By Selase Kove-Seyram
In the mountainous wilderness that spans the Colombia-Panama border, in an area where only wildlife, paramilitary groups, and migrants often tread, Abdul Majeed lay awake unable to sleep. By his count, there were about seventy others with him spending the night, the most varied group of nationalities he has seen together in his lifetime. “Somalis, Indians, Senegalese, Nepalese, Ghanaians, Bangladeshis, Cubans, Haitians and Nigerians,” he recalls.
All were migrants heading north to the United States of America to seek a better life, although each had gotten to this point differently. To pass the night here, the group formed a circle of bodies. They lit a log fire, which lay in their midst. The fire kept Majeed’s attention, but every chirp and turn in the jungle beyond rattled his nerves. It was a cold January night in 2016.
To get this far, Majeed – a tall, 27-year-old Ghanaian with a ready smile on a calm face – had sought the services of a smuggler in Turbo, the port town that sits near the border on Colombia’s northern coast. He paid $700. In exchange, the man facilitated his transportation to Panama without detection by immigration or state security officers. The smuggler, Santiago, is known for helping migrants like Majeed navigate the difficult terrain from Turbo to Capurganá, the last town on the Colombian Caribbean coast before the border with Panama. He provided a guide to lead Majeed and other migrants into the Darien Gap – the wilderness that separates South and Central America. The guide pointed them in the direction of Panama. “Keep going this way. It’s not very far,” Majeed recalls him telling them as they set off, although it would take one week of walking in the jungle before they reached Panama.
Keep going this way. It’s not very far,
Majeed
In West African countries like Ghana and Nigeria, migrants seeking to enter the United States without the required documents often fly to Brazil, Peru or Ecuador, where visa requirements are not as stringent or are issued on arrival. From there, they hire smugglers and bribe immigration officers who facilitate their journey north. Some take boat rides, trek through jungles, ride on horseback or are hidden in trucks to be smuggled across borders. As they journey towards the United States, they become part of a greater pack of migrants from Africa, Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America, all seeking the promises and possibilities of life in the United States.
In West African countries like Ghana and Nigeria, migrants seeking to enter the United States without the required documents often fly to Brazil, Peru or Ecuador, where visa requirements are not as stringent or are issued on arrival. From there, they hire smugglers and bribe immigration officers who facilitate their journey north. Some take boat rides, trek through jungles, ride on horseback or are hidden in trucks to be smuggled across borders. As they journey towards the United States, they become part of a greater pack of migrants from Africa, Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America, all seeking the promises and possibilities of life in the United States.
The Promise of America
The journey that took Abdul Majeed to the Darien Gap started nineteen months before in Nima, the neighborhood where he grew up in Accra, Ghana’s capital city. Ranking as one of Accra’s most underdeveloped neighbourhoods, Nima is known for its spice market, the internet cafés teeming with cyber fraudsters, churches, mosques and the lack of opportunities it offers for its youth. Records from Ghana’s immigration service shows Nima is also a hot-spot for migrants like Majeed who choose to travel out of the country in search of better economic conditions.
“Our elders and politicians do not care for us,” is how Majeed sums up Nima’s underdevelopment.
When you grow up here, you have to somehow find a way to escape.
Among his contemporaries and those who came before them, he has observed how making it out of the neighborhood often marks the pathway to a successful life. “If you don’t leave, you become a sakawa boy (cyber fraudster) or just die broke,” he says. Through his teenage years, he always kept his eyes open for opportunities that existed beyond Nima. This influenced his choice of high school – one far from his community – and his first job as a sales agent for an insurance company in one of Accra’s top-end neighborhoods.
