Northbound
- Mark Dee
- Jun 17, 2025
- 13 min read
For one local immigrant, the path to Idaho brought peril, possibility
This story was originally published on July 1, 2022 in the Idaho Mountain Express. It was awarded top prize in the Best Serious Feature category by the Idaho Press Club and second place for Best Feature Profile Story by in the National Newspaper Association's Better Newspaper Contest that year.
Part 1: North
The kidnapping came in America.
One week hugging her knees on the floors of Sonoran Desert stash houses. The men sat at tables before her, drinking liquor from bottles that, as if by magic, refilled every morning, only to be drained each night.
The deal was simple: They owned her. For $500, they’d bought her head from the smugglers that had brought her across the Mexican border into Arizona. For $3,000, she could buy it back.
They said they’d rape her, kill her. They’d let her up for two things: during the day, to make phone calls, asking everyone she could think of for the money to purchase her freedom, and at night, when the liquor was gone, to the table, where they’d lift her from lap to lap, perched next to their guns, close enough to whisper the words all over again—“Te mataré…Te violaré…”
The captors picked a new house each day, packed up and moved to where a new man would meet her on some strange lawn with a familial embrace—a show, for prying neighbors—then usher her inside, to a familiar pose. They moved through towns, neighborhoods. She can’t pinpoint where, exactly. They could have been anywhere. They were invisible.
Simona, whose name has been changed for this story, was 29 back then, a month separated from her three sons: Antonio, 5 years old; Luis, 4; and Manuel, narrowly past his first birthday. The boys, whose names have also been changed, were in Lima, Peru, living with Simona’s father. Their own father had left, though Simona didn’t know that yet. It could have been happening just then, while she waited by the phone. One month after she set off for America, he set off for Venezuela. He told the family he was going to find work in Spain. Wherever he went, he didn’t come back.
For most of the journey, she’d traveled alone. Getting to Mexico was easy enough. Two pieces of paper—a visa and a ticket—and you were there in hours.
The money, though. For those who lived in the slums of San Juan de Lurigancho, a district on the east edge of the Peruvian capital, Lima, money was the problem that cut through their lives.
At 12, Simona followed her sister down to the city from the mountain village of her youth. They settled into one of the district’s pinched rooms, and two years later she began selling bananas from a blanket on the street to cover the cost. Others she knew sold drugs; in her 20s, Simona eventually switched to CDs, then movies. When police passed near, she folded the corners of her blanket into a sack, and hid.
Her boys slept three to a bed. Each night, she’d empty what she earned into a jar. Then, the boys’ father, her partner, would empty the jar into his pockets.
One day, she was too slow folding the blanket. A cop caught her, and he took everything. She had no inventory, no money, no options.
But she had family—her father, her sister, a brother somewhere north. Simona tears up remembering the conversation she had with her father that day. She had to get out, he told her. He owned a business. He’d sell it. He’d sell everything he could. She had to go north to find her brother, north to a place called Idaho, and she had to promise him one thing:
As soon as she could, she’d get the boys out, too.
Part 2: Borders
Her first attempt to cross into America ended in the arms of a U.S. Border Patrol officer, crying. She had gone on foot—no food, little water, in a small band moving ever northward, always moving, until they were finally and immediately stopped. She dropped to her knees, ground her hands into American soil, and begged the man in uniform to look the other way. He didn’t. But, in soft, accented Spanish, Simona swears she heard him whisper.
“Try again,” she remembers him saying. “You’ll get through a second time.”
The second time, she hired the coyote. She had been away a long time already, longer by the day. The money her family had raised was bleeding dry. She was desperate, and began to think she might end up stranded in the middle of Mexico, almost 3,000 miles from one home and 2,000 short of the next. She counted out $1,500, handed it over, and boarded a van.
The driver packed 12 people like cargo inside, and treated them much the same. There was no small talk, no talking at all.
“Stop crying,” this new man said, “Or I’ll shoot off your head.”
“Coyotes, they don’t care about your story,” Simona said through a translator. “They’re people you don’t mess with. You’re completely in their hands.”
The van rumbled through Sonora, towards Arizona, and the thin, formless line between the two. Sometime in the night they must have crossed it, though she couldn’t say when. The landscape stayed the same but the signs changed languages and she was there—here—in the United States.
But then the driver stopped short. He spoke, for the first time in a long time. They had run out of gas, he said. And that seemed problem enough, were it true, when a second car pulled up tight behind, and another blocked the road in front, and gunshots split the darkness in flashes of light and sound.
Today, more than 15 years later, she struggles to piece together how it happened. There was a scramble. Passengers were ripped from the van, shoved into other cars. Some shook free and took off running into the desert. Simona doesn’t know what became of them. She was crying, wailing now, pushed through an open window on top of five others. When her vision cleared, she saw the driver up front, and the grooved black bore of a handgun.
“Stop crying,” this new man said, “Or I’ll shoot off your head.”
She hushed. The idling engine awoke, and torqued the car into the night.
