They paid the alien smugglers, or coyotes, $1,500
each
and were promised jobs in South Carolina as sheet metal workers.

It took the six men just a few days to get from their homes near Mexico
City to Aqua Prieta, Mexico, just across the border from here, where
they
used the code name they had been given to hire other coyotes who would
take
them across the border and then on to South Carolina.

Getting over the 14-foot fence that separates this town from Aqua
Prieta
was easy.

But two miles into the United States, they were robbed by their new
coyotes
and left in the desert without food or water. Three days later, they
flagged down a U.S. Border Patrol agent on a highway and surrendered.

Sitting in the darkness along the highway while three Border Patrol
agents
began the lengthy paperwork that would see them returned across the
border,
one of the men, Jaime, said in Spanish he had no idea what they were
going
to do.

"We don't have any money and no way to get back to our families," he
said.

"We'll see them again tomorrow or maybe the next day," said Willie
Barber,
a field operations supervisor at the Border Patrol's Douglas station.
"Once
they get stranded at the border, the only real option they have is to
try
again to cross into the United States and find a job. We've seen it a
million times."