No borders to grief
Alberta Trujillo felt the baby coming. She woke her fiance, Margarito Garcia, and told him they needed to get to a hospital.
Neither had a car or a driver's license. So they bundled up and started walking to East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital a block away.
Trujillo had to stop across the street from the emergency room as Garcia ran to get help. He returned with a wheelchair and an attendant, and the couple headed into the hospital.
They knew they were having a girl and had already chosen a name: Nicole.
But now the baby's heartbeat was dropping, so as soon as the doctor arrived, Trujillo started pushing.
"I was worried," Garcia said. "I didn't know what was going to happen."
Nicole was born at 4:22 a.m on Jan. 25. But she wasn't breathing, and her heart had stopped. Doctors were unable to save her.
Garcia was holding Trujillo's hand a few minutes later, trying to comfort her, when she started throwing up blood.
"Don't let what happened to our baby happen to me," Trujillo begged, crying.
The doctor took Trujillo into surgery to try to stop the bleeding. But by 1 p.m., she was dead.
"I wanted to die too," Garcia said.
His troubles were not over. As he mourned the deaths of his fiance and daughter, Garcia soon found that his decision to sneak across the border four years earlier was about to backfire.
At a time when most families come together to grieve, families like Trujillo's are separated -- by their initial decision to illegally cross the border, by their desire to bury relatives back home, and by their fear of never being able to return if they travel to Mexico.
The Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles pays for an immigrant's final journey home if the family is unable to do so. In the last four years, the consulate has shipped more than 1,000 bodies to Mexico for burial. Consul General Juan Marcos Gutiérrez-González said the situation for undocumented relatives who cannot travel with the bodies "is the worst of the worst."
"It is the most direct experience of human suffering," he said.
But Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said that is the price undocumented immigrants pay for breaking the law.
"We have borders and we have immigration laws," he said. "People who choose to jump the line have to deal with the consequences of that."
