By Mexican mafia standards it was a bargain: for $2,000 (£1,300) a guide would smuggle Ingrid Cruz and Williams Morales into the US and reunite them with their three children in Phoenix, Arizona.  It was a fraction of the usual price – $6,000 a person – but even for Nogales, a gritty Mexican border city filled with hard luck stories, the Guatemalan couple’s plight was heartrending. Maybe the local mafia had a heart?  Morales, 29, a gardener, and Cruz, 28, a food seller, had lived in Phoenix for a decade. They were undocumented but their two children, Esmeralda, nine, and Tony, six, were born in the US, and thus citizens.  Related: Bodies at the border: ‘Many Mexicans have no option. This flow will not cease’  Immigration and Customs Enforcement – “la migra” – nabbed Cruz in 2010 and deported her back to Guatemala, leaving Morales to raise the children with Cruz’s mother, who also lived in Phoenix.  In 2014 la migra struck again and detained Morales, leaving the children with their grandmother, a hotel worker battling cancer, and other relatives.  President Barack Obama’s administration has overseen record levels of removals. Morales had no criminal convictions but did not speak English or know how to fight the deportation, he said. There was a trivial upside to the journey south: “It was my first time on a plane.”  Cruz and Williams, reunited in Guatemala, headed north to try to rejoin their children. “I couldn’t bring them here. Criminal gangs rule the streets,” he said.  Gangs and corrupt police prey on central American migrants who travel through Mexico, and there was an additional complication: Cruz was heavily pregnant. She gave birth to a boy named Alberth in Mexico City on 19 September.  The three continued to Nogales, a dusty jumble of a border city in the Sonoran desert. A 40ft metal fence separates the city from its twin on the US side, also called Nogales. In November they persuaded a woman with US documents, and a baby around the same age as Alberth, to pass him off as her own to immigration officals and to deliver him to his grandmother in Phoenix, 180 miles north.  Getting themselves across was the problem. In late November Obama announced an executive actionto protect about 4.7 million people from deportation, giving priority to parents of children who were US citizens. It applied only to those already in the US so did not help Cruz and Morales.  They were broke and running out of options. They slept in a migrant shelter and ate in a Jesuit-run kitchen, El Comedor, where nuns, trainee priests and volunteers, American and Mexican, served food and tended ailments.  Stories shared around the breakfast table were dispiriting. Alfredo Salazar, from the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, lost his wife, apparently from heat stroke, while crossing the desert. Four times Saul Gamez, 30, originally from El Salvador, tried to return to his wife and two children in Tucson and four times he was caught and expelled. Angel Figueroa, 46, a Guatemalan former handyman, boasted of knowing Los Angeles “like the palm of my hand” but feared he would never see it or his children again.  US border controls were the most obvious problem. In the 1980s migrants used to slip through a rickety fence but now it felt like a steel fortress with control towers, cameras and sensors. Helicopters, blimps and drones watched from the sky.  Before tackling that, Cruz and Morales had to deal with the mafia, a cartel-affiliated organised crime group which runs border rackets, including networks of ganchadores who recruit would-be migrants, polleros who house them, coyotes who guide them and puntos who perch on hilltops to monitor and intercept any non-mafia sanctioned crossings. Police, migrants said, turn a blind eye in exchange for bribes.  Central Americans pay the mafia $600 for the privilege of attempting a crossing on their own steam. Mexicans get a discount, $350. A guided crossing with coyotes and pollero-run safe houses costs $6,000.  Related: Undocumented Latino migrants seek sanctuary in US churches  In November mafia representatives who lurk around migrant shelters expressed sympathy and offered a deal: $2,000 for both to cross. Morales and Cruz borrowed a friend’s phone to communicate with her mother via Facebook to ask for the money. She borrowed as much as she could – $1,900– and promised to pay once in the US. The border brokers agreed.  On the appointed day a coyote led the couple on a five-hour hike through remote desert trails, an arduous trek made in fear of discovery by the border patrol. They reached a road and a waiting car, an old yellow Mustang. They hid under sheets in the back seat, said Cruz, and prayed as it sped away. That night they were hustled into a dingy hotel room. They messaged Cruz’s mother that they had crossed.  She transferred the money to the agents’ account.  Left alone and instructed to wait, the migrants tingled with adrenaline. As the hours passed a sickening suspicion took hold. “I asked a maid where we were,” said Cruz.  “Nogales, Mexico,” said the maid.  The walls closed in. Their hearts stopped.  “It was all simulated,” said Cruz, tears welling as she relived the moment weeks later. “The whole thing. They tricked us.”  When Morales speaks of it his eyes turn glassy. “They left us with nothing.”  Now they are stuck in destitute limbo. Soon they may no longer even have the shelter and soup kitchen, which move people on after a few weeks to make room for newly arrived migrants.  Asked what they would do Cruz shook her head. “I don’t know.” In recent Facebook messages she painted a brighter picture to her mother and children. “Today is a very pretty day … We pray to our Father who art in heaven that we will soon be with you.”
Couple deported despite living in US for a decade were offered discount to get to Phoenix to rejoin their children