Fleeing a gang, Pedro Cordova joined thousands traveling north last fall from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He endured tear gas, days without food and trekked thousands of miles to Tijuana in November. But it wasn’t the complicated U.S. immigration policy or active-duty troops deployed to the border that slowed Cordova’s northward journey.

It was Linda Romero Sánchez, a 29-year-old from Ensenada. She’s the coordinator of the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter in Tijuana and a mother to three children.

From the moment he laid eyes on her, right there on Avenida Constitución, less than a block from the U.S.-Mexico border, his journey norte: forgotten.

“I started passing by every day just to catch a glimpse of her,” Cordova said. “Her smile just fixed everything for me.”

Romero works long hours, sometimes 15 hours a day, helping thousands of migrants a year.

There have been times when she’s had to put her body in between domestic violence victims and their abusers, and “show cartel members the door,” as she puts it.

On Wednesday morning, she apologizes for nearly dozing off between intakes.

“We didn’t get to sleep last night until after midnight,” Romero said with a yawn. “I didn’t even feed my own kids until after 10 p.m.”

Tijuana shelters are once again crowded to the brink of crisis, and shelter workers are bracing for more arrivals as people are sent back under the new U.S. “Remain in Mexico” policy.

“Okay, breakfast is at 8:30 a.m. … There is a schedule to charge your phones … At 7 p.m., it’s bedtime for all the kids,” Romero explains to a new arrival — a young woman with long, curly hair, holding a toddler on her lap.

“Do not leave your child here and go somewhere. They must be taken care of by you at all times. When you take a shower, they go with you to bathe.”

Once the paperwork is done, Romero slumps back down toward her desk, nearly drifting off, until something catches her eye from clear across the building.

It’s Cordova, her new husband.

As the 32-year-old Honduran navigates his way through rows of bright-colored tents where the migrants sleep, Romero comes back to life, sitting up straight at her desk and flashing a smile.

“When I see him, it’s like I have all my strength back with me,” she said.

Cordova arrived with the caravan of Central Americans in November, and the two had a whirlwind romance, quickly falling in love.

They aren’t the only ones to have found love in the time of caravans. News reports document at least a dozen marriages between people who met amid the large numbers of people leaving Central America, a migration movement that garnered international news attention and prompted angry tweets from President Trump.

The pair celebrated their wedding Dec. 28, 2018, at Movimiento Juventud.(Romero didn’t want to leave the shelter for the whole day.)

“It happened very fast. Everything happened so fast with our wedding,” she said. “I called my mom, and it was a big surprise.”

They tell their love story over the laughter of about a dozen children watching a movie in the shelter.

“I told her I would take care of her and I just wanted her by my side,” said Cordova, who now works in a partner shelter around the block to be closer to Romero.

Between the two of them, they have five children. Two are in Honduras, and Cordova doesn’t know when or if he will ever see them again.

“He cries about that sometimes,” Romero says.

Cordova said he has not yet applied for a permanent legal status in Mexico.

He keeps his feelings guarded, but it’s easy to see how proud he is of her and how he fell in love with someone who dedicated her life to welcoming those who walked a similar path he did as a migrant.

When the movie is interrupted by a fight over pan dulce, Cordova steps in to back up Romero, sending the offending youth off to his tent while she wraps her arms around and comforts the other.

Romero said they think about getting regular jobs to have more time with her kids and more money.

“But I like working with people who need me,” she said. “Someone has to have a heart or nothing will change.”

They both know how it feels to be desperate.

Cordova said he fled gang violence, leaving everything he has, even his children behind and he will never return to Honduras.

About 10 years ago, Romero’s family fell on hard times and she came to Tijuana with her children looking for work. They struggled to find shelter.

“I knocked on door after door after door and no one would accept me,” she said.

Before that, she spent parts of her childhood, begging in the streets for change.

“My mom never said to me: ‘How are you feeling today? Do you want me to play with you? Do you want me to help you with your homework?’ ” she tearfully recalls.

Here, she’s able to make sure children get the love and comfort they all deserve, she says.

They say love can conquer all.

For Pedro and Linda, overcoming their pasts may be their biggest obstacle. Much like the forces driving thousands of Central Americans to flee northward, decades of policy is not easily undone.

The two are grappling with how to blend their very different families now stretched thousands of miles apart.

The future looks challenging too.

Recently, Linda didn’t have money to buy her 11-year-old daughter a birthday present. The migrants at Movimiento Juventud all chipped in together to buy a birthday cake.

Their family shares a one-room apartment; the kids sleep on cobijas on the floor, and there’s a baby on the way.

Linda says before she met Pedro she never liked her own name because in Spanish, “linda” means pretty.

“When I was in grade school, kids would tease me that it wasn’t for me,” she explains.

“The truth is she’s a beautiful woman with a wonderful heart,” Pedro counters.

All they know is right now, in this moment, when Pedro looks at Linda, he sees the most beautiful woman he’s ever laid eyes on.

And in Pedro, Linda found what was missing all her life. She finally has someone on her side, and with that, her beauty shines bright.

A 20-hour blackout in Venezuela shuttered schools and public services across the country, ratcheting up tensions for a populace already struggling amid economic and political crises.

Electricity was finally being restored to parts of the country Friday afternoon after a breakdown in the national power grid hit nearly the entire nation.

Power outages occur frequently in the capital, Caracas, and the rest of the country, but this week’s blackout was one of the most serious in recent years.

It hit at rush hour Thursday, trapping hundreds of people for hours in the Caracas subway and leaving countless others to find their way home on darkened streets and paths.

The outage sparked fears of increased violence in the capital, which already suffers high levels of violent crime, and put hospital patients in danger.

