SYLHET, Bangladesh _ On a chilly April night in the desert outside Phoenix, Rasel Ahmed, his wrists and ankles bound in cuffs, shuffled onto a bus at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement airfield with a pit in his stomach.
From his home village in the rice fields of eastern Bangladesh, the 30-year-old restaurant worker had traveled through a dozen countries to reach the United States, nearly collapsing in relief when he saw the American flag flying over the border crossing at San Ysidro.
For 18 months he bounced among detention centers in San Diego, Louisiana and Alabama, praying for an immigration judge to let him remain in the country, get a job and support his family 8,000 miles away.
Now it appeared his time had run out.
Rasel sat near the front as the bus approached a plane looming beside an empty airstrip. Two dozen shackled Bangladeshis and Indians twisted in their seats, some shouting in protest, when the bus stopped.
An immigration officer who looked to be from Pakistan barked at the group in Urdu: "You're all going home, either alive or dead," he said.
The ICE-chartered flight that took off from Mesa, Ariz., on April 3 carried 85 Bangladeshis, Indians and Nepalis. They had reached the end of a long, unlikely journey to the United States.
They were among thousands of international migrants whose numbers are now surging across Latin America, taking advantage of travel routes and smuggling networks forged over decades by Latino immigrants destined for the U.S.
Nearly all had started in Brazil and snaked north for months, braving dense forests, roiling waters, bandits and gang-infested towns before arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Some attempted to sneak in illegally and were caught; others surrendered to authorities, requesting asylum.
South Asians have become some of the biggest users of this expanding immigration pipeline. In the 11 months ending in August 2016, at least 4,060 Bangladeshis, Indians, Nepalis and Pakistanis traveled to the U.S. along this route, compared with just 225 seven years earlier, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics. Of those, 3,604 were arrested while crossing illegally, nearly a fourfold increase from 2012.
The passengers on the charter flight from Arizona to Dhaka had each paid tens of thousands of dollars to traffickers who promised them a chance at a new life. But the money was gone, months had been spent attempting the treacherous journeys and languishing in detention, and courts in the U.S. had rejected their asylum claims.
They had gambled, and lost.
As an officer began reading off names of the detainees, a few men resisted and lunged toward the door. Rasel stood up too. He thought of his ailing father who had liquidated the family savings to get him to this point, the hellish journey he had survived and the shame of returning to Bangladesh.
Rasel saw an officer point a small weapon, about the size of a handgun. Then he crumpled to the floor and fell unconscious.
He awoke in an airplane seat, his body encased in a navy blue blanket unzipped to the middle of his chest. His face was bruised; his eyelids felt like they had weights attached.
Seated in the row behind him, Dalim Ahmed, a 29-year-old Bangladeshi, saw Rasel slumped in his seat, barely moving.
"He looked dead," Dalim said.
