HOUSTON _ As Mayela Villegas crossed the bridge from Matamoros, Mexico, to Texas, she looked like a success story. Defying the odds, she had been allowed into the United States to pursue her asylum claim.
That was a year ago: Oct. 5, 2019. We had met days before in the Mexican border tent camp where she had been living with about 2,000 others after migrating from El Salvador. White crosses on the nearby banks of the Rio Grande memorialized parents and children who had recently died trying to cross the river illegally.
A 27-year-old transgender woman, Mayela had been kidnapped and raped in Mexico and El Salvador. She told me those stories alone, in her tent, with the opening zipped tight against eavesdroppers. In the camp, a migrant woman from Honduras had threatened to gut her with a knife. Mayela secretly recorded the threat on her phone, found a witness and reported it to Mexican authorities. That became grounds for her successful U.S. asylum claim, which allowed her to enter the U.S. legally and settle with relatives in Houston.
Seven months later, at the end of May, one of Mayela's friends messaged me on Facebook: Mayela was dead.
"Is there any way you can help us find what happened to her?" Deisy Polanco wrote.
I was in Minneapolis, covering Black Lives Matter protests and getting shot at by police. I didn't want to believe Mayela had died. But I suspected Polanco was right.
Transgender women are often assaulted and killed. In August, two men were charged in an alleged hate crime attack and robbery of three transgender women in Los Angeles. At least 30 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed this year, according to the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign _ more than all of last year. And in the last five years, more transgender people have been killed in Texas than in any other state.
I sent Mayela a Facebook message. I called. Finally, a coroner outside Houston confirmed Polanco's news. The autopsy report was pending.
I hadn't spoken to Mayela in months, and felt guilty. She had called me now and then but, traveling and on assignment, I had responded late or not at all. Was there something I could have done?
I promised to update Polanco, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from Colombia and couldn't understand why Mayela had died so soon after reaching the U.S.
"She was really a warrior. She suffered a lot to come here," Polanco said.
At the border camp, Mayela's tent sat next to a fetid black pool where migrants dumped their trash. That's where the knife-wielding migrant had threatened her, saying she was more woman than Mayela was.
Despite the threat, Mayela did not consider disguising herself in men's clothes.
"I'm a woman," she said. "I can't give up what I am."
She worried about dying and the effect it would have on her mother in San Salvador, who accepted her as trans.
"Where will I be buried?" she said. "Will my mother know?"
In a quiet moment, she also made an admission: "I think about suicide sometimes."
