A year ago, Bayron Ardón began his journey to the United States from Guatemala crammed in the back of a trucking container with 75 other people. His stay in Rhode Island may soon end because of a traffic stop on Route 95.

Journal photo / Glenn Osmundson

The March 6 raid at the Michael Bianco factory, in New Bedford, sparked a heated debate over illegal immigration. This is the third story in an occasional series examining how immigration, both legal and illegal, is affecting Rhode Island and its institutions.

Bayron Ardón says his illegal journey from Guatemala to Rhode Island began inside a trucking container crammed and layered with 75 men, women and children.

With barely enough room to stand, the first group squeezed through a hidden entrance in the front of the container, then curled against each other like stacked clamshells. The smugglers placed a board on top of the first group, and a second layer crawled in, Ardon said, in an account he gave through an interpreter last week.

The truck took 12 hours to reach a way station in Puebla, Mexico.

“We were very tight. We couldn’t move,” says Ardón, 22, who left Guatemala one year ago. “You can’t breathe. There was no air. It was like, crazy,” he says. “Nobody drank. Nobody ate,” he said, because there was no way to go to the bathroom.

Three children and one man fainted and slumped onto the people next to them after a fan broke, he said, three hours before the truck reached Puebla. Other passengers revived the unconscious children and man by fanning them with their hands.

From Puebla, smugglers took the group by truck to a way station in Hidalgo; by bus to Sonora, Mexico, and then by van to the U.S. border.

Carrying water, fruit, and canned beans and tuna, and led by a pollero, or coyote, the group began a four-day trek through the Sonora-Arizona desert, where ground temperatures often reach 130 degrees — a perilous route that illegal immigrants have used increasingly since 9/11 to avoid heightened U.S. security at established checkpoints.

But Ardón’s group did not avoid detection.

“We were resting about three o’clock in the morning in the mountains,” Ardón said, “when we heard some horses. The Border Patrol said, ‘Stop, in the name of the law,’ and everyone started to run.” By dawn, he says, “they had already caught 25 people.”

Ardón ran, and kept going.

The $7,200 he paid in Guatemala to hire the pollero included a relay ride by truck and van to Los Angeles and then New York City, where his cousin picked him up and drove him to Rhode Island. Like millions of other illegal immigrants in this country — including thousands in Rhode Island — Ardón hid in the shadows.

He went to work, he came home. He went to work. He came home. He watched TV. He went to work.

But one day last month on Route 95, a traffic stop threatened to cut short Ardón’s time in America.

And now he wonders: Was it worth it?

THE JOURNEY took shape in Ardón’s mind after his father died last year.

“My father was murdered, by a drug user — a drunkard,” Ardón said. “I never wanted to come here. If my father were alive, I wouldn’t have come here.”

The death gave him impetus to leave his Guatemalan village of Chosavic, in the state of Quiche, with its maize and sugar-cane fields, and head to Rhode Island, so he could support his mother from afar.

He planned to join relatives and friends from Chosavic who had already established new lives here.

“My sister told me about a job in a company processing fish,” Ardón said. “She said there were jobs available in Rhode Island.”

The 21-year-old arranged his illegal journey through his uncle in Guatemala.

“I paid 40,000 quetsales [$7,200] to be delivered to Rhode Island,” Ardón said, “with five-percent interest per month.”

Being “delivered” to Rhode Island included Ardón’s trek through the treacherous Sonora-Arizona crossing, a mountain-desert route established to circumvent increased border patrols after 9/11. According to numerous human-rights organizations, increasing numbers of migrants die every year in their attempts to cross the border, many of them from the heat.

Diverted from traditional, busy crossing routes in California and Texas, the group passed through an area where border patrols use infrared light to track movement in the desert; where armed vigilante groups such as the Minutemen track illegal immigrants in the desert, and human-rights organizations such as Humane Borders have established emergency water stations.

“In the desert, we slept during the day and we walked at night. The crossing lasted for four nights,” Ardón said. “We ran out of water and food on the third night.”

