The Coyotes Working the US Side of the Border Are Often Highly Vulnerable, Too
Dennis Wilson, who was incarcerated for three and a half years for transporting people who’d entered the US illegally.
Photographer: Kaylee Greenly Beal for Bloomberg Businessweek
Dennis Wilson spent most of his days in early 2017 at an Exxon station in Corpus Christi, Texas, panhandling so he could buy food and meth. He’d arrive in the morning, park his walker between the ice machine and the Redbox movie kiosk and hold out a striped plastic cup.
One day, after a few hours, Wilson took stock of what he’d collected: about $50. Not enough, but a start. He’d been staying with friends after months of sleeping wherever he could find a safe place on the streets: under a freeway overpass, on a bus station bench, in a tent pitched in gritty sand. Then 54, he’d grappled with unstable housing since losing his job as a kitchen supervisor at Denny’s and succumbing to the addiction he’d battled from adolescence.