Carlos Manriquez was standing on a Caracas street Friday trying to find a way to get his 60-year-old sister to the hospital for her dialysis treatment.

The metro wasn’t running. There were no buses. Even if they made it, the 42-year-old said, there was no guarantee the hospital would have generators so his sister could get the treatment.

“How is it possible that our country has arrived in this situation — so dramatic, so sad — where we are so desperate?” Manriquez asked.

Zulay Garcia just wanted water for her boys, ages 2 and 4. The 32-year-old in Caracas’ Baruta neighborhood was trying to make a purchase but having no luck.

“It’s been more than 24 hours without services, water, telephone and electricity, and I need water for the children, food for the children,” she said, her frustration growing. “They want to charge me for water in dollars and I have no dollars.”

At the national level, the blackout quickly led to finger-pointing and accusations of sabotage among sitting President Nicolas Maduro, opposition leader and self-declared interim president Juan Guaidó, and U.S. officials.

Communication Minister Jorge Rodriguez said a hydroelectric complex in eastern Venezuela had been sabotaged, saying an attacker or attackers “tried to leave the country without power for several days.” He did not specify the nature of the sabotage he was alleging.

Maduro was more pointed, writing on Twitter: "The electricity war declared and directed by the imperialist United States against our people will be overcome!"

Critics say the Maduro government has let the electric power system fall into decline, a symptom of the country’s deteriorating infrastructure.

Guaidó, in a video on social media, blamed the outage on “corruption in Miraflores,” a reference to the presidential palace.

The U.S., which supports Guaidó’s claim to the presidency and his calls for Maduro’s resignation, also laid the blame at the sitting president’s feet.

Elliott Abrams, special U.S. envoy for Venezuela, called the outage “a reminder that the country’s once quite sophisticated infrastructure has been plundered and allowed to decay under Maduro’s misrule.”

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo said on Twitter: “Maduro’s policies bring nothing but darkness.” He followed up with, “No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.”

Maduro is increasingly unpopular and isolated, charging that the opposition is conspiring with the U.S. and other foreign governments in an attempt to overthrow him.

Guaidó, an opposition politician who declared himself interim president on Jan. 23, has enlisted the support of more than 50 countries as well as multinational bodies in support of his calls for Maduro to resign.

Abrams said Friday that the U.S. had information that most members of the military want Maduro to step down.

Although up to 700 military personnel have deserted in recent weeks, the command appears to still favor Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader whose reelection in May was widely viewed as a sham.

The handpicked successor of the late President Hugo Chavez, Maduro was elected in April 2013, a month after Chavez died of cancer. Since then, rising poverty and crime in the once wealthy oil-producing nation have prompted a massive exodus of Venezuelans fleeing the country in search of better lives.

Hyperinflation and scarcities of food, medicine and basic goods from car parts to coffins have made life miserable for the millions who remain.

Many streets in Caracas remained in eerie darkness late Friday, with many residents staying inside for safety.

But Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, who’d toured the city Friday, told reporters that conditions were “normal.”

Late last August, 300 sub-Saharan migrants ran from the hills above this small Spanish enclave on the northern coast of Africa and stormed the 20-foot-high barbed-wire fence separating Spain from Morocco.

When 118 of them reached the other side, they hugged and yelped in disbelief. After journeying thousands of miles, after months of lying in wait in the forest for the perfect moment to cross, they had made it to Europe.

But the euphoria wouldn’t last. A day later, 116 of the migrants were deported back to Morocco. After mass crossings into Ceuta, the 7-square-mile Spanish city of 85,000 on the Strait of Gibraltar and a stone’s throw from continental Europe, Spain has cracked down.

Spain’s government, praised in the last year as more welcoming of immigrants than others in Europe, has partnered with Morocco to stop migrants from crossing its borders, or sometimes even approaching — prompting outcry from human rights groups.

“Spain has put in place a policy of externalization of border control to the Moroccans,” said Virginia Alvarez, a researcher at Amnesty International Spain. “And Morocco does not comply with human rights standards.”

The forests outside Ceuta where migrants once waited to cross are quiet; those who’ve made it into the city are laying low for fear of deportation. And in the northern Moroccan city of Tangier, migrants waiting to cross the Strait of Gibraltar tell of police raiding homes and packing people on buses to the country’s south.

As historically high-migrant destinations including Italy closed their borders to refugees, Spain became the most popular route into Europe. Last year, 57,000 people crossed illegally into Spain, according to Frontex, the European Union’s border and coast guard agency — surpassing 23,000 crossing into Italy and 56,000 into Greece and Cyprus.

The surge in migration to Spain — including a boat holding more than 600 immigrants turned away by Italy and Malta in June — prompted the nation to open a temporary refugee camp in Cadiz.

But human rights groups argue that Europe and especially Spain, which has struggled to accommodate the new arrivals, are outsourcing border policing to Morocco.

Last year, the European Union pledged about $159 million to Morocco in order to contain migration into Spain. In 2018, Moroccan officials intercepted 89,000 attempts to illegally cross into Spain, according to the country’s interior ministry.

Morocco is building new encampments for officers patrolling its border with Ceuta, an autonomous city with its own government like Spanish regions such as Catalonia or Basque Country. The Moroccans work in tandem with the Spanish civil guard, which monitors the fence’s cameras and motion sensors to detect potential border crossers.

And across the country last year, Moroccan police swept up thousands of immigrants in home raids, according to data collected by Amnesty International.

In many cases, police send immigrants to the south of Morocco instead of back to their home countries.

“They're treating them like they are their owners, like [the immigrants] are sheep,” said Santiago Agrelo Martinez, the archbishop of Tangier. “They can put them and take them wherever they want.”

