Crossing a continent to save your children
[Trigger warning: Some disturbing content]
Long before Minnesota’s ICE surge began, the Silva family was living under threat.
The five of them—mother Elisa, father Rafael, and their three children—come from a small city in Tabasco, southeastern Mexico. For nearly a decade, they ran a papelería, a small office supply store and printing shop, in a typical Tabasco neighborhood: there was an elementary school, a health center, a bakery, a beauty salon. The Silvas knew their neighbors. They felt safe.
But that began to change.
“We thought we were safe. We were a good family. We weren’t involved in anything shady. But when we got the call… it was our turn.”
By 2020, shifts in their hometown were noticeable. Businesses closed. People left. Neighbors traded stories of extortion, of violence done by the cartels—Mexico’s powerful criminal organizations with roots everywhere from drug smuggling to fuel trafficking—which were now taking tighter hold of Tabasco. The body of a young man killed by cartel members appeared on the street one morning, dumped in front of the Silvas’ store.
“The violence always seemed to happen in another neighborhood,” says Elisa. “We still thought we were safe. We were a good family. We weren’t involved in anything shady. But when we got the call…it was our turn.”
***
One Friday afternoon in September 2023, Elisa’s cell phone rang. Her daughter, then ten years old, picked it up.
“I need to talk to your mother,” said the caller.
Elisa took the phone, assuming it was a customer.
But it was a stranger’s voice that answered her.
“This is CJNG Commander S.”
CJNG—Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel—is one of the largest and deadliest cartels operating in Mexico. El Mencho, Mexico’s most wanted drug lord until his killing by Mexican security forces in February 2026, was the group’s cofounder.
The name was enough to fill Elisa with fear. She listened as Commander S went on.
CJNG was moving further into Tabasco to protect small businesses like the Silvas’, he said. But they would have to pay the cartel for that protection. How much would the Silvas cooperate?
“I told him I didn’t have anything,” Elisa recalls. “We made just enough money to keep our store running. Sometimes we’d been unable to make enough to buy food.”
Commander S offered a deal. Elisa needed to immediately gather 3000 pesos—around $170 dollars, or a month’s wages for many workers in Tabasco—and deposit the money in a specified location, all while staying on the phone. The cartel would be watching her.
Scrambling and terrified, Elisa managed to get the money together and deliver it according to the cartel’s commands. Still, the phone call wasn’t over.
The commander told her to go back into her house, lock up the business, and take the phone into a place where no one outside would hear.
“This is just the beginning,” he said.
They went around in circles, Elisa pleading, Commander S threatening, swearing, growing angrier.
Finally he asked her, “Do you love your children?”
Since Elisa had shown she was true to her word, the cartel expected her continued cooperation. She would pay them 380,000 pesos—around $22,000—for protection. And after that lump sum, to show that they were “friends,” the Silvas would have to give the cartel another 3000 pesos each week.
Elisa was stunned. As she told the commander, even if they sold their home and business, they wouldn’t have that kind of money. But the commander wouldn’t take no for an answer. They went around in circles, Elisa pleading, Commander S threatening, swearing, growing angrier.
Finally he asked her, “Do you love your children?”
Elisa listened in horror. Besides their ten-year-old daughter, the Silvas had a five-year-old son, and a youngest daughter, then just two years old.
“If you miss one week’s payment, we’ll kidnap your children,” the commander told her. “We know where they go to school. We know their names. We know your daughter has a birthmark on her face.”
Elisa’s mind spun. The cartel had already been close enough to know about the distinctive marks on her oldest daughter’s cheek. And Elisa knew firsthand that kidnapping was no empty threat. Just two weeks before, cartel members had broken into a house five doors down from the Silvas’ and vanished with the entire family.
“Then he said, ‘Do you know what we do with the kids we take?’” Elisa recalls. “‘We remove their organs and sell them. That’s our specialty. Then we give what’s left back to their parents. In pieces.’”
