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He was cleaning up the operating room after performing a C-section when rebels entered his rural health center in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Martin closed the operating room and hid. But rebels found him. When he said he was a doctor, they demanded proof.
On the document Martin showed, one rebel saw the university the doctor had attended. The rebel had studied there too. He led Martin to the bushes outside, pretending he was going to kill the physician, and instead told him to run.
“If you go back, we’ll kill you like we’re killing everybody,” the rebel said, according to Martin’s recounting.
Martin ran. Behind him was the sound of gunfire from a 2022 massacre in the village of Kishishe. Ahead of him was a perilous international journey, undertaken with his wife and toddler, that at times made him wish he had died back in Congo.
The family became part of a large group of migrants — an estimated 2,000 so far — who have made their way over the last couple of years from the southern U.S. border to Riverton Park United Methodist Church in Tukwila. Their arrival has confounded local officials, who have provided insufficient aid, funding temporary housing for some but leaving many sleeping on the church’s floor or in tents.
Their countries of origin, spanning several continents, illustrate dramatically changing migration patterns enabled by a treacherous new route from Southern to Central America and the spread of information through social media.
Why have these migrants come?
Answers recounted in interviews help explain record numbers of people crossing the U.S. southern border and provide context for weighing President Joe Biden’s June 4 executive order making it much harder for migrants who come illegally to apply for asylum.
Migrants’ accounts, while not yet interrogated in immigration court, also contrast markedly with some political rhetoric — such as former President Donald Trump’s claim that many people arriving in the U.S. come from emptied jails in Congo and elsewhere.
Numbers are imprecise, but rough data kept by the Tukwila church indicates hundreds have come from Angola and Venezuela and at least five or six dozen from Congo. A smattering have also journeyed from an array of countries including Guinea, Afghanistan, Brazil and Peru.
More migrants from some of the same places have found shelter over the past two years at African churches and a house owned by the Congolese Integration Network, according to leaders of the SeaTac-based organization. And the population of migrants and refugees at Mary’s Place has doubled in the past year, occupying more than 50% of its 700 beds in five shelters.
From October 2019 to September 2020, just 12% of U.S. Border Patrol encounters at the southern border were with migrants from beyond Mexico and northern Central America, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Three years later, the proportion jumped to 51% — a slight majority. Many are seeking asylum.
About 350 migrants now occupy one wing of the sprawling DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in SeaTac. King County funded their move from the Riverton church, with priority given to families expecting babies, those with young children and elderly or disabled people.
They receive meals, help filing asylum and work permit applications and other support from the Spokane-based nonprofit Thrive International, which has a small team based at the hotel. It is a pleasant venue — with a pool, exercise room and views of a small lake — that has become an incongruous reservoir of myriad stories of traumas and monthslong treks.
Several families, speaking through interpreters, shared their stories without hesitation, though some asked not to be identified by their full names due to concerns about privacy and possible repercussions. Others held back at points or preferred to let family members relate painful episodes.
Venezuelan Sugey Del Valle Padrón grew silent as she recalled crossing a jungle into Central America. “There are things that happened there that scar you for life,” she said.
Haunted by doctoring in Congo
Unending war.
That’s how Martin described conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo while his wife, Abigael, sat nearby holding their newborn, and their 3-year-old son camped out on a hotel bed.
The 36-year-old doctor said he had been practicing for a while in southwestern Congo when he was transferred east to the Kivu region. He thought he would be safe because a United Nations peacekeeping mission was nearby.
But he said the U.N’s forces proved ineffective as so-called M23 rebels attacked villages, indiscriminately killing residents, as they did during the Kishishe massacre. Dozens of other militias also rampaged the region, including the Allied Democratic Forces, aligned with the terrorist group ISIS.
As a doctor, Martin said he was charged with providing aid to women who had been violated in grotesque ways and to men wounded with machetes.
“I feel like I suffered more psychologically because of the horrible surgery I had to do,” he said, showing a video from Congo of a line of dead bodies with injuries that still torment him.
He also agonized about the safety of his family. A tipping point came after they fled to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital city in the west. A rebellion loomed on the outskirts.
“I saw there was no way I could stay here,” he said.
In time, he will tell his story to an immigration judge, who will assess whether his account is credible and meets grounds for asylum based on persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group.
Those who study Congo say there is no doubt the country has been wracked by what University of London historian Reuben Loffman called “an extremely complex series of wars.”
The vast country in central Africa, formerly known as Zaire, was for decades ruled by one of the world’s most corrupt despots, the late Mobutu Sese Seko. A rebel force ousted him in 1997, but that didn’t put an end to cycles of violence that have spanned three decades.
Different theories circulate as to why: ethnic conflicts over citizenship, land and power; quests for mining resources in eastern Congo; the alleged intervention of neighboring Rwanda (denied by that country); or a combination of these factors.