Thirty miles southwest of Ceuta, in Tangier, five Senegalese immigrants share the bottom floor of a building in the quiet neighborhood of Souani. Every month, they pool $460 for the two-bedroom flat tucked away in an alley off a street lined with orange trees and restaurants.

Their living situation is unusual, said Cheikh Mbaye, who has lived in the flat for three years and plans to return to Senegal; many immigrants save their money to pay smugglers, and instead cram into smaller apartments with 20 or 30 other people.

Mbaye and the others chose to live in Souani because the risk of a police raid is lower compared with other neighborhoods.

“Each day [the police] come to break into the houses of the migrants who are here, to catch them and take them away to Tiznit,” a city in southern Morocco, said Mbaye, 30.

Lamine Diop, 25, sat on a faded red cushion as he recounted the four times he had been detained and sent to Tiznit. One early morning, police broke down the door to an apartment where he had been staying with more than 25 other immigrants. He was handcuffed, taken to a detention center, then bused to Tiznit. Then he headed north again.

Ndeye Marieme Diop, 28, who is not related to Lamine Diop, has also been deported several times. She lived in Saudi Arabia and Casablanca before paying smugglers 500 euros for a place to stay in Tangier while she waited to cross into Spain. Her father had died and she considered it her responsibility as the oldest child to find a way to earn money for her family, including her 7-year-old child.

In October, police broke down the door of her apartment, and she, too was sent to Tiznit, she said. When she returned to Tangier, she met Mbaye, who offered her a more stable place to stay.

Both Marieme and Lamine Diop said they planned to pay smugglers for a boat trip across the Strait of Gibraltar, a nine-mile stretch where the meeting of the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea creates powerful and dangerous crosscurrents.

Thousands made the attempt last year. Many didn’t make it. On Jan. 12, 53 migrants drowned when their boat capsized in the Alboran Sea.

Immigrants are increasingly choosing a sea route to Spain, according to a government official in Ceuta not authorized to speak on the topic. Spain would not deport immigrants rescued at sea, the official said.

But the country is quick to deport immigrants when they cross by land. For years officials have used a controversial practice known as “pushbacks” to immediately return immigrants to Morocco from the two historically Spanish-controlled cities in northern Africa, Melilla and Ceuta.

In 2018, 1,977 immigrants arrived illegally in Ceuta, according to the Spanish government’s delegation in the city, a decrease from previous years.

But after 800 migrants stormed the border in July, Spain reactivated a 1992 agreement with Morocco allowing for express deportations of migrants to their point of entry — effectively legalizing the rapid deportations already taking place. So when the 118 sub-Saharan migrants crossed the Ceuta fence in August, the policy was in place.

“They rarely have a genuine chance to apply for asylum,” said Judith Sunderland, associate director for Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division. “They whole point of these readmissions agreements is a quick agreement for returns.”

Spanish officials say the migrants were told of the opportunity to apply for asylum but declined. The central government in Madrid received 100 applications for asylum in Ceuta last year, the majority from Algerians.

The Spanish government has defended its practices at the Moroccan border, saying the immigrants who tried to enter Ceuta in July and August were violent, throwing acid and quicklime at police at the border.

“Legally, it’s a very distinct situation from the migrants who we sometimes have to rescue,” Spanish Vice President Carmen Calvo said in August, calling what happened at the Ceuta border “unacceptable.”

Inside the city’s fences, Spanish officials are grappling with a different immigration problem: More than 300 unaccompanied Moroccans younger than 18 are estimated to live in Ceuta.

Some entered legally with their parents and stayed. Others hid under trucks or sneaked through the border with the thousands of Moroccans who cross into Ceuta each day to work.

Though they can stay at a crowded center for minors, many sleep between the concrete blocks of a jetty near the port.

A new proposal from the regional government of Melilla would give unaccompanied minors a deadline of three months before they are sent to their home countries or to other immigrant centers in Spain. One evening, standing on a curb near the port’s western wall, a group of Moroccan immigrants discussed the proposal, worried a similar one could take effect in Ceuta.

Taufek Liaduni, 17, said he wanted to get out of Ceuta as soon as possible. Taufek dropped out of school at 14 and was unable to find work in Tétouan, his hometown. Two months ago, he crossed into Ceuta underneath a trailer, clutching its metal underside and breathing in fumes for an hour as it idled in traffic.

He sleeps under the jetty, braving the cold sea air and the occasional rat that scrambles into his sleeping space. During the day, he wanders the city center asking for food and money. By night, he stakes out the port, waiting for the perfect moment to clamber over into a boat bound for the Iberian Peninsula.

“There’s no other way,” Taufek said.

Some of the city’s residents complain about the immigrants and unaccompanied minors. Posters on the 3,000-member Facebook group “Citizen Insecurity Ceuta” accuse immigrants of committing crime and call for tighter border security.

But some in Ceuta are more sympathetic to the immigrants.

Jose Berrocal lived on his family’s farm at the border with Morocco until he moved into the city center five decades ago, when he was 15 years old. Back then there was no border fence, and people wishing to cross the border could do so easily.

Now, he said from behind the counter of his tobacco shop, everything has changed. His cousins still live on the farm, near where the migrants stormed into Ceuta in August. Spanish civil guard members patrol the road leading to the farm, and no unauthorized visitors are allowed.

Berrocal spoke of the migrants as he handed a customer change: “They’re just trying to find a way to make a living. I understand that.”

It was after dark Wednesday when three buses pulled out of Mosul and headed southeast on a desolate desert road. The passengers were government-backed paramilitary fighters.

The city lights were well behind them when the convoy came under attack. By the time the shooting stopped, six paramilitary members were dead and 31 wounded.

Iraqi authorities quickly identified the culprit: Islamic State.

