When Mexicans Antonio Cuapio and his cousin, Rubén Salazar, set out one April day from San Francisco Tetlanoca to Tlaxcala, Mexico, the coyotes’ warnings were clear. Besides carrying with them only one pair of trousers, a T-shirt, some biscuits and canned tuna, they would have to keep their eyes wide open.

The coyotes’ order was also forceful and convincing: “When you cross through Arizona, you’ll have to watch out for the ranch owners. It’s much tougher now; when these guys see a Mexican, they grab him and mess up his crossing.”

Cuapio, 24, and Salazar, 20, said goodbye to their families around three in the morning on April 7. They took a bus as far as the Mexican capital. There, for the first time in their lives, they boarded an airplane that flew them to Sonora. Four hours after they had reached the town of Altar (about 60 miles southwest of Nogales, Arizona), they started their crossing hoping to ultimately reach New York. Their gear consisted of a simple backpack, an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, “a huge desire to get to the other side to make money, and a lot of fear that they’d catch us,” Cuapio described.

Cuapio recalled that at the start of the journey there were 14 people preparing to cross the border. All of them were young, among them were two women.

“We left the house in a pickup that took us to the border. We were piled on top of each other, and after about four hours they dropped us next to the border fence, and there we started to walk,” he said. “After several hours of walking they told us we were near Tucson where the ranch owners were. We crossed a highway and the coyote brushed away our tracks with some leaves, so we couldn’t be followed; these ranch owners always look at the ground for signs.”

When Cuapio and his cousin saw the first of the ranch owners, they knew they had to heed the warning about staying alert.

Project Minuteman had already started up, an effort by many Arizona residents intent on helping reduce the traffic in undocumented immigrants. They claim this is meant to help the country, but according to immigrant organizers, it is a “blatant and illegal hunt for immigrants.”

“They were ranch owners and they had some cattle. We walked by about a hundred meters away, and we were really scared. When we had already gotten past that place, a helicopter showed up, so we hid until it was gone,” said Salazar. “That day we had to wait several hours, and then we got into a car, but it fell apart on the road. After a while the migra [immigration authorities in Mexican slang] was on top of us, and our next stop was jail.”

After more than eight hours there, along with another 50 undocumented immigrants, they were taken by bus to the border. A few hours later they started their second trip across.

“On the second try we had more luck, though my cousin and I had to travel for more than four hours in the trunk of a car. But afterwards, when we got to Phoenix, they put us in a pick-up that got us to New York in four days,” said Salazar, who is now working in a Manhattan restaurant along with his cousin.

Salazar is happy these days since the ranch owners failed to thwart his dream to get to New York.

“We pay $2,000 to get here. It was tough, but we made it,” he said.