“There’s no one root cause of this conflict,” said Roger Alfani, a Congolese professor at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University who studies his homeland and has interviewed its refugees. He said the atrocities, including rape and mutilations, “have been unbelievable.”
Millions of Congolese people have been displaced over the years, according to a December U.N. Refugee Agency report, often migrating to other parts of the country. But recently, according to Border Patrol figures, thousands have jumped continents — in the case of Martin and many others, flying first to São Paulo in Brazil and then traveling north to the U.S.
It’s a journey of thousands of miles across multiple countries.
Venezuelan food lines lasting days
The hospital in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital city, had no doctors, no available beds and little medicine.
Padrón’s then 2-year-old daughter, sick with a chronic condition, received IV fluids and antibiotics in a waiting room. Padrón, who once studied nursing, believed her daughter needed more medical help. Leaving Venezuela seemed the only way.
It was 2018 and the country had collapsed, triggering an exodus that would eventually amount to 7.7 million people.
The catalyst was the end of a commodities boom that buoyed the oil-rich nation for more than a decade. It was “catastrophic,” said Javier Corrales, an Amherst College professor who has extensively written about Venezuela.
Problems hidden by the windfall, he said, were brought into sharp relief: a slide from democracy to a dictatorship, economic mismanagement on a grand scale centered on mass nationalization and “a certain degree of impunity for people engaged in illicit activities.”
Padrón, 43 and speaking in her hotel room while her now 8-year-old daughter and an older son, 15, were at school, recalled the extreme poverty and scarcity that resulted. People ate food from the garbage. When goods appeared in stores, the lines were unfathomably long — requiring waits of not hours but days.
“We would sleep on cardboard boxes,” she said, explaining how she and others in line spread out blankets they carried with them. In the morning, they rolled up the blankets, picked up the cardboard and continued waiting.
When people got through the lines, there was little to buy, said a couple also living in the DoubleTree, Loris Garcia, 25, and David Rangel, 27. Garcia is Venezuelan; Rangel, 27, was born in Colombia and lived in Venezuela for many years.
If lentils were on sale, that would comprise the day’s meal, the couple said. Or maybe they would just eat mangos if that’s what they could get.
The couple said they faced other problems. Rangel, who studied civil engineering, traveled to his university on a motorcycle. Then it was stolen. Getting to school by public transportation, in shambles due to a lack of gas and tires, would have taken impossibly long, he said. He dropped out.
Garcia said that when she was 17, she was threatened by gangs who ruled her neighborhood because they falsely believed she informed on them to a then-boyfriend who was a police officer.
Following the path taken by many leaving Venezuela, Padrón, Garcia and Rangel first tried living elsewhere in Latin America. Padrón went to Ecuador, where she had a friend. Garcia and Rangel, at different times, went to neighboring Colombia, where they met.
Each decided after some years they needed a new home. Padrón said she made little money selling candies, produce and cigarettes on streets and busses, and her son faced discrimination in school. Garcia and Rangel said they had to work constantly to make a living from the restaurant they were then running and faced extortion from a paramilitary group.
The path north seemed the way out.
Abducted in Angola
Calemba felt unsafe — even in Brazil.
It was easy to get there from his home country of Angola due to accessible visas and constant flights between the two former Portuguese colonies. He worried, what if the men who persecuted his family came after them?
In Angola, Calemba belonged to the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA, an opposition party challenging the hold on power that the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has had since independence in 1975. UNITA members had much to protest, he said. People couldn’t find jobs. Hunger was widespread. The government was jailing dissenters.
Calemba, who earned a living by selling music flash drives in public squares, said he suffered that fate himself. Once, in late 2022, he was jailed for five days after participating in a protest, said the now 30-year-old. The second time, a month later, was worse.
He said police shot him in the leg. Then, government actors threw him and several other protesters into a car, blindfolded them and drove them to a remote area. There, he said, he was severely tortured.
“Death, you feel when it’s coming,” he said.
Calemba shifted positions on his hotel room chair as he talked. Sharp pains in his back, a remnant of torture, make it uncomfortable to sit, he said.
But his torturers did not kill him. They brought him, passed out and bleeding, to a makeshift medical unit. A nurse recognized his family name and helped him escape, he said. He hid out on a farm.
All that was not the saddest part, he said, speaking with a quiet intensity while his wife silently listened. The saddest part was when men repeatedly came to his house looking for him.
On one occasion, trying to get his wife to reveal his whereabouts, the men heated an iron and threatened to use it on the couple’s young daughter, he said. They didn’t after his wife fainted and they correctly concluded she had no information, Calemba said.
But he said men came again, abducted his wife and daughter and raped his wife. She lost the baby she was carrying.
Marissa Moorman, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies Angola, said the country is not uniformly repressive. There are some democratic rights like regular elections. But, she said, “there are always human rights abuses going on at some level.”