The attack, one of the deadliest since Iraq declared military victory over the extremist group in December 2017, was the clearest sign yet that the war isn’t over.

It has merely shifted to a new phase: Islamic State is trying to mount a comeback, and the Iraqi military is trying to root out sympathizers and sleeper cells still embedded in the extensive territory the group once controlled.

By many accounts, the government is failing to contain a budding insurgency, the sort of resilient, underground enemy that has outlived governments around the world.

Stripped of its territory — which once encompassed a third of both Iraq and Syria — Islamic State has reverted to its roots, using small, self-contained teams of operatives to conduct small-scale attacks and assassinations and rebuild its smuggling and ransom operations.

“We’re not talking about the networks they used to have. Now it’s cells of five or six people,” said Shamkhi Mansour, a colonel in the intelligence branch of Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Service.

Iraqi military officials, security experts and the U.S. government said that Iraq has failed to develop the extensive intelligence network that would offer the best chance of rooting out the militants.

“We had a victory in that we kicked out Daesh from cities, but we’ve failed in pursuing them in the rural areas and ferreting them out,” said Hisham Hashimi, a counter-terrorism advisor to the government, using a derisive Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

The Pentagon’s inspector general reported last month that Iraq lacked reconnaissance assets, intelligence personnel and surveillance capabilities needed to counteract the group, which advocates an extreme version of Sunni Islam.

Instead, Iraqi forces have resorted to rounding up large numbers of Sunnis and holding sham trials of Islamic State suspects, a strategy that costs the Shiite-dominated government vital support and could increase support for the extremists.

According to activists and security personnel, tens of thousands of people across the country have been wrongly accused of supporting Islamic State because their names are similar to those of wanted militants. There has also been little allowance made for the many people who supported the extremists less out of ideological conviction than out of fear for their lives.

Iraqis caught in the dragnet can languish for months in crowded jails while police visit their neighborhoods to investigate. In many cases, according to three security officers, the police extort bribes to clear people of wrongdoing.

Iraq is all too familiar with the dangers of this strategy.

Nouri Maliki, a Shiite Muslim who served as Iraq’s prime minister from 2006 to 2014, used it against Islamic State.

At the time, the group was operating clandestinely, forging links in rural areas with Sunni leaders sympathetic to its cause, attempting to lay the groundwork for a massive takeover.

Hoping to stomp out any support, Maliki transformed security services into death squads that oppressed Sunni-dominated areas. His approach backfired.

In mid-2014, when Islamic State militants began seizing Iraqi territory and building a caliphate, many Sunnis welcomed them as liberators.

Many Iraqis insist that history is unlikely to repeat itself.

In former Islamic State strongholds such as Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, it’s difficult to find anybody who speaks favorably about the group.

“There is not a single citizen in Mosul who respects Daesh,” said Bashir Hussein Fathi, a politician there. “I haven’t seen a single citizen complimenting them.”

“Even those who were considered good people and who joined the group — now people speak of them badly,” he said. “It’s become a black spot on someone’s character.”

He said residents were cooperating more with security services to pinpoint Islamic State infiltrators, especially after the government reactivated local police groups.

Maj. Gen. Saad Allaq, head of Iraq’s military intelligence directorate, lauded residents in Islamic State areas who “had a primary role in bringing us information against Daesh.”

But he and others said the government was not spending enough funds to cultivate new sources.

In one case described by a security expert who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, the Iraqi government nearly missed the chance to cultivate a high-level defector from Islamic State. The U.S.-led coalition in the region finally stepped in and paid $2 million for his cooperation.

Another problem is that with seven different intelligence services operating in the country, all working with no clear jurisdiction, there is a greater chance of important information getting lost.

A Mosul-based special forces colonel who spoke on the condition that he not be named blamed the issue on a lack of trust among the different security services.

“In America they combined databases and increased coordination over two buildings falling,” he said, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“We haven't done this over whole cities falling.”

Perhaps most worrisome, Islamic State has started operating more openly in rural areas southwest of Mosul, including Hatra, the Hamrin Mountains and the deserts of Anbar.

“We should be having military operations in those remote regions, but there aren’t even reconnaissance flights,” said Mansour, the colonel.

The problem is set to become worse. With Islamic State losing its final bastions in Syria, Iraq has already taken back tens of thousands of its own citizens who had joined the militants.

More are expected to return, including many children steeped in Islamic State’s murderous ideology and forced to take up arms in its “Cubs of the Caliphate” program.

Preventing the militants from gaining a bigger foothold will also require the government to address more basic concerns.

Roughly 1.8 million people are still displaced from their homes and living in camps, and many who have moved back are living in ravaged structures on the verge of collapsing.

Beset by budgetary concerns, the government has provided little compensation and neglected responsibilities such as lifting rubble and even removing corpses.

“People want a good relationship with the government,” said Fathi, the politician. “But it has offered them no plan for people to be patient or to at least know what will happen to them.

Huawei is suing the U.S. government over a law banning federal agencies from using its equipment, the latest maneuver in the Chinese tech giant’s global offensive against American pressure and criticism that it poses a national security risk.

Huawei’s inexpensive, effective technology is attractive to many countries planning 5G wireless networks, but U.S. officials have been touring the world arguing it poses an unacceptable security risk, particularly for allies with which the U.S. shares intelligence.

The White House says Beijing could exploit the technology to carry out cyberspace intrusions and espionage, and Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo recently warned European partners not to use Huawei to equip 5G networks.

But Huawei, desperate to protect its share of a crucial market, has been fighting back.

“Congress acted unconstitutionally as judge, jury and executioner,” Huawei executive Guo Ping said Thursday after announcing the court action.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Plano, Texas — home to Huawei’s U.S. headquarters — targets a U.S. ban on government agencies using its equipment or dealing with third parties that use its equipment.

