Continue the Phone Call

Knowing you won't be able to muster up the energy to retell the story again tomorrow, you continue speaking against the CBP officer's warning.

You tell the staff member what happened next as quickly as you can. You delivered the arms. But the truck on the way back to Guatemala was not empty. It was full of people. Migrants, like you. When you met up with the coyote again, he shoved you in the back of the truck with everybody else. It was a heat box. Seventeen of the thirty people in the truck died before the doors were opened in the desert in Mexico. Five of them were children.

You break into tears when the CBP officer comes to get you.

"You're five minutes past the phone call limit," he says. Because you had failed to adhere to his warning, you will be punished.

He brings you to an isolation room. You will spend the next seven days here, he says, your priviledges to the phone and outside grounds have been revoked.