Recently, Ellsworth police stopped a car without a license plate. They arrested five Mexican undocumented workers. I tried to visit them in the Penobscot County jail. A jail official told me they were gone: she had no idea where they were taken. I called Homeland Security and left a message that I’d like to visit them if they were still in Maine. I never got a call. The migrant workers quickly disappeared; perhaps deported.

Few know about a world of hardship and sometimes death endured by migrants as they follow out-of-the-way trails in Central America and Mexico to get to the United States to find work. Danger follows them every step of the way: when it strikes it opens up a welter of emotion for them, as it did with me when I heard them talk about it.

A 24-year-old Honduran man outlined a world of risk and danger he stepped into when he began his journey to find work in the United States. Outside a shelter in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across from El Paso, Texas, he tells me that 19 of his friends died in a three-month period as they journeyed north, starting out in El Salvador. Trauma envelops his body as he tells me about the reality of gangs. A Salvadoran gang murdered five of his friends. Trains killed five others, one, a 14-year-old girl cut in half when she fell asleep and fell off. Others perished in Arizona’s sprawling deadly desert. The 24-year-old Honduran was the only survivor.

The biggest risk facing those headed north, particularly Central Americans, is in jumping freight trains — the only mode of transportation available to them. Without documentation, they can’t take passenger trains or buses. From Mexico’s southern border-city of Tapachula in Chiapas, it’s a blister-creating seven-day walk to reach the tracks in Arriaga where freight trains head north. There I met migrants sleeping on the tracks waiting to jump the “iron monster,” as a Salvadoran ready to deal with it said.

A Mexican advocate for migrants, Doña Olga Sanchez, knows their world better than most. The Mexican Government Human Rights Commission honored her for her commitment to those who nearly lost their lives dealing with the “monster.” Seventeen years ago, she saw children, pregnant women and the elderly in hospitals without arms and legs. They slipped off of trains. It so moved her that she opened the Good Shepherd Shelter in Tapachula.

In the shelter that quarters 30 limb-less Central Americans, one Salvadoran migrant told me that it was worth facing death to get to the United States so that he could put in an honest day’s work; earn an income to feed his family. He never made it: the “monster” grabbed his right arm and leg.

He phoned his wife and told her he was wounded. He didn’t mention the nature of the wound. His wife found out about it when she saw a photo of her husband in a Salvadoran newspaper.

Tragedy, couched in an ongoing war against the poor, strikes families when they see their local currencies plummet: for peasants it means more sweat for less money. Here we have some of the ingredients that push human beings into a “wall of death” along the border on which faith communities have placed crosses representing those who have fallen trying to cross.

Many never experience the dream. Last year, more than 300 died trying to cross the Arizona desert that ate them up in the cold of night or heat of day, or drowned them in flash floods.

If U.S. citizens knew about this dangerous journey migrants travel — rarely documented — perhaps conversations in the House and Senate might include a more hospitable plan for the fate of 12 million people in our country who don’t have papers. Some legislators might even use the word “amnesty”; the undocumented deserve it.

Jim Harney works for a Bangor-based nonprofit Posibilidad. He can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .