This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

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By the time thunderstorms hit the eastern Montana prairie just after seven on the morning of August 2, 2017, Audemio Orózco Ramirez had been up and driving south for a couple of hours. He was making the four-hour trip to Billings from Vida, the tiny hamlet where he’d been working as a ranch hand for nearly four years. Audemio, then 44, and his wife, Amparo, 37, lived on a ranch in a one-story house with a wide front porch. With eight children still at home, it was tight quarters, but they had endured much worse in the two decades since they had crossed the border together near San Diego with their infant son, Juan Luís. Before this most recent gig, they’d lived in a tumbledown trailer in Sidney, Montana, within sight of a feedlot, barely better than the shacks the migrant workers slept in when they used to come up from Mexico to weed the sugar beet fields. They did not have so much as a leaf for shade, and the sun turned that trailer into an oven. The water, which they didn’t dare drink, ran brown from the spigot.



In Vida, the children had a whole ranch to roam, just as Audemio did when he was a kid in Michoacán. Back then, Audemio and his brothers scaled the mountains that shot up from the forest canopy. They hunted javelinas and quail and ate fresh mangoes straight from the trees. It made Audemio proud to re-create a piece of his childhood for his children. He taught them how to ride horses and handle livestock, how to pit-roast goats for birria, and, most important, how to work. Here in rural Montana, he was raising his kids with buena educación—lessons in manners and values that he hoped would bring them success at school, on the farm, and anywhere else they might wind up.

The Orózcos got along well with the ranch owners, Rob and Carla Delp. With one son off to college and only one still left at home, the Delps had even given their own ranch house to Audemio and Amparo and moved into a trailer next door. Their younger son, Brett, was in the same grade as Juan Luís, and the boys became best friends. They played on the Circle High eight-man football team and helped their fathers with chores after school. Audemio had a good friend of his own on the ranch—a man named Alejandro, who came up from Nayarit, Mexico, for a few months every year on a visa for temporary agricultural workers. Audemio liked having someone around to talk to in Spanish and drink a couple of cold beers with after a hard day’s work, even though Alejandro’s presence was a constant reminder of his own family’s peril. Unlike Alejandro, Audemio and Amparo were “undocumented,” or in Audemio’s words, “sin papeles.” In the official terminology of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement they were “illegal aliens,” and Audemio was already known to them.

Since his first crossing in 1993, Audemio had been arrested and deported multiple times, most recently in 2011. As a result, he was officially barred from reentering the country for 20 years, and he had received a final removal order, which meant ICE could arrest and deport him at any time. After his last arrest and detention, however, in October 2013, Audemio had been released, and he’d been living under an “order of supervision” ever since. The order of supervision allowed Audemio to continue to work and provide for his family while he waited for his attorney to determine if there was a legal remedy for his immigration case. He wasn’t required to wear an ankle monitor, as tens of thousands of people do under orders of supervision, so there was nothing in his daily life to remind him that he was living on borrowed time. The only significant burden was that he had to check in with ICE agents once a month in Billings. It was an obligation he never missed, though it meant traveling four hours by road or round-trip on a government-subsidized flight from Sidney. The check-ins had become so routine that Audemio grew confused about his immigration status. He knew he didn’t have a visa, but he did have a federal work permit, which included a government-issued photo identification card. And every month, he walked into the belly of the deportation beast, presented himself to the dreaded ICE, and then came right back out again. In his mind, he wasn’t exactly “illegal.”