The kidnappers stripped them down and took their cell phones. When she got hers back, Simona called everyone she could. They were the ones who’d paid to get her that far. One man had family in New York, but when relatives tried to wire the money, the sum raised alarms. $3,000 fell to $1,500. Otherwise, they had a spot, maybe two hours away. They described it in detail: a lonely piece of desert, miles from anywhere. A place no one would ever think to look for someone, dead or alive. A place to disappear.
Simona’s family scrounged and borrowed. They sent her the money she needed, plus another $1,000 to get her the rest of the way to Idaho. If they hadn’t, she’s sure she’d be dead.
“This is his business,” Simona says now. “Everything for money. I couldn’t believe anyone would be that bad, for money.”
Money. That’s all she thought of when she stepped out of the car and into Ketchum, like waking, she remembered, from a long and haunted dream. She’d need to make money—a lot of it—because for what it cost to get her that far, it’d cost her children far more.
Part 3: Sons
Fights in San Juan de Lurigancho felt more like battles. Luis, the middle son, was old enough to remember glimpses, clipped images of older boys wielding bats in the street.
Schoolchildren joined gangs, or became targets of them. Luis knows that’s where he’d be now, had he stayed. His brothers, too.
“It was just chaos,” he said.
From their shared room, the three brothers heard the terse pops of drive-by shootings. From the doorway, Luis watched a teenager beaten to stillness in the gutter by attackers with eyes for his bike. Luis doesn’t know what happened to him—only that he was still bleeding when the front door closed.
In Idaho, Simona worked from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. to pull her children out of San Juan de Lurigancho.
Meanwhile, Simona’s family disavowed her. They couldn’t talk about their daughter in America—she said they still can’t. To mention it makes you a mark for ransom. Everyone in the States has money, the thinking goes: If they love their family, they’ll pay to get them back.
In Idaho, Simona worked from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. to pull her children out of San Juan de Lurigancho. She took three jobs, seven days a week spent in kitchens, cleaning houses, changing linens in hotels. At night, she’d take the bus to her brother’s trailer to do her own laundry and rest. If she missed the last route, she’d walk, as far as 5 miles, depending on the night. Once, in midwinter, she tripped and overturned her mop bucket. Her clothes clung wet to her skin, soaked and soapy. By the time she made it home, they were fixed in ice on her frame.
Slowly, she gained a foothold. A community, immigrants themselves, took her in. Food and clothes would show up on her doorstep, always anonymous, always when she needed something most. She met a man, who we’ll call Ernesto. He had a similar story. Like Simona, he was Peruvian and undocumented. They fell in love, and moved into a small apartment, then a larger trailer, supporting each other as jobs came and went.
For four years, her life was work. Each paycheck chipped into the monolithic sum she knew she needed: $43,500—$14,500 per child—to secure safe transit for minors from Lima to Ketchum. Family members helped. So did neighbors. And when she had to, she borrowed what she could. In 2009, Simona sent the money to a sister in Puebla, Mexico—she’d tried and failed to cross into America, and that’s where she found herself, stuck in between.
Simona’s sons, grown to 9, 8, and 5, met their aunt in the city. She made arrangements with a coyote, who brought them to an abandoned house somewhere nearby. They spent a week indoors. Manuel was scared; they all were. But he was so young. He didn’t eat, rarely spoke. Then, they were separated, and lost contact.
Antonio, the oldest, made the crossing in a fruit crate, cribbed inside a box from central Mexico. It was easier for Luis. He was handed over to a Mexican family with a son about his age. The boy had a passport, and at least a passing resemblance. Luis memorized everything about him: teachers, schools, relatives’ names. At the border, he feigned sleep as agents checked the flow of cars, and opened his eyes in a new country. The youngest, Manuel, can’t remember how it happened, Luis said. Only that the three came together in an Arizona parking lot, and their mother, after four years, was waiting for them there.
Part 4: Plans
When she was in Peru, Simona never thought of leaving. But in dreams, at night, she saw a river arcing through northern pines. She saw the pale false front of a building, announcing its name with a sign she could make out, set against white-veined mountains. When she first walked into Atkinsons’ Market, she was surprised it didn’t have a swimming pool—in her dream, it’d been a hotel.
Simona never thought of coming to America, but she dreamed of Ketchum, Idaho.
She’s not surprised: Her dreams, she said, have always bordered on premonitions. Not every night, but for big moments in her life, she trusts what she sees. She’s predicted at least three pregnancies, pronouncing, correctly, the sex of the baby each time. “If Simona says it’s a girl, it’s going to be a girl,” her friends back home liked to joke. If she sees a number in her sleep, play the lottery.
When the boys arrived, Simona began taking Sundays off. She showed them, piece by piece, the life she’d carved out for herself, and the plans she had for them. They would enter public school where they would learn English to fluency. They’d graduate, then move on to lives of their own. And between now and then, they’d walk to the river on Sundays, and she’d show them her dreams.
Manuel is a high schooler now, and all American: “This is what he knows,” his mother says. At night, sometimes, he’ll sit her down for English lessons, teaching the language that he learned to speak like his native tongue.