The savings from his first job would become his lifeline when an opportunity to travel came along. It was June 2014 and Ghana had qualified for the World Cup in Brazil. Majeed, a long-time member of a loose group of soccer fans called the Ghana Supporters Union, had found a reason to apply for a visa. He was one of an estimated ten thousand Ghanaians who received visas to Brazil that year. “From what we know, only one thousand of those who received visas went to see the games,” says Ibrahim Lan-Ghani, an officer at Ghana’s immigration fraud office. There is no official record of what the other nine thousand did with their visas. For Majeed and a number of young men he knew in Nima who had dreamed of leaving Ghana, Brazil became an open door. With savings, loans from relatives and support from friends, they purchased one-way tickets, knowing they would not be coming back anytime soon.
At the same time Majeed was heading to Brazil on Turkish Airlines, 24-year old Marwan Yahaya, who also grew up in Nima, was also traveling West. Yahaya has relatives in Spain and Germany and knew neighbors who were now living in the United States. He had always wanted to travel. After the World Cup, he met Majeed in Sao Paulo, where they discovered their mutual origins and talked about the path that led them to Brazil. Such encounters were rife at the time. Those who stayed behind after the World Cup had to find a means to move on. There were Ghanaians, Angolans, Burundians, Cameroonians and Nigerians. They met at mosques or street corners, shared food, job offers or sleeping places. Yahaya got a job at a chicken factory in another city. Majeed hopped between menial jobs in restaurants and factories in three other cities. While at it, he applied for Protocol, a Brazilian official document that allowed migrants to stay in the country for a year.
Bribes, detentions and the survival manual
Among the informal associations and connections migrants in Brazil made along street corners and mosques, opportunities emerged through conversations, phone calls and messages passed on social media. “People send voice notes, videos and pictures to show others what they are up to,” Majeed explains. In these voice notes and visual media, he’d learn about lands beyond Brazil and check them out on maps online. He’d get updates from friends and acquaintances who had moved on to the United States. He’d see images of others crossing the Mediterranean on boats to Europe or others who had chosen to go north through the Darien Gap, months before he decided to embark on his own trip.
“I was prepared for most of the things that would come,” Majeed says of his state of mind the day he decided to leave Brazil for the United States. In nineteen months of working odd jobs in Brazil he had saved up about $3,700, an amount he projected would keep him till he reached the United States. Unknown to both at the time, Yahaya had also embarked on the journey to the United States seven months beforehand.
In a recent interview, they both recounted their journeys, noting both the similarities and the subtle differences in their experiences. From Brazil, Yahaya flew to Ecuador, where he heard Ghanaians did not need a visa. He stayed in Quito for three weeks, “just chilling and staying in cheap hotels.” After three weeks, he travelled to Colombia, but was caught and deported back to Ecuador.
I spent one day in Ecuador, then went back to Colombia once again
“I spent one day in Ecuador, then went back to Colombia once again,” he said. This time, he paid a man in Ecuador to make sure he was not deported again, and the $700 to Santiago, who helped him and other migrants in Turbo travel into the Darien Gap. Majeed headed first to Peru before reaching Colombia. But although their routes differed, each recounted a similar trek through the jungle – one marked by exhaustion, hunger, insect bites and which left their vision blurred and their bodies sick.
As migrants travel north, they send messages and audio recordings to friends yet to make the journey. Like those that had gone before them, these tips become a deconstructed manual of sorts for the next traveler. The recordings, often made in the recorder’s native language, sum up the journey, providing vital tips on what to look out for and contact details of smugglers to seek for help. Inside a hotel room in Mexico, Yahaya also recorded his version to send back to friends he left behind.
“Pack enough food for your trip in the jungle.”
“Look for Santiago or Mama Africa in Turbo. They charge $700 to get you into Panama.”
“Keep your money away from the Colombian Police. They can take half.” [Majeed kept his money inside a condom and shoved it down his anus. Others unscrew phone chargers, take the content out, put their monies inside and screw it back].
“The people in Costa Rica are friendly.”
“There is a lot of security in Nicaragua, but you’ll find farmers at the border who’ll show you how to go without detection by the military.”
