Family remembers tragic Guatemalan migrant: ‘She told me to pray for her’

CASERIO LOS VICENTES, Guatemala — The night before she was to cross the Rio Grande into Texas, 20-year-old Claudia Gomez Gonzalez called her mother in this pastoral hamlet in the shadow of the Chicabal Volcano.

“She was so excited to finally cross the border,” said Lidia Gonzalez Vasquez, 40. “She told me to pray for her, and she told me that she would pray before she went.”

It was the last time Gonzalez would hear from her eldest daughter, who had left home weeks earlier to make the 1,200-mile journey by bus and on foot with a human smuggler, or ­“coyote,” to the US.

Claudia, a newly minted accountant, was following the path taken by many of this Mayan hamlet’s 500 residents desperate to improve their economic situation, including her own father.

Gilberto Gomez Vicente, 40, settled with his sister in Atlanta and saved enough money working as an electrician to buy a Toyota pickup.

After several years of living illegally in the US, he was deported in 2017. By then, he had saved enough money to complete construction of his modest brick-and-stucco house on the edge of town, where many of the homes are still made of adobe.

But without an American job, he could not afford Claudia’s dream of continuing her studies at a private university.

“She was really intelligent, and she told me she didn’t want to turn into a housewife like the other girls here,” said Gonzalez.

Claudia borrowed $10,000 from an aunt in the US to pay the coyote and left home last spring with five others.

On the night of May 22, 2018, she made her final excited phone call to her mom, telling her she was planning to cross the Rio Grande the following day.

It was shortly after noon, and Claudia and her group were in Rio Bravo, Texas, only a third of a mile from the river, when they encountered a Customs and Border Protection agent.

According to court documents, two people from Claudia’s group ran back toward the river and two others ran toward an abandoned trailer to hide. Claudia and another migrant stood still.

“The agent drew his weapon,” court papers say. “When Claudia took a step, the agent aimed at her, pulled the trigger and shot her in the head.”

By the time she hit the ground, face down, she was already dead.

In an initial press release issued the same day, CBP said that Claudia’s group used “blunt objects” to attack the agent and that Claudia was one of the assailants. In a release two days later, the agency said Claudia “rushed” the agent, with no mention of “blunt objects.”

A spokesman for CBP told The Post last week that the matter was “under investigation” by the FBI and Texas Rangers and declined further comment. The unidentified agent, described as a 15-year veteran of Border Protection, was immediately placed on administrative leave, CBP said.

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union in Texas and New York law firm Kirkland & Ellis filed a $100 million lawsuit on behalf of Claudia’s family against CBP and the Department of Homeland Security.

“Claudia posed no threat to anyone, as would have been obvious from the slightest glance,” legal papers say. “She was a petite woman … She was clearly unarmed.”

Although it has been more than a year since Claudia’s death, Gomez’s eyes were moist with tears last week as he led a Post reporter and photographer to her grave in nearby La Victoria cemetery — a muddy hillside where the graves are painted in traditional Mayan pastels.

On her tomb reads the epitaph: “She died in the United States, seeking the American dream.”

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