Elisa knew that this wasn’t an empty threat either. Over the past few years, dozens of dismembered corpses—heads in plastic bags, bodies chopped apart—had been found scattered throughout Tabasco. Now Commander S told her that those were CJNG’s work. That this was what they did when families wouldn’t pay.
“I was just praying to God in my mind,” Elisa remembers.
She begged the commander for a few days’ time. She would get a bank loan. She’d come up with as much as she could. She would have the money ready for them on Thursday.
The commander agreed. He told her not to bother calling the police, that CJNG controlled the police and judges anyway. He warned her that the cartel would be watching. At last, he hung up.
Elisa turned to her husband, who stood nearby, overhearing.
“I told him, ‘We can’t stay here,’” she says. “‘Not one minute more.’”
***
With their most important papers and one change of clothes apiece, Elisa and Rafael rushed their family into the car. They told the children they were running an errand. They said no goodbyes. Then they left their town for the last time.
At first, they planned to head to Veracruz, where they could stay with relatives. But as Elisa and Rafael spoke, they realized the situation there would be no better. CJNG and another cartel, Los Zetas, had branches in that territory. Besides, if CJNG came looking for them, it could put their extended family at risk.
Instead, they drove north.
From a roadside motel several hours from home, they called Rafael’s sister, who lived in Texas. “She said, ‘Why don’t you come here?’” Elisa remembers.
So they headed for the border.
In a small group, carrying their only possessions in their backpacks, the family waded across the Rio Grande. The quick-moving water came up to the chin of their five-year-old son. The two-year-old rode on Rafael’s shoulders. Elisa remembers the toddler reaching out for the ripples in the moving water, and the terror Elisa felt that she might tumble off and disappear into the current.
But they made it to the other side. There, they turned themselves in to US Border Patrol.
When seeking asylum in the US, an applicant must prove “credible fear.”
Elisa wrote out her family’s story. She explained the worsening violence in their community. The vanishing neighbors. The dismembered bodies. The things Commander S had said: About how CJNG would come to her home, find every peso in every nook and cranny, and hammer each one into her children’s bodies.
The Silvas stayed with relatives in Texas while waiting for their claim to be processed. They didn’t have to wait long.
By the end of October, the immigration judge had made his decision. Their claim was denied.
As for the family’s experience with the cartel, the judge brushed it off.
“There’s crime here too,” he told the Silvas.
***
Now they hide.
A rejected claim of asylum slates a family for instant deportation.
But the Silvas can’t return home. They sold their property in Tabasco years ago, using the money to help pay rent and fees during their first weeks in the US. And things in their hometown are no better. Kidnappings and murders continue. Every business that opens is subject to extortion. With the killing of El Mencho, cartel violence has spiked, setting off waves of shootings and arson throughout CJNG territory.
As for their kidnapped neighbors, Elisa has gotten updates: CJNG eventually released the parents, so that the father, a fisherman, could get back to work and pay the extortion fees.
The cartel kept the children.
Elisa hears that the mother has lost her mind.
“We left everything behind. Our home, our business, our dreams, our memories. Everything we had accomplished.”
To keep their own family together, the Silvas fled to Minnesota, where other relatives had settled.
Here in Red Wing, they live in a small apartment. Thick curtains cover the windows. A few pieces of the children’s artwork hang on the walls, crayons and markers brightening the dimness. Rafael catches a daily ride with a coworker to an out-of-town job, but otherwise rarely leaves. The older children attend school online. The family doesn’t even go out for groceries. Walmart deliveries are left at the door.
They are refugees, by definition—people seeking refuge from violence and fear. But without legal status, they’ve had to become invisible.
“We left everything behind,” says Elisa. “Our home, our business, our dreams, our memories. Everything we had accomplished.”
Now and then, when Elisa speaks to family members still in Mexico, they ask why the Silvas don’t just come back, if they’re having to hide in Minnesota, anyway.
“Our children are still so young,” Elisa says, folding her hands on the table where her family gathers each night. “My husband and I decided to come here to protect them. That is why we’re here.”
* Names and other identifying details have been changed.