Elvira Herrera ran into a dark alley in a thundering rainstorm as her boyfriend gave chase. She jumped into a dumpster to escape. Afraid he was waiting for her nearby, she spent the night there.

They had only been together for a few months. Herrera was 18, and the guy chasing her was her first boyfriend.

Born in Tijuana, Herrera was raised in Colorado. She later moved to the small town of Brawley, California, a half hour from the border with Mexico to be with her boyfriend. A naturalized American citizen, she is one of the many immigrants living in Imperial County who encountered challenges she wasn’t ready for.

Growing up, Herrera and her siblings didn’t learn about drugs, she said. Nor were they taught about boyfriends, sex or pregnancies.

“My parents sheltered us so much that I never saw red flags," she said. "And so finding out that [my boyfriend] was a heroin addict, and that's the reason [for his abuse] most of the time... He'd be upset because he didn’t have money for his drugs, and he would take it out on me.”

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), in California, one in three women and over 30% of men experience such abuse. In 2020, California lawmakers passed legislation extending the statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit for domestic violence from one year to five years.

Judith Klein-Pritchard, director of the legal services at WomanHaven , the only state-approved comprehensive domestic violence agency in Imperial County, said the organization received more than 2,000 calls—hotline, shelter and walk-ins—in 2022, mostly from people who didn’t call law enforcement.

There were more than 500 calls related to domestic violence in 2021, of which around 80% involved substance abuse, according to the Domestic Violence Response Team (DVRT), a program connected to the district attorney’s office of Imperial County.

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Interviews with survivors, advocates, legal advisors and law enforcement point to a much larger number of cases going unreported owing to the sensitive intersection of abuse, addiction and migration.

It is not just the abusers who suffer from addiction, but also the abused, noted licensed psychologist Julie Hayden, co-founder of RhombusCounseling. which is a probation-department approved outpatient facility for drug and alcohol addiction, and the center in Imperial County has year-round, weekly groups for people convicted of domestic violence.

Addiction and domestic abuse frequently intersect in general, Hayden said, but in Imperial, the correlation is stronger due to higher level of abuse, child abuse, sexual trauma and violence.

Ashley Harris, 35, was in the process of testifying against the man who sexually assaulted her nearly half her life ago when she met her future husband. He seemed kind, understanding and stood by her throughout the entire process.

But there was a problem.

“He was a functioning alcoholic,” Harris said, she was familiar with what that meant because her father was too.

After getting married, she repeatedly told her husband that his drinking worried her. They broke up four times over the course of their 16-year relationship. She would leave, and he would promise to do better. But within a few months, he would start drinking again. Despite the tumultuous bond, they had a child.

“When he was sober. He would talk to me like a normal person…he would apologize for everything,” Harris said. “And then, at the flip of a switch, he'd be drinking and go right back to being this very, very mean person.”

Nearly half of women nationally experience at least one psychologically aggressive behavior by an intimate partner, according to the NCADV , and seven in 10 women who suffer psychological abuse show signs of depression and/or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Harris finally found the strength to ask for a divorce and, after meeting someone else, temporarily moved out. Before long, she ended up back with her husband, and by the middle of 2022, the situation seemed increasingly dangerous to her.

Soon after, she realized she was pregnant again. He was away for a while when to make extra money to feed the coming baby, Herrera began selling coffee at a bus stop on a street corner near where they lived. With the money she saved, she started going to night school. She guesses it was the grandmother who called and told Herrera’s boyfriend that Herrera was away more often. He came back and beat her assuming that she was cheating on him.

Herrera was convinced by her boyfriend’s grandmother that her own family had abandoned her.

“I didn't know who to talk to. I didn't know who to call,” she said. She believed there was no point in calling the police because she thought they wouldn’t be able to help her in any way; she had nowhere to go.

In 2021, over 90% of the people who never called the police were wary of how the police would react, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline survey. Most clients that come to WomanHaven don’t call the cops, Klein-Pritchard said. There are several reasons victims in Imperial County don’t call authority.

Hover to hear Harris talk about finding all her clothes in a dumpster.

Tap to hear Harris talk about finding all her clothes in a dumpster.

Photo credit: Ashley Harris

Most of those who call the police earn little to no income, Klein-Pritchard said, because otherwise the biggest fear victims have is losing their source of income.

“What if their abusers are in law enforcement?" she said. "What if they work in one of our prisons or they work for the Border Patrol? They could, they will lose their job. So, no, they don't want to call the cops.”

Other reasons to not call the cops is undocumented people’s fear of being expelled from the country. Herrera, who has become a domestic abuse advocate, estimates at least three in every four abused women she has worked with are migrants, who usually came to work on the farms. Crossing the border comes with its own challenges. 80% of immigrant victims polled said they feared reporting their abuse to the police.

Struggles in Succession

In 2022, Ashley reached out to WomanHaven to get a temporary restraining order against her husband, which she said was accompanied with a kick out order, so he had to leave the house. He got the lights and water to be shut off and Harris and her daughter had to move to a hotel.

