The 9-year-old girl huddled in the back of the banana truck with 60 others. A badly burned baby boy screeched. Bombs rained down all around them as a civil war ripped apart El Salvador after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Karen Rayes-Rodriguez gave thanks she made it out. Her 1989 journey remains forever frozen in her mind, and she says she?ll never lose empathy for those who risk everything for a life of peace and freedom.
“I have a lot of respect for them, but at the same time, I feel really sorry for them,” Rayes-Rodriguez says. “Even three dollars to them is a lot compared to what they made before.”
Rayes-Rodriguez, 26, crossed the border illegally but since became a citizen when her mother married an American.
When she traveled thousands of miles by banana truck, train and bus, Rayes-Rodriguez says, she never had to worry about starvation or homelessness, as do so many who cross the border today.
Her mother had been taken in by an American family as a housekeeper four years before Rayes-Rodriguez immigrated, and her stepfather helped her get used to American life.
Today, Rayes-Rodriguez says she sees the horizon of possibilities for immigrants receding because of a crackdown on illegals throughout the state and country. Most proposed immigration laws, she says, would make it much tougher for new immigrants.
“It almost feels like it?s only aimed at the Hispanic community and it?s not aimed at anybody else,” Rayes-Rodriguez says. “I do think it?s discriminatory.”
State and local officials cracking down on illegal immigrants say illegals drain the economy, requiring basics such as health care without giving anything in return.
They also say illegal immigrants break laws, form gangs to survive and are difficult to track.
At St. John Roman Catholic Church in Westminster, volunteers started services a few years ago for the county?s growing immigrant population.
The nonprofit United Hands of Carroll County, which helps immigrants get acclimated to life in America, has get-togethers afterward with food and music from their culture.
A Central American theme on a Sunday afternoon introduced dozens of families to the county?s Get Connected Family Resource Center, where they can get help with addiction, abuse and developmental disabilities, problems anyone can face, whether native or foreign-born, legal or illegal.
When Rayes-Rodriguez attended Eldersburg Middle School, she and her sister were the only Hispanic students. Everyone else was white, and Rayes-Rodriguez hated going to school.
“There was a lot of racism,” she recalls. “I used to get beat up on the bus. I used to hate it because I knew what was coming.”
She?s considering attending Towson University to pursue a career in music that would have been out of reach had she stayed in El Salvador, where education often stops after eighth grade.
Until then, she?ll work an apprenticeship at a hair salon, attend class and help out at United Hands ? humbled, she says, that she?s made it this far.