Calemba said he wanted something different for his family. “I wanted to come to a place where they respect people and where the law works.”
“The jungle of death”
With an eye to the U.S., Calemba went online.
Thinking of the country’s capital, he looked up “Washington.” What came up was a TikTok video about the other “famous Washington,” as Calemba described our state, where he heard social organizations give migrants a warm welcome.
The internet, of course, is not always reliable, but it has become a go-to source for migrants considering where to go and how to get there.
“Technology has revolutionized how migrants have access to routes and information,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a Migration Policy Institute senior policy analyst.
While finding routes may be easy, following them is not. Inevitably, they traverse the Darién Gap, an area of steep mountains and fast-running rivers stretching from Colombia to Panama.
“Three or four years ago, the Darién Gap was considered impenetrable,” said Maureen Meyer, vice president of programs at WOLA, a group advocating for human rights in the Americas. But a sophisticated criminal network has specialized in bringing people through it, or at least charging fees of hundreds of dollars or more for access and dubious promises of protection.
More than 900,000 people traveled through the Darién Gap between 2021 and 2023, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. Predatory violence, sexual and otherwise, is common.
“The jungle of death,” is how Martin, the doctor from Congo, referred to the area. “The water was all the way to my neck,” he said. The only way his toddler could cross was on Martin’s shoulders.
Garcia, who was pregnant when she entered the jungle, recalled such strong currents in the rivers that one false move could sweep you away. She saw dead bodies floating by.
Immersed in water one moment, climbing up, up, up the next, she said, “I felt like I was going crazy.” Sometimes, she would scream.
Still, she said, “for me, the real jungle was Mexico.” She said police would come on busses and order migrants off, patting them down in private places and demanding money.
“Time and again, migrants say the worst part of their trip was Mexico,” said WOLA’s Meyer, referring to dangers from both law enforcement and criminals, sometimes in concert with each other.
Juan Acereto Cervera, a mayoral adviser in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, said such corruption is “terrible for us to accept, but it’s happening.”
Nearing the end of Mexico’s gantlet, migrants arrive at different points along the 2,000-mile southern U.S. border. Some, like Martin and Calemba, cross the desert into Arizona. Others, such as Garcia and Rangel, swim or wade across the Rio Grande into Texas.
Often, powerful smuggling cartels lure or coerce them into paying money to guide them across.
Garcia and Rangel said they escaped that fate by running into a “sweet old guy” in Piedras Negras, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, who suggested where to cross the Rio Grande. Near the U.S. side, a Border Patrol officer, seeing Garcia was pregnant, motioned to a spot where migrants had cut a razor wire fence.
Then they faced a question confronting all migrants who get across the border: Where to now?
Garcia and Rangel had heard about the Riverton church from a friend who had stayed there. They made their way to Tukwila circuitously.
Separated by border officials, Garcia said she was taken to a migrant shelter and given a free bus ride to New York City — likely as a result of a Texas policy busing thousands of migrants to select “sanctuary” cities protecting undocumented immigrants.
Rangel, upon release, met Garcia in New York, a Democratic city in many ways the polar opposite of Republican Texas but also looking to send migrants elsewhere. The city has been offering free plane tickets, and the couple flew at no cost to Seattle.
Padrón, who entered the U.S. near El Paso, Texas, was also bused to a sanctuary city, in her case Chicago. She, too, had a friend who had stayed at Riverton and eventually moved on to Tukwila. A friend enticed Martin and Abigael to Riverton as well, while Calemba said he and his wife were sent to the church by a downtown Seattle shelter that was full.
“I was surprised,” Martin said of the people at Riverton sleeping on the floor. It was April, and the church had become a de facto migrant shelter without the room or resources to accommodate the influx.
Those transferred to the DoubleTree got lucky, and none of those interviewed expressed regrets about what it had taken to get there. They dreamed of starting businesses or going back to school. A few have recently gotten work permits, and with subsidies from nonprofit Thrive, a six-month lease at a North Seattle apartment complex.
“I feel really, really happy,” said Padrón the June day after she had gotten keys to a two-bedroom apartment. She was looking forward to cooking Venezuelan food for her children again.
Others face an uncertain housing situation come the end of July, when the county’s DoubleTree funding runs out. A spokesperson for Executive Dow Constantine said the county will receive $5 million in state funds for migrants that month and is prioritizing services for DoubleTree residents but has not yet made concrete plans as to how.
And asylum decisions, which will determine who can stay in the U.S. and who might have to return home, are years away due to the country’s backed up immigration court system.
For thousands, the journey to the U.S. has ended, but a different one has begun.
Staff reporter Manuel Villa contributed to this report.
This story was reported in part through a Poynter fellowship on U.S. immigration policy in El Paso with funding from the Catena Foundation.