Luis and Antonio, now in their 20s, made it through high school at Wood River. Without documentation, and unable to get driver’s licenses, opportunities afterward were scarce, Luis said. He’s already faced one scare: As a student, he was driving his brother to buy school supplies in Twin Falls when they blew a tire near Shoshone. Stranded on the side of the road, a police officer approached the car. Luis didn’t have a license. He got a ticket for driving without privileges, then a court date. At the station, he found himself on the phone with an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE, the harbingers of deportation.
That time, he received a reprieve, and a warning.
“I never want to hear your name again,” he remembers a man on the other end of the phone saying, “or we’re going to go there, and we’re going to take you.”
Luis paid his fine, and kept his part of the deal.
Some months later, Antonio got word of a man driving to Montana. He had an empty seat in the car. Antonio stuffed a set of clothes in a bag small enough to fit in his lap, said his goodbyes, and left to try his luck somewhere else. Within a year of graduation, Luis quit his job in a Ketchum restaurant, too. He promised his mother he’d be back for Christmas and followed his brother eastward.
“When you get a court date, everyone’s scared,” he said before he left. “You don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s the same story—many people have the same story. Not only here. It’s hard, being afraid of the cops. Not being able to drive. Not being anything. In this place, you’re a tiny little person. You have nothing. If someone yells at you, if your boss abuses you, you just have to take it. I can’t go to college, because I can’t go anywhere. Without papers, you’re limited in the things you can do. What you can dream about. I see people with nice houses, with nice cars, and I know that’s not available to me.
“This is not our hometown. This is not our country. We got inside without being invited.”
In recent years, Simona has dreamed of people disappearing. One winter night, she woke up crying. The tears wrested Ernesto awake. She’d seen him leaving—a dream of them pulled apart.
“We’ll never be separated,” he told her, but he was wrong. Eight months later, he was in ICE custody. Not long after, he was gone.
Alone at night, she’s seen friends, family, all taken away. Herself, too. Simona says someday she’ll be deported back to Peru. She knows it’s going to happen to her, she says, because it happens to everyone, eventually. There are too many risks you have to take. Too many trips to Twin Falls—for food, for clothes, for school supplies—and the road from Blaine County is just too long. So, she’s planning. She wants Manuel to graduate, and she’s saving up money for all her boys, if and when they decide to return to their adopted home.
Not long ago, she had a plan: Once Manuel became old enough to make his own decisions, chart his own future, she would go home, back to Peru for the first time since she crossed north 20 years earlier, and rest.
This spring, things changed. Simona became a grandmother and decided she wanted to stay in Blaine County—stay, and watch her family grow in their transplanted country. Home, now, is here.
But it’s getting harder. She’s losing her house, she says; she doesn’t know where she’ll go. As she enters her 50s, Simona’s health is deteriorating, too. Her body hurts constantly: Her hands, her back. Her stomach aches a lot these days and she doesn’t know why. It costs too much to find out.
“She’s depressed, I can tell,” Luis said about his mother before he left for Montana. “She’s just here to work. She’s here for us.”
Simona doesn’t stop to dwell on it, but doesn’t disagree.
“You don’t want to drown in a glass of water,” she tells her kids. “You have to be strong, and you have to keep moving.”
Before the pandemic, she cut back her hours to a single job at a Ketchum restaurant—all her body could handle. As things, jobs, people, move in and out of her life, the work remains. And if she wakes up in pain, she reminds herself why she’s here to do it.
“I’ve been able to find work here—I came here to work, not to do anyone harm,” she said. “The only shame is, it’s limited, what we can do, because we don’t have documents. But I’ve had a lot of opportunities, thanks to this country. Me, and my kids. I’ll always be grateful for that. I don’t know what would have happened to them if they weren’t here.”
Part 5: Stories
“Everyone has a story,” Simona says. “Everyone.”
Simona sees new faces all the time. As long as there is work, there will be new faces: Peruvian faces, Mexican faces, faces she can’t place with accents she can’t name. She sees people from towns she knows, on a journey she remembers well.
“It’s something really hard, coming to this country,” she says. “You risk your life. You have to hide, live in the shadows, and you have to get here first.”
So she tells them her story. She takes them to the Gold Mine, like someone took her long ago, to buy a fresh set of clothes. She shows them that the path ahead is charted, and well worn, and it leads towards something like home.
“Sometimes, it surprises me, what I’ve accomplished here,” she says. “I wasn’t like this before my kids. But once I had them, I did what it took. I wanted to die, without them. It was hard, but now I feel happy. Two of my sons are men, and one is on his way. I want people to know—especially people without documents, who just arrived—to know that the fight is important. That in this life, it’s worth dreaming. I came from so low, and I’ve accomplished mine. I want people in a dark place, like where I was, to know that things will change.”
One January night, Simona had another dream. She saw an aunt, long dead, leading her towards an unfamiliar mountain. On top there was a man, who showed her the vista, arcing across the horizon. In that dream, her kids had documents. They were safe, wherever they were, wherever they wanted to be. She said she understood, unspoken, that this year would be better.
“I walked and I walked,” she said, remembering. “It wasn’t fast—it wasn’t right away. But I had faith that I’d arrive in the right place.
“I know it will happen, eventually. I saw it in my dreams.” 
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