The story of Emma, James and Robert is the story of thousands of refugees

Editor’s Note: This is a true story. Names have been changed to protect the people who live this story.

She’s known as Emma. She’s the mother of James, her older son, and Robert, his younger brother. She’s from Guatemala. Her hometown is beautiful, with lots of coffee trees. The weather is great. The lakes and the mountains look like heaven.    

Paradise is one thing, but reality is another. 

Emma is a single mother. She's illiterate, and her Spanish is not the best. The only jobs available for a person like Emma are seasonal opportunities to pick coffee or bananas. Neither job pays well. She worked herself to exhaustion only to subsist in extreme poverty. 

Sometimes, she ate only once a day in order to feed her sons. They never have owned electronics, cellphones or cars. They lived in an old wooden house. 

Emma never wanted this future for James and Robert.  

Other than her boys, Emma doesn’t have any family. Her common-law husband disappeared. She doesn’t know where he is or if he’s alive. She loves her country’s beauty, but she hates the life it offered her and her sons. 

One day, as she walked home from picking up her children from school, the leader of the local gang stopped Emma on the road. He said he wanted James to join the gang, but Emma would not allow that to happen. The gang leader told Emma to either give her oldest son to the gang, or she would pay. Emma, James and Robert continued their walk home.  

Two weeks later, Emma got up early to water her garden. It was a Saturday, and four gang members showed up at her home.

Emma knew what they wanted. She knew her children were sleeping, and she walked away from her home, to a vacant lot. The gang members followed and beat, raped and humiliated her. They told her she must give them James, or they would kidnap or kill him when he returned home from school on Monday. 

Bloodied yet dignified, Emma went home and took a shower. And even though her injuries cried for attention, she never visited a hospital. She had no money to receive medical attention. 

Emma did not file a police report, either. She feared the police would have notified the local gang about the report, and her sons would have been killed—or worse. She never told her sons what happened. She continued working on her garden and caring for her children. 

At night, she decided to protect James from the gang. She sent him away from Guatemala, and he eventually received asylum in the United States. 

Six years later, the gang wanted Robert to join them, and Emma again refused. And once again, gang members raped Emma.

This time, she filed a police report with the local police. When nothing happened, Emma sent Robert to the United States to seek asylum. He’s still working through that tedious process.  

Meanwhile in Guatemala, the gang raged because James and Robert left the country, bound for the United States. Believing Emma's sons were making money, the gang demanded she pay thousands of dollars or face another beating, or possibly death.  

Emma couldn't come up with the money and decided to flee to the United States and try to reunify with her sons. Now, she's waiting in Mexico under the U.S. government’s Migrant Protection Protocols, known as MPP or the Remain in Mexico policy. Her future is uncertain. She's in a strange country in the middle of a pandemic, and immigration courts are closed.     

Stories like Emma's are not exceptional. They are the norm. The majority of asylum seekers have fled Central American countries due to conditions like Emma’s, James’ and Robert’s. Their families are being torn apart by shifts in U.S. immigration policy. 

If MPP were not operating, Emma would have been reunited with her children while waiting for their cases to be heard by an immigration judge. The whole family would have been able to spend this difficult time together, no matter the court's ultimate decision on her case.  

Fellowship Southwest works with pastors along the border who care for refugees like Emma, who live in tent camps and shelters in northern Mexico as they wind their way through the U.S. immigration process. If you would like to support Fellowship Southwest’s Immigrant Relief Ministry, click here.

Elket Rodríguez is the immigrant and refugee advocacy and missions specialist for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Fellowship Southwest.