A Daily Drama Along the Border

She clutches the manila envelope to her breast as if it were a baby, as if it were the most precious thing in the world.

Espolia Gerard is 64. For five years she has been trying to leave Haiti for the American place they call “mee-ah-MEE,” and the day has finally arrived. In this envelope she holds her wondrous visa.

“I’m happy,” she says in Creole, smoothing her gray hair back as she waits. “So happy!” It is morning at Port-au-Prince airport.

Evan Alexander Kantor is about to cross the border too, though he dozes unaware in his yellow jumper; he is 8 months old. He has a little fever--nothing much, not enough to delay his departure from Moscow with his adoptive parents. Today he will travel 4,749 miles; tonight he will sleep in Glenside, Pa.

The 15 stowaways hiding on the cargo ship President Adams this same morning do not know where they will be at day’s end. For two weeks, since they departed Hong Kong, they have been locked in a 10-by-30-foot metal container that is supposed to hold toys; they are filthy but hopeful. Entering U.S. territorial waters as it approaches Los Angeles Harbor, the ship crosses an invisible line.

This is how dawn comes to the American border on April 10, 2000.

On this single day, America’s golden door will swing open more than 1.3 million times. It will admit workers and fun-seekers, homecoming Americans and foreign wanderers, smugglers and entrepreneurs, tearful immigrants and long-lost loved ones.

They will come, like a human tide, crossing at countless points along 7,600 miles of frontier and 12,380 miles of coastline. They will come by plane, boat, car and foot. They will have stories to tell.

Because the border is not really a line in the sand.

It is a line in people’s lives.

*

Leigh Keess waits for border agents on the Canadian side, her minivan idling behind a half-dozen orange cones. She glances at her watch. It is 9:05 a.m.

“They told me once, ‘Leigh, if you’re late for work and we’re not there, just go around the cones.’ ” A pause. “But we’ll give them a few more minutes.”

Keess commutes from Estevan, Saskatchewan, to her job as a registered nurse in Crosby, N.D.

When she started, “I was very conscious of the fact that I was entering another country,” she says. “But it’s so routine now, I don’t even think about it.”

On a busy day, maybe 250 people come through this crossing at Noonan, N.D. There are American housewives who take a weekly drive to stretch their household budgets--a U.S. dollar buys nearly $1.50 in groceries at an Estevan supermarket. There are Canadian farmers who leave their fields to buy tractor parts from a dealer in Minot.

Keess is a regular, and once the border agent arrives, he waves her through. Then U.S. Customs Inspector Bob Thompson does the same.

“Hi, Leigh,” he says.

“Hi, Bob,” she replies.

And she’s across.

It is a very different border half a continent away at Terminal 1 of New York’s JFK Airport.

“Purpose of trip?” the agent asks, one of a series of questions.

Business, answers Jang Hee Lee, of Seoul, South Korea. He is in New York for a textile show. His wife, Euna, holds their 22-month-old daughter, Su Yeon; the toddler reaches out to grab their papers.

Immigration, answers Kolade Oyediran, a Nigerian who has arrived at Hartsfield airport in Atlanta. He will live in Jonesboro, Ga., where a cousin settled two years ago. He hopes to work in the printing industry, but he has a backup plan: “I play the drums.”

Some of the passengers are sent to another room for more questions. But most pass through in minutes, to Customs and then outward.

Not all of these places are so sterile. At Honolulu, there is a lava-rock pond and trickling water feeding tropical plants. At Los Angeles International, people arriving pass glass-enclosed displays depicting America’s rugged past--a stuffed bear and buffalo, posters from the Old West.

*

This is the New West--Arizona, a mile and a half north of the Mexican border. Just after midnight on April 10. Border Patrol agent Carla Provost’s radio is alive with static.

“If you guys wanna wait right there, they should come right to you,” a voice booms over the line.

“Ten-four,” another agent responds.