"The U.S. Congress has repeatedly failed to produce any evidence to support its restrictions on Huawei products,” Guo said at a news conference in Shenzhen, China.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, last week, Huawei boasted it had already signed up 64 countries for 5G equipment. Governments in important markets such as Britain, Germany, Canada and India are still deciding, and some telecommunications firms in France, Japan, Germany and Britain have expressed concerns about using Huawei technology in their 5G networks.

Huawei has been trying to shrug off its reputation for having a closed, opaque corporate culture. In Brussels this week, the company launched a cybersecurity transparency center. It has taken to social media and recently launched the English-language website Huawei Facts with an “Open Letter to the U.S. Media,” saying, “Don’t believe everything you hear. Come and see us.”

Huawei has also been wooing journalists, according to Reuters, which reported that 10 of its senior staffers were offered salaries of up to $200,000 to jump ship and work for Huawei’s public relations department.

It took out a full-page ad in New Zealand newspapers after that country barred its equipment from 5G networks. And it paid for a sponsored column by cybersecurity analyst Henry B. Wolfe published by the New York Times’ T Brand Studio calling on Australia to reverse a similar ban.

The company has urged its foreign employees to post glowing comments about Huawei, to send the company headquarters any positive commentary they can find online and to share the Huawei Facts website and Twitter handle with clients, customers and partners.

Last week, a slick video featuring schoolchildren singing “Huawei Is Beautiful” circulated on Chinese social media; the company said the video was made by supporters on the internet without its participation. Huawei “appreciates customers' attentions and concerns,” a company statement said.

In his news conference at Huawei’s Chinese headquarters, Guo, who serves in the company’s rotating chairmanship, accused U.S. agencies of hacking Huawei servers and stealing emails and source code.

The allegation that the National Security Agency hacked Huawei’s servers in 2007 surfaced in 2014, based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Huawei is not the first company the U.S. government has barred over national security concerns. In September 2017, government agencies were barred from using software from the Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab. The company sued, but its case was dismissed.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Thursday that he was unaware of Huawei’s legal action against the U.S. government but that it was “totally reasonable and totally understandable.”

Concern about Huawei is based partly on a 2017 Chinese law requiring Chinese companies to cooperate with that country’s national security agency.

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has said he would rather close the company than compromise clients’ security or give national security officials access to data.

But European Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip has said that Huawei being subject to China’s national security authorities was troubling. He said at a news conference last month that the task was not to look for evidence of past breaches by Huawei but to assess the risk of a future threat, Reuters reported.

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — who led the government when it barred Huawei and another Chinese company, ZTE, from participating in its 5G rollout — gave much the same assessment Tuesday during a speech in London.

“It is important to remember that a threat is the combination of capability and intent,” he said. “Capability can take years, decades, to develop and in many cases won’t be attainable at all. But intent can change in a heartbeat.”

Australia is part of the “Five Eyes” network with which the U.S. shares intelligence, including Britain, Canada and New Zealand. Turnbull said pressure from Washington played no part in Australia’s decision on Huawei.

Huawei has been at the center of accusations of intellectual property theft from U.S. companies, a core grievance in the U.S.-China trade war. In January, U.S. prosecutors indicted the company in two cases — over allegations of intellectual property theft and fraud over hidden dealings with Iran. They accused Ren of repeatedly lying to U.S. officials over business dealings in Iran in breach of U.S. sanctions.

Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, Ren’s daughter, was arrested in Canada in December and has been indicted by the U.S. on charges of fraud over business dealings in Iran. She faces a May 8 extradition hearing in Vancouver in a case that has outraged Chinese officials. Meng is suing Canadian authorities over what she alleges were breaches of her rights during her arrest.

The vehemence of Chinese officials’ reaction to Meng’s arrest has raised questions about the closeness of company executives to state officials.

China’s pressure on Canada to release Meng was swift and intense. Chinese authorities arrested two Canadians, whom it has accused of stealing state secrets, and boosted the 15-year drug sentence of another Canadian to the death penalty. Authorities this week banned imports of Canadian canola seeds by a major supplier.

Meng’s lawyer Richard Peck raised concerns in a Vancouver court Wednesday that the U.S. case against her is politically motivated. He also suggested her arrest involved abuse of process.

He raised comments by President Trump, who said in December that he would be willing to intervene in the Meng case if it helped secure a trade deal.

New Zealand, which banned Huawei from its rollout of a 5G network, and Australia have seen recent actions from China that some suspect may have been in retaliation.

A New Zealand commercial airliner was turned back on its way to China for “technical reasons” because it lacked registration, Australian coal shipments to a Chinese port were delayed for “quality checks” and an Australian writer was arrested in China.

Thailand’s Constitutional Court on Thursday banned the political party that nominated a former princess to run for prime minister, dealing a blow to opposition forces vying to defeat allies of the military-led government in the first election since a 2014 coup.

The court ruled that the Thai Raksa Chart party’s nomination of Ubolratana Mahidol, the eldest child of Thailand’s revered late king and sister to its current monarch, undermined the monarchy and was “hostile to the democratic system.”

The party will be dissolved and its executives barred from politics for 10 years, judges said.

“It is necessary for the Thai monarchy to stay above politics and stay neutral in politics,” Taweekiat Meenakanit, one of the judges, said in a verdict broadcast live on television. “Do not allow any opportunities for the Thai monarchy to be used for political purposes.”

The ruling was not a surprise. The party’s decision last month to nominate the 67-year-old Ubolratana — a UCLA master’s graduate who relinquished her royal title when she married an American in 1972 but is still treated as royalty by Thais — stunned the nation and broke with a more than century-old tradition of the royal family avoiding elected office.

It also raised the prospect of the return of Thaksin Shinawatra, the telecommunications tycoon and former prime minister who is linked to Thai Raksa Chart and lives in exile to avoid corruption charges that he says are politically motivated.

Thaksin is regarded as a dangerous upstart by the military — which ousted him from office in 2006 — and by supporters of the royal family, who regard him as insufficiently deferential to the monarchy.

The nomination of a royal to lead a Thaksin-linked party suggested a rapprochement that could have ended more than a decade of political clashes between rival Thai political factions that have occasionally turned deadly.

But the nomination was short-lived. The party withdrew her candidacy after her brother and Thailand’s current monarch, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, called it “extremely inappropriate.”

Election officials formally canceled her nomination days later and asked the Constitutional Court to punish the party, which led to Thursday’s ruling.

The ex-princess did not appear for the verdict but responded on Instagram, where photos on her private account indicated she was in Berlin. Followers commented that the party had been dissolved, to which Ubolratana responded: “It is sad and depressing.”

Human rights groups denounced the verdict, saying it would diminish the fairness of the March 24 election that the Thai military has held up as a sign of the country’s return to democratic rule.

“This decision highlights the Thai authorities’ abuse of judicial powers to restrict the peaceful association and expression of the political opposition,” Amnesty International’s Thailand campaigner, Katherine Gerson, said in a statement.

“This far-reaching measure raises strong concerns about the human rights to freedom of association and expression in the period leading to the elections.”

Two parties associated with Thaksin have previously been banned, and his sister Yingluck was removed as prime minister in 2014, the most recent of more than a dozen coups in Thailand’s modern history.

Constitutional changes enacted by the junta since 2014 have given the military power to appoint members of the upper house of parliament, while making it more difficult for major parties such as Pheu Thai — the largest Thaksin-backed party — to win large numbers of seats in the lower house.

Both houses vote to select the prime minister, giving the military outsize influence over the winner.

Thai Raksa Chart was formed just four months ago as one of several Pheu Thai offshoots in a bid to secure more parliamentary seats for pro-Thaksin candidates.

Thai Raksa Chart’s nomination gamble, and the court’s ruling, have left that strategy in tatters and boosted the chances of the military-backed leader, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who is running at the head of a pro-military party to remain in power via the ballot box.

“We had pure intentions through the course of our actions,” Thai Raksa Chart’s leader, Preechapol Pongpanich, told reporters after the ruling. “I would like to thank all the candidates and the people who walked side by side with us.”

To reach Ekeyran, a place so desolate no one has bothered to put it on a map, you must abandon the bustle of Baghdad for a 173-mile jaunt to the city of Samawah, dodge camel caravans while driving over to Al Salman district — onetime home to Saddam Hussein’s harshest prison — then find a Bedouin guide to drive you two more hours deep into the uncharted desert plains near the Iraqi-Saudi border.

There, buffeted by roaring winds amid near-freezing temperatures, you too can slowly wander the barren landscape, knife in hand as you scour the ground for hours in search of the almost cruelly obscure signs hinting at your quarry.

What is it you seek? The inauspicious-looking bonne bouche known as the desert truffle.

Delicate, subtle, light yet satisfying, the desert truffle has much of the magic of its more prestigious (and rarer) European counterpart.

Because Iraqi food has all the subtlety of a stampede — consider kahi, a flaked pastry soaked in cardamon-infused syrup and clotted cream — you might think truffles would be ill-suited for such a cuisine.

You’d be wrong.

Everything about the truffle exemplifies the food-as-challenge aspect of so many ingredients in the Iraqi cookbook.

And for those who prize the desert truffle — and many do, sometimes at the risk of their lives — finding it means nothing less than a quest for treasure, one that mixes equal parts timing, superstition and danger.

First the timing. To get truffles, you need water, a fair amount of it too. But it all depends on when the first rain begins to fall.

Storms in October, November, even as late as December can herald a good harvest. Anything after, says Nofal Saleh, a mustachioed 35-year-old Bedouin, is just too late.

Saleh, who has long roamed Iraq’s south for kama, as truffle is known in Syria and Iraq, is perched one winter day in the passenger seat of a van, scanning the horizon. He’s swathed in a fur-lined abaya, a long cloak, and black-and-white kaffiyeh headdress to protect him from the elements. He points to what appears to be a random spot on the road, a signal to veer off into the desert.

As the van bumps over the harsh terrain, Saleh points to what looks like one indistinguishable area after another, yet he produces a Bedouin name for each as he marks a path heading ever closer to the Saudi border.

He counts off fingers as he begins a detailed litany of good and bad truffle seasons stretching back to 2004.

“This year the first rains fell on the 20th of October,” he says. “Pretty good.”

The storms are also where superstition comes in. Thunder and lightning are said to boost the alchemy of the truffle, a species of mushroom that grows in different types all across the arid and semiarid areas around the Middle East and zones around the Mediterranean.

The most common truffle type here is terfezia, an off-white, sponge-surfaced variety that looks rather like the rocks dotting much of the flat sand and gravel plains of Iraq’s south. That hard terrain perhaps explains the need for meteorological fireworks. Thunderclaps crack the surface of the ground like an eggshell, some say, allowing the microscopic spores to spread below the sand to flourish.

Science, however, gives a less fanciful explanation, asserting that thunderstorms generate water-soluble nitrogenous compounds. They fall with the rain and encourage growth.

Timing is also essential for the harvest. The season is fleeting, lasting a mere three months in the arid lands of Iraq and Syria. But woe be to those who dally, warns Saleh.

“By late March it becomes disgusting,” he says, wrinkling his nose at the remembrance of past truffle hunts gone bad. “It has worms in it and smells like a rotting corpse.”

Saleh continues scanning the seemingly unchanging landscape, then suddenly announces it is time to stop. He takes a moment to adjust his robes, wrapping them around himself in preparation for the elements. He opens the door, and the pressurized quiet of the cabin gives way to a growling wind.

How do you know your quarry lurks under the surface, without the benefit of truffle-sniffing dogs or pigs, which are considered unclean by Islam? With great difficulty, at least for the untrained eye.

One clue is the appearance of cracks in the soil, indicating the truffle is bulging its way toward the surface. Another is the appearance of a certain grass, called aneyd by the Bedouins here. If you see it, they say, truffles are nearby.

This observation is also borne out by research, with studies finding that desert truffles, like most of their ilk, form symbiotic relationships with certain plants and can be found close to their roots.

Unfortunately, aneyd looks almost identical to another weed.

That is one explanation as to why, after walking the uninterrupted plains, squinting at the ground, you may find yourself sans truffle.

None of this slows Asaad Jabaali, who is leaning against the wind, his robes flapping. The 23-year-old pounces on one promising spot, then another.

Once all the clues converge, he squats over the prospective site, brandishing a long kitchen knife to cut a quick circle around the spot. He works the surface with both hands to reveal the rotund outlines of the truffle. He gently works the knife at an angle underneath the truffle, and pops it out.

It gets a quick examination, with Jabaali dusting the truffle off before plopping it in a ragged-looking cloth pouch and continuing his search.

But harvesting can also be where the danger comes in, for the finest truffles are found where foragers face extreme threats. One such danger zone is the Iraqi-Saudi border, where in December, Saleh says, overzealous Iraqi guards shot what they thought was a smuggler but was actually a truffle forager.

“The truffles there are huge, the size of a pomegranate,” says Saleh, a hint of awe in his voice. “But only the guards are benefiting from them now.”

To the southeast you might encounter land mines, vestiges from the war with Iran. In the western Iraqi province of Anbar, home to the reddish, smaller iteration of desert truffle known as hargi, truffle hunters had to contend with the threat from Islamic State.

But for many, the danger is worth it, especially if market forces are on their side.

In dedicated markets stretching from Al Salman to Baghdad, hunters and merchants arrive before daybreak to peer at squat stacks of truffles piled on blankets and brimming in baskets alongside the street.

They engage in rapid-fire auctions, where quality truffles command prices as low as 8,000 Iraqi dinars per kilogram (roughly $3 a pound) all the way up to more than $10 a pound in Baghdad and nearly $25 when exported.

Depending on the area, a good forager can get anywhere from 2 to 4 kilos in a day, according to Jabaali, who shouts, straining to make himself heard above the constant roar of the wind.

Like many others here, Jabaali traveled with his family from other provinces, setting up tents for weeks on end in a collective effort to get truffles. He no doubt had in mind the story of one family that managed to sell $11,000 worth of truffles in three months — a princely sum here.

Nearby is a lone tent, pelted off-white by the sand. It houses some nine members of Jabaali’s clan, some of them even now spread out on the plains. A pickup truck awaits the haul for a trek to the market.

If you’ve found the truffle, and survived the harvest, you still have to clean it.

There are boundless theories, many contradictory, as to the best manner to clean the crevices of sand. The commonality is that each method is thankless: Nobody compliments you for doing it well, and everyone frowns if sand crunches against their teeth.

One way is to soak the truffles in ice-cold water to push the sand from the cracks, then use a toothbrush to painstakingly tease out every last bit.

Press too hard and you’ll bruise the skin and turn the insides to mush. Brush too lightly and your meal may not be ready until next season.

Once the rinse water runs clear and the truffles are clean (relatively), you can finally begin to prepare your truffle-focused feast.

Protein-rich truffles make a decent substitute for meat. And studies have indicated they are high in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties.

Countless websites, inevitably, expound on truffles’ rejuvenating effect on the male libido. Here, unfortunately, science does not concur, with a number of papers refuting such wishful theories.

One evening in Baghdad, chef Saleh Ubaidi, a massive man who once played on the Iraqi national basketball team, prepares three truffle dishes at his unassuming barbecue chicken joint.

The first iteration involves frying the truffles with turmeric and crispy onions. He offers a guest a taste as the truffles turn shiny gold and redolent with the spices.

He then turns to a skewer, alternating pieces of truffle and animal fat. These, Ubaidi says, are destined for the charcoals. “They’ll be just like Turkish delight,” he says of the texture.

The third involves boiling the truffles, then using the yellow-tinted water to boil rice and infuse it with delicate flavor.

The effort — from long drive to wind-scoured hunt, to laborious cleaning — is rewarded with a light meal, with the truffles asserting themselves as more substantive mushrooms, with the chewiness of tofu.

Of course there will be sand in your mouth. But, as most truffle aficionados will tell you, it is worth it.

You don’t go that far into the desert to complain about sand.

It was just a couple of days after he’d left the nuclear summit between President Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un after it collapsed in Hanoi, and where was America’s top diplomat?

On morning drive-time radio in Iowa.

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo had barely touched down at Joint Base Andrews from Vietnam after a diplomatic stop in Manila, when he boarded another flight — for Des Moines. Even the several radio and television interviewers he met with there earlier this week were a little surprised he had made the trip.

Pompeo alluded to the unlikely appearance when he opened his remarks to the Iowa branch of the Future Farmers of America.

“Some of you may not have heard of me before,” he said to laughter, then added: “I know Iowa is not a foreign country, in case some of you thought maybe I was a little confused.”

