Interviews and stories are presented as they are told, often non-linear, jumping backwards and forwards in time. This presentation mirrors real-life conversations, allowing the reader to feel as if they are Terrio, hearing the stories from these women in real-time. It also allows the reader to identify the cyclical nature of systemic abuse, with multiple generations of women in a family being subject to repeated harm from sexual violence, to dealing with absentee and abusive partners, to verbal and physical abuse from border authorities in both Central America and the US. Narratives of the mothers begin to weave together, as repeated themes of fleeing violence and threats at home, then facing death from gangs and nature on the dangerous border crossings, culminate in a US immigration system which criminalises them for merely trying to preserve their own and their families lives and welfare. They are forced to earn money in an informal economy with zero labour protections while being barred from legal employment. In some instances, they are paid well below the federal minimum wage or refused payment altogether. Oftentimes, they are once again forced to rely on institutionally more powerful men, who use their undocumented status to intimidate, manipulate, and abuse them and their children further. Throughout their lives and journeys, these women have consistently fallen through the cracks of legal systems which proclaim to defend the most vulnerable. 

Another shared trauma which is repeated throughout these women’s stories is that of family separation. While there is the literal policy of family separation within ICE custody introduced by the Trump administration in 2017, there are also families separated across borders as parents work to earn enough to send home and bring their children over; there are the family separations between mixed status families, with older siblings ripped apart from younger ones born in the US. There is the separation of a parent seized by ICE, trapped in custody or deported unable to return. There are instances of children being retained in squalid immigration custody due to officials deeming the mother unfit to care for them and requiring a heavy burden of proof. One mother had to beg her church congregation for an address to provide to have her child released from ICE detention, as she was unable to use her current address due to the housemates’ and the landlord’s fear of retribution. 

However, the distance is often not only physical. The great sacrifices they made in taking this journey are often viewed as harmful by their children. Rather than seeing their parents as taking great risks to provide for them, they view their absence as abandonment. Mothers are put into the difficult position of feeling they need to apologise for what they saw as a great sacrifice for providing a better life for their children. After years of separation, children often view their parents as strangers, struggle to meet new people and yearn for their grandparents and hometown friends.  Additionally, mothers face admonishment and shame for choices they’ve made even when they were due to forces beyond their control. One interviewee describes violence she’s survived calmly, but her voice shakes when recounting an immigration official who called her a bad mother for allowing her pregnant daughter to come alone, even when she was escaping violent threats and intimidation in Guatemala. 

Out of all 10 women interviewed, only one has achieved legal status and a potential path towards citizenship. Terrio concludes that most undocumented migrant women will be perpetually within the ‘mouth of the shark’ she has described, never fully secure in their long-term status in the US and constantly fearful of incarceration and deportation. Terrio concludes by making policy recommendations in order to fix this broken immigration system and provide a pathway to legal residency/citizenship. This includes expanding the visa sponsorship system to siblings and extended family members, increasing eligibility for green cards, increasing the number of immigration judges as well as lawyers and clerks, and moving these courts outside of the executive department. To further support migrants, Terrio recommends the DREAM Act finally be passed to support undocumented youth, to punish misconduct by border officials, and finally to ‘stop the war on migrants’, ending the incendiary characterisation of all undocumented migrants as ‘rapists and criminals’ and unaccompanied children as ‘murderous predators’. This rhetoric has already led to a mass murder of 23 mostly Latino people by a radicalised white supremacist in 2019.  

Since being published in 2024, the second election of Donald Trump has led to a renewal of the expansion of ICE powers and funding and the rollback of accessions provided by The Biden Administration, including Trump’s reinstatement of the dangerous ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy. Terrio’s book is a powerful record of the human cost of an inhumane migration system where the cruelty of the system is not a side effect but the intent. As workplace raids increase, protected statuses are revoked, and law-abiding migrants are detained while attending their required ICE check-ins and immigration hearings to be left languishing in crowded immigration prisons within The US or tortured in offshore facilities abroad; Terrio’s book is a powerful and necessary testimony to the suffering of countless undocumented people and its inherent injustice.

Funding

No financial support was received for the research, authorship, or publication of this article. 

Declaration of Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.