“Some people got hurt. A woman got hurt badly. We took turns dragging her during the crossing. At the end, she was left in the desert, but the pollero helped her to cross. He took her through a short route, but a more dangerous one, to Arizona. He saved her.”

ONCE IN Rhode Island, Ardón paid an additional $200 for a fake green card (a document that allows a permanent resident to work and live permanently in the United States) and a phony Social Security number that he presented when he applied for the job.

A van picked him up and drove him to work, where he spent eight hours a day packing fish into boxes, for $7.10 an hour. He said the business was in Rhode Island but declined to identify it. State and federal taxes were deducted from his pay.

He does not have health insurance. He does not have a driver’s license.

“Work, home, work,” he said. “You’re afraid to be caught and deported. I don’t go out to the street a lot.”

His only outings are to the supermarket, and to Western Union, where he wires money to his mother.

Occasionally, he goes to Roger Williams Park. But mostly, he stays inside an apartment he shares with three others for about $250 a month, listens to the radio, watches Spanish-language TV programs and rents DVDs — his favorite being Spanish action videos.

In one year, he has acculturated slightly. He owns a cell phone, and has acquired a taste for hamburgers. And when a reporter admired his “Life is Fast” T-shirt, Ardón grinned and said he bought it at Wal-Mart.

“Everything is more cheap, and everything is easy for one here,” he said. Roads are paved. His wages buy more food. But given his low profile, “it’s a lonely life.”

Nonetheless, Ardón had established a routine, and a small measure of comfort: he had work, a place to live, and a small group of relatives and friends to lean on.

All that was put in jeopardy April 7, when a state trooper pulled over a van Ardón was riding in on Route 95.

“WE WERE coming from work, when the patrolman [trooper] started tailgating the van and he stopped us,” Ardón said.

His account meshes with that of a state police spokesman, who reported that the driver had been speeding. But while state police said that the driver “traveled quite a distance without heeding the emergency lights and siren,” Ardón said the driver “pulled right over.”

The trooper asked the driver “for [identification] papers,” Ardón said, “so the driver gave the papers” to the trooper.

“And then the police asked one of my co-workers whether he spoke English, and he said, ‘A little bit.’ Then the policeman asked every one of us if we spoke English … and then he opened the van door and he asked each one of us for ID. We said we didn’t have any. Then he asked all of us, are we from Guatemala? And we said yes.”

The trooper “got a little angry,” Ardón said, “and he said, ‘Out.’ And when my co-worker saw the policeman was angry, he took out a Guatemalan consulate ID” and handed it to the trooper, who returned to his car.

Inside the van, “we were talking that maybe Immigration was going to come, and we would be deported,” Ardón said. A half-hour later, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came and took them into custody.

The driver and his 13 passengers, including Ardón, were taken to the local ICE office, on Dyer Street in Providence, where they were booked, fingerprinted and photographed.

Ten were released on their own recognizance — a policy informally known as “catch and release” — generally applied when an illegal immigrant has not committed any crime in the United States. Three who had outstanding deportation orders were held, the state police said.

Ardón said that after he and his co-workers were arrested, “we were fired” from the fish-processing plant.

Now he is waiting for his notice to appear at a hearing in U.S. Immigration Court. Given his lack of a criminal record — according to his own statement and evidenced by his immediate release from ICE custody — he will probably get voluntary deportation, which would allow Ardón the opportunity to legally return to the United States in the future.

Asked whether he thinks he will be deported, Ardón shrugs. His eyebrows lift involuntarily, and he runs his hand through his hair.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

Is he glad he came to America?

“Not too much,” he said. “I miss my family, and I’m not in my country.”

Should he be forced to return to Guatemala, where even low-paying jobs are scarce, Ardón will face a near-impossible situation.

“I still owe the coyote $2,000,” he said, for leading him through the mountains and desert to this new life in America.

kziner@projo.com