Harris found an apartment—which would not be ready until mid-October—with the help of WomanHaven. While waiting, she found out something worse. Their 14-year-old daughter told Harris that her dad would hug her too close and for too long and that she was not comfortable around her father.

When they were living in the house, her daughter who was around twelve years old, would crawl into bed with dad. "I didn't see a problem with that,” Harris said. “She mentioned that she had crawled into bed with him and that he had rolled over and taken her hand and put it on…his…area.”

Harris told her daughter to avoid being alone with her father. She worked her day job and then spent her evenings fixing her apartment. She said, apart fromall things that happened, she saw that her child was afraid of her dad.

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Herrera was in her twenties when her daughter was born and her boyfriend stopped being around the house for a while. But the respite was short-lived.

One day when their daughter was six months old, he locked Herrera in the spare room of their apartment. Herrera pushed against the window with a pillow until the stuck window loosened up. She sandwiched her daughter between pillows, wrapped her in a blanket, tied her with a sheet and lowered her out of the window before she squeezed herself through too.

Carrying her infant, Herrera ran — and didn’t stop until she reached her parents’ place. She said that he continued to harass her for two years, and that police couldn’t find him.

Herrera began to work on herself in therapy. She didn’t feel safe enough to get into another relationship for five years when she met a man who seemed nice and they got married.

Years later he began to record conversations, take away her phone, and wait outside where she worked without a good reason.

In 2008, they separated but he continued to live in the trailer on their ranch, harassing her, she doesn't know if he'd be drunk or high: banging on her door and asking to have sex with him, because she was legally his wife. Two years later she finally asked for a divorce.

Herrera woke up one day with a bad feeling as though something was going to happen. She got home from work and her husband’s truck wasn’t there. She went into her trailer, put her phone on a table and walked into her room.

The door shut behind her.

Intimate partner homicides committed with firearms are on the rise. An abuser’s access to a firearm increases the risk of femicide by 1,000%.

According to Herrera, the sheriff’s department missed to collect important evidence. Herrera had to tell the police that the rifle, blanket, rope, club and screwdrivers were still there.

“The only thing they took was my clothes because I was wearing it. When the case closed, they gave me my nails. And they gave me some notes… And my dress. That's all they returned to me.”

Sheriff's department's records team could not locate the case to provide clarification on the details.

Herrera said she was in a wheelchair for a year. Around that time, her husband was arrested, got bail and when he tried coming after her again, he was arrested again. When she was moving around with a crutch, the district attorney’s office called to interview her to assess whether she had been raped.

“One: they didn’t have an advocate for me. Two: I start talking about the rape and they were all men. And one girl... And I felt like, okay, I'm an advocate, I'll be okay, but not even halfway I start crying.”

Years later, on a hunch, Herrera asked for the minutes of the court and discovered that district attorney had made a deal with her ex-husband in which he agreed to not bring rape charges, which spared him a long prison sentence.

“And that's something that they didn't tell me,” Herrera said. “No one told me that they made a deal with him.”

The DA’s office did not give out any details regarding the case citing confidentiality.

Moving On

Harris still wants to believe her husband when he says he must have been drunk and confused their daughter with Harris, even if it doesn't make sense to her.

“The reason as to why or how it happened doesn't matter, because the fact is, that is his daughter. And it shouldn't have happened.”

Each time Harris left him, it became easier to identify the problems. Each time she came back, she tried her best to correct them. But, she said, she was focusing on the wrong things: childhood problems and depression that had gone untreated for her entire life. Harris rationalized being abused.

Survivors often develop emotional, but unhealthy attachment to their abusers as a result of cycles of abuse that are periodically reinforced. This is called “trauma bonding,” and it can lead abused people to hope for changes that will never come unless they extricate themselves from the situation they are in.

“One specific thing that I had to work on was my self-confidence and my ability to recognize that I am worthy of something better,” Harris said. I deserve better. ”

According to Hayden, a solution in a place like Imperial is more therapists and psychologists. And state and federal funding are needed to train people to work in the area.

“There's constant domestic violence,” said Cindy Fimbers, a domestic violence counselor. They see it a lot more because they are a very small community. DVRT encounters difficulties when victims need services in the long run, especially if they depend on their abuser to help with finances.

It takes a long time for people to recognize that the psychological abuse going on in the family is not part of life, said Chief Investigator Justin Matus.

It could be months, if not years, before they can get into any type of counseling. And so people have to go out of the county to receive such services without any or very little funds. This also affects their cooperation through different stages of the court proceedings.

With DVRT, it was the first time in the county that a nonprofit and a government agency combined forces to help domestic violence victims through the entire process, Matus said.

They are doing community outreach, briefings with local law enforcement agencies, targeting the youth and running a social media campaign to spread awareness. They hope to continue to draw attention to get general fund money going forward in case the grant goes away.

Herrera talks on the value of advocates and moving on.

Photo credit: Elvira Herrera

For Hayden there is hope.

“I would say one cool thing is people are open to help,” she said. “They tried everything and nothing's worked and they are looking forward to something new, trying something else.”

Herrera realized the importance of being an advocate and the difference it makes to have someone as a support when she was alone recounting the story of her assault. Now, she wants to be what she didn’t have and fight for other survivors.