The kidnapper sounded polite, even deferential, when she called on a Tuesday afternoon last May. Melida Lemus and Alfredo Godoy had left their clapboard house in Trenton, New Jersey, to pick up their two daughters from school. Godoy, who works in construction, was late to meet a client for whom he was building a home extension, and his family accompanied him to the project site. Melida and the girls—Kathryn, twelve, and Jennifer, seventeen—waited in the client’s living room, snacking on cookies and checking Instagram, while Alfredo walked through the house, taking specs: how much Sheetrock he’d need, how much spackle, how many two-by-fours. In the middle of the tour, his cell phone rang. The call came from a Texas area code.

“Are you the father of two boys?” a woman asked.

“Yes,” Godoy replied. “Is everything O.K.?”

“I have them here at my house,” she said.

The Godoys’ younger son, Brayan, had just turned fourteen. Small for his age, he was greatly impressed by icons of the strength he hoped someday to possess: the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Stone Cold Steve Austin. Robinson, a year older, was reflective and soft-spoken, a soccer player and aspiring mechanic. They had grown up in Guatemala, raised by their grandparents.

In the mid-nineties, Alfredo had been working as a security guard at Exclusivas, an upscale supermarket in Guatemala City that sold name-brand U.S. goods, when he met and courted Melida, a round-faced cashier of eighteen. Jennifer was born in 1996, and Robinson followed, in 1998. Both Alfredo and Melida dreamed of heading north, to seek out decent-paying work that would fund their children’s education. The prospect of leaving the kids behind was anguishing, but they’d be well cared for until Alfredo and Melida returned with a nest egg, a few years later. In 2000, the couple agreed that Alfredo would embark first on the journey to Trenton, where he had a relative who could find him a job. Melida was pregnant with Brayan; she’d wait to give birth before joining Alfredo, the next year. “That’s what we decided,” Alfredo told me, “with all the pain in our hearts.”

In New Jersey, Alfredo got steady work as a builder. Melida had a series of jobs: making cold medicine in a local pharmaceutical factory, cleaning rooms at a Best Western, and making fries at two fast-food franchises. Kathryn was born after their arrival in the United States. Meanwhile, the boys thrived in a private school in Guatemala City.

Melida and Alfredo sent money back to Guatemala to build a house for the family to live in upon their return. But life there was growing perilous. Fuelled by gang rivalries, homicide rates hovered at six times the global average, and people were dying at a faster rate than they had during much of the country’s three and a half decades of civil war. On their way home from school one day, Brayan and Robinson saw four children gunned down in the street while playing soccer, by men in a black truck. Later, Robinson was on a local bus when it was hijacked; a cop chased the teen-age culprit and shot him dead as Robinson watched. Melida’s father had been brutally robbed at gunpoint, and Alfredo’s father, a cabbage and corn farmer in the state of Jalapa, fielded phone calls from a group of local extortionists who threatened to kill his family if he didn’t pay the equivalent of four thousand dollars. When Brayan and Robinson visited Jalapa, the same men—recent U.S. deportees—stalked Brayan for his parents’ numbers in Trenton. The news heightened Alfredo’s anxiety, which worsened further when his father filed a police report, raising the risk of retribution. He called his sons and set down rules: “Don’t leave the house unless you have to.” “Don’t ever give out our phone number in the U.S.” And, as hard as it might be to follow, “Focus on your education.”

As conditions in Guatemala changed, so did Melida and Alfredo’s plans. In 2008, Jennifer crossed the border with an aunt to join them in New Jersey. Last spring, the couple decided that the time had come to send for their sons, too. They found a network of coyotes—couriers who transport migrants—recommended by friends and relatives, and settled on a fee of fourteen thousand dollars to get the boys safely to Trenton. Anticipating the reunion, the couple arranged to trade their cramped apartment for an airier place next door, where the four children could sleep in a pale-yellow attic, surrounded by the girls’ art projects. Melida got a job at a cosmetics factory that made products for a Sephora supplier—a night shift, so that she could pick up her sons from school. In March, she wrote to Brayan and Robinson on Facebook, “Soon, we will be together again—I miss you so much.”

She and Alfredo were aware of the journey’s dangers. They’d been tracking the boys through frequent phone calls, but hadn’t heard from them in three days; the last call had come just before the boys were supposed to cross the Rio Grande into Texas.

“They were lost, and I found them,” the woman on the phone told Alfredo, as he paced around his client’s living room. She allowed the boys to speak briefly with Melida. Then she said, “My brother will call you with instructions.”

America’s migrant-extortion market remains in the shadows of our fierce immigration debate. One reason is that the crime targets those who are least likely to report it. Another is that the victims of ransom kidnappings are sometimes twice disappeared: after being rescued from the stash houses where they are kept, they are often detained long enough to testify against their captors and then are swiftly deported. Some of them are informed of the possibility to seek legal relief, generally in the form of a U visa, designated for victims of crime who help law enforcement or prosecutors, or a T visa, for survivors of trafficking. Still, such protections are hard to obtain, and the price for speaking out against captors can be steep.

Shortly before Alfredo Godoy received the phone call about his sons, two men in Trenton faced trial for kidnapping a fifteen-year-old girl in Texas while she made her way from Guatemala to New Jersey, where her mother lived. The mother told police that the kidnappers had starved and abused her. “They caused so much pain for my daughter that she does not live a normal life,” she wrote to the judge. The girl would not be able to testify, “due to fear that they will see us, follow us, and do us harm.”

Fear of the police can loom as large as fear of captors, particularly in parts of the country where law enforcement is believed to detain undocumented people who come forward to report a crime. One person who did contact the police was Sonia Avila, a woman living in Texas whose teen-age son, Franklin, reached Arizona from Honduras in 2011, only to be abducted by men posing as good Samaritans and held captive in a stash-house bedroom. Franklin’s kidnappers phoned Avila, demanding fifteen hundred dollars. Otherwise, they told her, they would chop off Franklin’s ears, or kill him.

Avila called 911. When Franklin was rescued by federal agents, she agreed to testify against the culprits. The prosecutor’s last question to her on the witness stand made clear what she had put at stake by speaking out: “Now, do you realize you might have to face an immigration judge?”