Flashlights appear in the of darkness at midnight on a riverbank in Roma, Texas and the first sound that breaks the stillness is usually a baby crying. Then the inflation of a rubber raft that soon carries a slice of desperate humanity, women and children mostly, across the Rio Grande from Mexico to their American Dream.
On the outskirts of Garden City, Kansas, along the smooth two-lane road, past the silos and the grazing cattle, a few semi trucks are parked in the dusty gravel lot below the tall, yellow Super 8 sign.
There, in the desert the dark storm clouds drifted across the jagged horizon. The July air was dry as a bone. On the hot ground, the rock and cactus, through the high thorny brush she sat silent, crouched low, her hair wild from the helicopter above, her brown eyes squinting in the desert light.