BY JUSTO ROBLES
In the final hours of Sept. 15, 2022, Pablo Silva and four other Venezuelan men were wandering downtown Sacramento, a city they had never heard of, searching for a roof over their heads.
They didn’t find it.
They had traveled thousands of miles to escape violence and poverty in Venezuela. Silva said he and the men had asked for asylum at the border in Texas and, after they were processed, immigration officials gave them paperwork with an address, saying it was a shelter in Sacramento.
To this day, Silva isn’t sure who bought his ticket to California, but penniless and hungry he accepted, expecting a better future in the state capital.
After hours of walking in Sacramento, Silva spotted the address — 1107 9th St. — and imagined himself sleeping in a warm bed inside the tall building.
But a security guard there stopped him and the other men before they could knock and said, with the help of Google Translate, that there was no shelter in the Forum Building, a 10-story edifice that houses offices for lobbyists, two blocks from the Capitol.
The five immigrants, who barely knew each other, searched all night for a warm place to rest. At times they slept on the ground, huddled together on a park bench, and even ducked into portable toilets until the smell of human feces got to them.
A year later Silva still lives in Sacramento. Recently he retraced his steps from that night, telling his story of leaving his family in Venezuela, seeing the bodies of those who didn’t survive their journey to the United States, and almost giving up during that first night of…
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