“There are pickups, ambulances and land rovers that can carry you. You’ll pay between $300 and $700. Prices change all the time.”
“At the Nicaraguan border to Honduras, you’ll find young guys who’ll charge you between $20 and $30 and carry you on horsebacks. They’ll take you to Honduras immigration officers in Choluteca, but the officers accept bribes of $50 or $30 dollars. They treat you leniently if you pay.”
“From here, take a bus to Agua Caliente in Honduras, near Guatemala border.”
“There’s a guy here named Dickson. He’s lived in America for 15 years. He takes between $70 to $100. He transports you from Honduras into Guatemala. You’ll see an old woman in a house on the way. Give her about $10 if you have.”
“Bribe the immigration officers you meet in Guatemala; else they’ll detain you for a month.”
“Pick a bus to Guatemala City. It costs about $100 from the border.”
“From here, buy a ticket to Ciudad Tecún Umán. It’s the border between Mexico and Guatemala.”
“Don’t cross the border at night. Sleep in a hotel if it’s late.”
“Take a canoe ride that crosses a river into Mexico. You’ll be handed over to Mexican immigration in Tsiapas. You’ll be kept in a camp and fed while they process you. You’ll be given 30 days to leave the country.”
Once they arrive in Mexico, the roads often diverge for migrants. For travelers like Majeed and Yahaya, it had taken about eight weeks across eight countries. From here, the route is determined by the migrants physical health, how much money they have available, how they intend to spend the 30 days of freedom they are granted to cross Mexico, if they still have the temerity to face the border of the United States of America and which direction they will take to the US-Mexico-American border. Majeed chose to travel to Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Before him, Yahaya had headed to Tijuana.
"Nothing prepares you for this"
Until American President Donald Trump’s tough rhetoric on migration streamed to the rest of the world – during and after the 2016 US elections – undocumented migrants seeking to enter the United States like Majeed had an uninformed view about the workings of the country’s immigration system.
I thought it was just a matter of walking through the border and telling them you wanted asylum, he said.
He had a cover story prepared: people in his neighborhood wanted to lynch him because he was friends with homosexuals. “But the moment you tell them [Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials] you’re seeking asylum, they pounce on you,” he said. He was questioned and then taken into a cold room for questioning “for about four or five hours.” He remembers the day vividly. It was March 27, 2016. During the next 15 months, he would be moved across five detention centers across the United States. He’d appear before a judge “who does not even look at your face” and his request for asylum would be turned down. “Detention was hell.”
Yahaya also experienced the “cold room” interrogation and spent 17 months in detention in the town of Adelanto, San Bernardino County, California. While there, three colleagues he traveled with were released after they got sponsors to pay their bond. He was hoping he would be released after a lawyer called to assure him he would be helping appeal his case for asylum, but two days later, he woke up to his cell supervisor telling him he was being deported. He was flown to JFK and put on a Delta Airline flight bound for Accra on February 9, 2017.
On June 15 2017, Abdul Majeed and 78 others would also be chained to their seats in a military aircraft and flown from Maine to Accra. They were part of a new wave of deportations from the US this year. By March 10, the US had deported over 150 people back to Somalia. In India, there was news of the impending deportation of 270 Indians in March this year. In May, five Kenyans were deported from the US. Among migrants from other countries, there’s a similar trend.
Back home in Nima, and sitting on the steps of a neighbourhood restaurant, Yahaya and Majeed reflected on their journeys and how it feels to come full circle. They know other friends who made it into the US- they were together on the same journey. Today, Yahaya is running an electrical shop while plotting his next move. Majeed has other plans. The Protocol document he applied for in Brazil should be ready by now. If he can find his way back there, he’ll either live in Brazil or head to Costa Rica – “where the people are warm and nice.” He might cross the Atlantic again, but for now, he doesn’t plan on heading back north to the US.
About This Series
Selase Kove-Seyram
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