Provost pulls her unmarked Ford Expedition onto a dusty embankment. Within minutes the shadows of seven figures appear, scampering through mesquite bushes. Agents flip on their flashlights.

“Right in front of us,” Provost marvels.

In the next 90 minutes, agents will catch four groups of illegal immigrants on this same swath of ranchland, four miles west of Douglas, Ariz.

In the last group are 32 men, women and children--among them Manuel Casarrubias, 28, his 23-year-old wife, Sylvia, and 4-year-old Manuel Jr.

The boy, clutching a toy xylophone the Border Patrol agents gave him, rests his head on his daddy’s chest. He is bundled up, with four shirts underneath his mother’s navy blue sweatshirt.

“He wants to study in the United States,” says the father, who hopes his son will someday be an astronaut. “Or immigration,” he adds slyly.

He has made this trip before, successfully; last year he wound up as a cook in a Mexican restaurant in Nashville, earning $1,300 a month.

He went back to Mexico in December to get his family. He paid $1,700 for his family’s transit; a 6-year-old son was left behind in Acapulco with Casarrubias’ parents, for fear that the couple could not carry both boys on their backs.

In Mexico, he says, “There’s not enough work, and when there is work it’s not enough to buy stuff and be able to put food on the table.”

By 3 a.m., the family has joined the others on vans that will take them back to the border. They shake hands with the Border Patrol agents.

“See you,” Casarrubias says.

He has told a reporter, “I’m going to go back and rest a little bit, and then I’ll be back.”

He hoists Junior onto his shoulders and walks into his country, under a sign reading “Mexico.” He turns back once more to wave, and there is a small smile on his face.

*

“No vale la pena,” reads the sign on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande: It’s not worth it.

Wrong, says Jose Lopez.

“If you don’t take a risk, you can’t win,” says the 45-year-old father of two from Guadalajara. He waits with 21 others in Tecate, Mexico, in a grove of arroyo willows.

For now, they stay out of view of Border Patrol agents parked behind the 12-foot steel fence that marks the border 25 yards away. Tonight they will climb the fence and head into the mountains. There they may encounter frigid temperatures, bandits and rattlesnakes.

“I have to risk it for my family,” says Lopez. “I think it will be worth it.”

To the northwest, at the San Ysidro border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, Paula Solis Zepeda needs to get back to her 19-year-old daughter in L.A., and to her job as a nurse’s assistant at a retirement home.

She is from Mexico City, she says. And she does resemble the picture on the border crossing card she presents. But something is wrong. This is a 57-year-old woman, but if her card is to be believed, she is 87.

She breaks down.

“I’ve already lied and I don’t wish to lie anymore,” she says. “I am from El Salvador.”

She entered the United States illegally in 1978 and has applied to stay legally. But then she got word that her father was dying, and she rushed home to be with him, intending to return with the false document.

“I need to get back to Los Angeles. I need to return to my daughter,” she says, tears falling. “She is waiting.”

Pleading for asylum, she is led away to a detention center.

*

But the rules of the border are not just black and white. There are grays as well.

Susan Barney, a Canadian citizen who lives in Las Vegas, went on a three-day cruise to Ensenada with her husband, Matthew. Now, upon their return to Long Beach, Susan has made a terrible discovery: Her immigration papers expired a month ago.

“What’s going to happen?” she asks inspector Jim Lesley.

She might be allowed to enter on an emergency basis, or on 30-day parole. Or she might be put on a plane to Canada, without her husband.

Lesley considers. Barney is cooperative, apologetic; she just made a mistake. He approves parole.

In Dublin, Ireland, meanwhile, Dermot Hamill and Peter Harbinson clutch packs of duty-free cigarettes and fidget. Inspector Matt Hanley grills them about their plans.

Hanley works the INS pre-inspection station here--in effect, an extension of the U.S. border, where authorities check the papers of travelers--and he doesn’t believe the lanky 18-year-olds from Portadown are off to visit an uncle in Boston for three weeks.

