“I went for a long run in the park. I guess I lost track of the time. I needed to think.”

“Well, I needed to talk to you. C’mere.” He gestured to the laptop open on the table. “You have to see this.”

“Okay, just let me grab a shower.”

“No. Now,” he insisted, and he pointedly pulled out the chair next to his.

He’d spent the day at the ICE facility in Elizabeth, he told me. One of the four women on my list had already been processed out—a euphemism for deported—but he was able to interview the other three with the help of the interpreters he took with him. He had videos of all three interviews.

“Watch,” he said, and pushed a button on the keyboard.

The video flickered onto the screen. A young Asian woman sat at a table with her hands folded prayerlike in front of her. Mark’s voice sounded off-screen, and as the woman answered, another voice could be heard off-screen in a halting translation.

The young woman’s name was Peou, and she was from a small village in Cambodia. It was very poor, and there was not enough work and not enough food for her family. She learned that there were jobs in Kampot, and so she walked there, over many days, to a job center near the city. The people there put her on a bus to an airstrip near the coast. Hundreds of people were waiting there, men and women and children, most from Cambodia but others from Thailand and Vietnam. They’d all heard there was good work here, though no one knew what it was. They had to wait a long time until a plane appeared high in the sky. It circled the airstrip slowly, like a vulture, and the people craned their necks and shaded their eyes to watch it. Finally it landed, and the stairs came down, and a fancy lady came out.

She was very pale, with hair nearly as white as her skin. Some people thought she had an American accent, and some thought it was British. She wore clothes like Peou had only ever seen in a magazine.

“Gotta be Lucy Carter-Jones,” Mark said.

Another woman walked behind the fancy lady holding an umbrella over her head, and a third woman trailed after them with many bottles of water in her arms. They went into the hangar—garage, the translator said first, then corrected herself—and after a few bewildered minutes, the people followed. A platform had been set up inside with two tables in front of it. The fancy lady stood on the platform, and the other two women sat at the tables with big stacks of red and green cards. The fancy lady had a microphone, and she told the people about the jobs they would have. They would make clothes, she told them, in a factory, but a bigger, better factory than they had ever seen. It had air-conditioning, the fancy lady said. So did the rooms where the workers would sleep and the big room where they would eat their meals.