With the support of Longreads, I have spent the past eight months traveling, living with and interviewing migrants in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. There are some 60 million displaced people worldwide, and they have become the slave labor of the future—a population at risk to human trafficking whose bodies are used for labor ranging from sex work, to packing drugs, to picking coffee.

I interviewed a 13-year-old Guatemalan girl whose leg had been amputated due to violence suffered on the migrant trail, a transgender woman fleeing attempted murder in El Salvador, and indigenous women migrating because they wanted better access to healthcare and sexual and reproductive rights. The reasons people migrate and the violence they suffer are the stories of our time.

Alice Driver

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