“We’re just going for a wee break, to see the sights,” says Hamill.

Hanley is convinced the boys intend to work illegally, like thousands of Irish every summer. “Look at the timing,” he says. “Beginning of summer, South Boston, $300 in their pockets.”

But the Irish can visit as tourists for up to 90 days without a visa, and Hanley can’t penalize them for something they plan to do; he lets them go. Grinning, the two board Aer Lingus Flight 137, bound for Boston.

“They’ll be back in January after coming home for Christmas,” Hanley says. “We’ll catch them then.”

*

Scenes from the line where America meets the world:

* At Logan Airport in Boston, Kishore waits for his bride of three months, Nagasree, to arrive from Hyderabad, India. His cell phone rings.

“Is she there yet?” It’s his father, in India. No, he says.

Another call--his sister in Pittsburgh. “Is she there yet?”

Intently, he watches the doors to Customs. And he wonders: His wife is a newly graduated pharmacist. Will she find work in the United States? She comes from a warm climate. How will she react to snow?

And now she is there, in her blue sari. They tentatively take each other’s hands and smile. He says a few words, she none at all. Holding hands, they walk out into the cold New England spring day.

* At JFK, Stella Tseirka pushes her baggage cart through Customs. Her children, Evan, 6, and Dafni, 2, ride along with the luggage. They’re just back from a three-day sprint to Greece, where Tseirka voted in elections.

Tseirka, a university researcher in New York, has lived here since 1989. She has returned to Greece three times to vote.

“In Greece we care about politics,” she says.

* On a blustery day at Niagara Falls, the Pitcaithlys--Euan, Mary and their 12-year-old daughter, Sarah--take a break from their vacation in Canada and walk across the Rainbow Bridge toward the United States.

They plan to stay just 20 minutes, but when they arrive on the other shore, they are told they must pay $6 each for temporary visas.

Forget it. “It seemed silly to pay $18 for 20 minutes,” says Euan, a newspaper photographer from Falkirk, Scotland.

So they turn around, stopping only at mid-span for a family picture.

*

“No China,” the Chinese say, waving their hands. They want asylum.

They have just arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. INS inspectors had been alerted that the three--a 27-year-old man and two women ages 19 and 22--were going to sneak into the country. They are taken into custody.

An agent goes to check the restroom of the American Airlines jet that brought them. She returns with a small plastic bag full of torn papers and spreads them on a counter.

They are shreds of the Chinese man’s passport--almost certainly bogus--discarded so that there would be nothing to tell authorities where he had come from, should he be caught.

“It’s OK,” says J.E. Squires, a supervisory inspector. He gently touches the shoulder of the Chinese man.

“You want them to be cooperative,” he says later. “If you come off being nice, they get a better feeling. I try to let them know it’s OK. They’re here . . . they’re just trying to get a better life.”

Their 15 countrymen on the container ship President Adams will have no more luck crossing the border on this day. They are discovered upon the ship’s arrival in Los Angeles.

Officers wear hazardous materials gear when they enter the container to take them into custody. Two plastic trash cans served as toilets in the steel box rigged with fans powered by car batteries. There’s also a cellular phone--apparently to contact smugglers upon arrival.

They, too, seek asylum. Perhaps they will be admitted; perhaps they will be sent home.

*

Giovani Mateo is going home today, though he doesn’t know it.

His saga began in 1992, when he crossed the dangerous, 75-mile Mona Passage from the Dominican Republic in a rickety boat, landed on a beach and disappeared into Puerto Rican life.

He married a local woman; a year ago they had a baby. He became a legal resident. But then he forgot to renew his residence card.

He was picked up in a police raid. A soft-featured man of 28, he shakes his head. “This is because of my own negligence,” he says.

Now the guards at the Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, detention center order Mateo to change out of his bright orange detainee’s uniform and back into civilian clothes. “They’re moving me out,” Mateo reports, hopefully. “I don’t know where.”

