Another Guatemalan friend’s trial was denied altogether. Another asked for asylum on account of persecution, she had proof and lawyers. Still (at time of recording), she is in detention. “She was there when I arrived,” said Cokky, “and she was still there when I left.” The group of women still have weekly calls to connect—every Thursday. They are like family now.
Cokky was released from Eloy Detention Center in Eloy, Arizona, on Friday, 24 May 2024, fourteen days after her son was released from Florence Correctional Center in Florence, Arizona. She was transferred to the Nogales, Arizona-Sonora, Mexico port of entry and deported to Mexico the same day. Her son was waiting for her at the border when she arrived and at 3:00 p.m. she returned to the Kino Border Initiative center, MotM’s friend and partner, where meals are served daily, among other services for people in the migrant community in need.
Five days after her deportation she came to KBI again, in Nogales, Mexico, where we recorded this story on 29 May 2024.
Cokky is an amazing human being.
*“CBP One” or the U.S. Customs and Border Protection mobile phone app is how people in transit in irregular ways through Mexico schedule an appointment at a U.S. port of entry along the southern border. It is also a loaded term, because while it is an active step vulnerable people in the migrant community may take to secure their application for entry, it is also glitchy and inefficient. CBP One requires users to log on early each morning when appointment slots open, but that fill quickly; users will refresh the app for hours in search of a slot before slots close entirely by the afternoon; the process repeats itself daily, with some people waiting weeks or months where they are targeted by cartels on the other side of the border, or who are simply in unfamiliar spaces, like border towns, which are innately precarious.