A guard, Eduardo de la Cruz, glances at him. “He’s going home to his country,” de la Cruz says, in English. “We usually don’t tell them here--for security reasons.”

Not understanding, too timid to ask, Mateo blankly watches the papers that will separate him from his family as they shuffle across the counter.

*

But most of the endings at the border on Monday, April 10, are not unhappy. Most aren’t even endings, just passages.

Hu Ke, 24, arrives in Los Angeles from Beijing. “I work for the Disney Channel in China as an announcer. I am going to visit Disneyland.”

Steve Green, 40, of Martha’s Vineyard, is just back at JFK after a four-month trip through the wilds of Asia. “I’m happy to be back home. I’ll be able to put my clothes in the washing machine.”

For some, the step over the border is momentous--though not necessarily joyous. Filomeno Condez Jr. remained behind eight years ago when his wife and two children moved from the Philippines to Daly City, Calif. Tired of the separation, he joins them today.

He is worried. Will he succeed in the United States?

“I may not be able to fulfill my dreams,” he says.

Dreams? Dulce Candelaria Caraballo Martin, 41, has been separated from her father for 20 years, since he left Cuba for New Jersey. Now, as United Airlines Flight 9022 approaches Miami, she is overcome with anticipation.

“I was hoping the plane would land as quick as possible,” she says, “and I would be reunited with my father as quick as possible and do whatever I dreamed of all my life.”

Evan Alexander Kantor cannot tell us his dreams. He is sleepy and cranky and only 8 months old, after all.

His new parents, Michael and Dawn Kantor, were childless after 14 years of marriage. Their quest for a child took them to an orphanage in central Russia, and to Evan--blond, blue-eyed and abandoned at birth.

“He’s a beautiful boy,” says Michael Kantor.

Two friends have come to Philadelphia International Airport to bring them home. Evan yelps impatiently as Dawn straps him into his car seat.

“Now we have more work to do,” Michael says. “We have to get his Social Security number, his green card, his citizenship, his Pennsylvania citizenship, there’s so much more to do. But we’ll take it day to day.”

The bags are in; the doors slam shut. The brown minivan starts, easing away from the curb, leaving the border behind. It accelerates, joining a stream of cars headed for the interstate, blending into America.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

This story was reported and photographed by Pauline Arrillaga and Matt York in Douglas, Ariz., and Mexico; Carolyn Thompson and Charles Rex Arbogast in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Ontario; Allen Breed off the Florida coast; Bill Bergstrom and Sabina Louise Pierce in Philadelphia; Laura Vozzella and Steven Senne in Boston; Michelle Koidin and Eric Draper in Deming, N.M., and Palomas, Mexico; Tom Harrigan and Nick Ut in Los Angeles; Chelsea Carter and Kevork Djansezian in Long Beach; David Foster and Elaine Thompson in Seattle; Sharon Cohen and Ted S. Warren in Chicago; Jerry Schwartz and Richard Drew in New York; Chad Roedemeier and John Bazemore in Atlanta; Jean Christensen and Ronen Zilberman in Honolulu; Amanda Riddle and Amy E. Conn in Miami; Jim Suhr and Paul Sancya in Detroit; John MacDonald and Nati Harnik in Noonan, N.D., and Saskatchewan; Michelle Ray Ortiz and Damien Dovarganes in San Ysidro, Calif.; Ben Fox in Tecate, Mexico; Megan K. Stack and L.M. Otero, along the Rio Grande, Texas and Mexico; David McHugh and Maxim Marmur in Moscow; Ramesh Thimaiya and Namas Bhojani in Bangalore, India; Jim Gomez and Bullit Marquez in Manila; Helen O’Neill and Christine Nesbitt in Dublin; Michael Norton and Daniel Morel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Chris Hawley and Ricardo Figueroa in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico; and John Riley in La Romana, Dominican Republic.

*

CASTOFF CHILDREN

Casa Pepito takes in children separated from or abandoned by parents on way to U.S. B1