Pompeo described his visit as partly a mission to inspire people in fly-over country to become future diplomats. What was clearly more important, however, was the more immediate and politically charged part of his mission: talking about trade and reassuring an agricultural sector battered by President Trump’s trade war with China that everything will, eventually, be OK.

“We flew in last night, and believe me, it was a breath of fresh air to be out of Washington, D.C.,” Pompeo told the Iowa Farm Bureau in another appearance Monday. “And I know firsthand too how farmers are the backbone of America, how food security matters so much, and what you all do, the people of Iowa do, to help deliver that every place in the world.”

It is unusual — though not unheard of — for a secretary of State to spend as much time on domestic speaking engagements as Pompeo does, and even more unusual for the subjects to be domestic ones, in his case trade and farming. Those are matters normally handled by the Cabinet secretaries for Commerce and Agriculture, or the president’s trade representative.

Madeleine Albright, who was secretary of State in President Clinton’s second term, also did speaking tours in the U.S. She was primarily promoting internationalism, however, drumming up support at home for foreign policy and for cooperation among nations globally.

Pompeo, in contrast, has demonstrated he is looking inward while his portfolio is one that looks outward. Formerly a Republican congressman from Kansas, he is likely eyeing a return to politics, maybe even a presidential bid in 2024. He recently was urged by senior Republicans to run for the Senate from his home state, and considered it, but declined.

For now, then, Pompeo is among the most loyal members of Trump’s Cabinet, eager to do the president’s bidding whether in Kansas or Kuwait.

Later this month, he will deliver the keynote address for the State Department’s Road to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit Heartland Event in Overland Park, Kan. He has given several dozen interviews to local-level radio and television stations all over the country, sometimes by teleconference, and especially in the Midwest — while shutting out most Washington-based diplomatic correspondents.

“President Trump has been determined to get Iowa farmers a fair shake,” Pompeo told broadcast host Doug Wagner on Cedar Rapids’ WMT Radio, in a show that airs between 5 and 9 a.m. — the popular drive time.

Describing China as a duplicitous trading partner, Pompeo said, “This effort to get a full, comprehensive trade deal, is to fix that, to make it fair, to fix this historic wrong, and I am very hopeful in the coming weeks we’ll get that positive outcome.”

Over at WHO Radio in Des Moines, the hosts of the “Van and Bonnie in the Morning” show also welcomed Pompeo.

“Well, Bonnie, I always said it’d be a cold day when the United States secretary of State would call us and want to be on ‘Van and Bonnie in the Morning,’” co-host Van Harden said.

“And it’s cold," Bonnie Lucas responded.

“You got it,” Harden said. “It’s minus 1.”

Pompeo gave them a similar pitch about Trump’s trade policies ultimately helping out Iowan and Kansan farmers, if they’ll just be patient.

“I do want to talk about agriculture, making sure that Iowa farmers and, frankly, Kansas farmers, too, have a chance to compete on a fair, level playing field,” he said.

Farmers in states that supported Trump in 2016, including Iowa, have been hit hard by the retaliatory tariffs that U.S. trading partners have imposed in reaction to the president’s tariffs on their exports. Trump’s trade war with China — previously soybean farmers’ main customer — has especially hurt U.S. agriculture, driving down sales and market prices. For the industry in the Midwest and Great Plains states, it’s the worst crisis since the 1980s — a worrisome fact for the administration.

Trump last year imposed levies on the importation of scores of Chinese products, such as TVs, chemicals, steel and solar panels. China retaliated by imposing tariffs on imports of U.S. agricultural commodities including soybeans, grain sorghum and pork. Soybean exports to China have plummeted by more than 90%.

Trump appointed Pompeo, formerly his CIA director, as secretary of State almost a year ago to replace Rex Tillerson, former chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp., who frequently clashed with the president. Originally from California, Pompeo spent many years in Kansas and, while his business involved aircraft manufacturing, he makes frequent reference to time on a family farm.

Trump clearly relies on Pompeo, one of the few experienced politicians in his orbit, to perform many tasks. As the president has begun his campaigning for reelection, the secretary of State’s jobs apparently include allaying the concerns of Trump’s core supporters in rural America.

“We deliver consistent, stable, affordable, high-yield, high-quality food products all around the world,” Pompeo told the Iowa Farm Bureau, adding that foreign competitors spread myths and lies about U.S. products to protect their own farmers.

The hip-hop hit “A Lot,” by the rapper 21 Savage, boomed through the speakers at Phnom Penh’s Cool Lounge, the rapid-fire verses spilling from the bar onto the Cambodian capital’s hectic streets.

“Been through some things, but I couldn’t imagine my kids stuck at the border,” rapped the British-born artist who was recently detained in the U.S. on suspicion of overstaying his 2006 visa.

The lyrics and the Atlanta-based rapper’s story, perhaps foreign to most Cambodians, resonated with the bar’s clientele, which included some of the more than 700 Cambodians deported from the United States over criminal convictions since a 2002 repatriation agreement.

During his second term, President Obama prioritized removing migrants with criminal convictions. The Trump administration has since ramped up deportations, including of Cambodians and Southeast Asians, expanding the list of targets and the acts for which they can be removed, some for cases more than a decade old.

But sitting inside the Cool Lounge on a recent afternoon, a tattooed, soft-spoken California man who was deported in 2014 to Cambodia — a country he’d never set foot in — was preparing to embark on a journey that had given other deportees hope.

Veasna Meth, 30, spent the last five years apart from family members in Sacramento, including wife Sandy Ho and their children — son Jorden, 12, and 1-year-old Lily.

Now Meth is one of the first Cambodians to be allowed to return after the 2018 Supreme Court decision in Sessions vs. Dimaya, which struck down part of a broad federal immigration law that mandated the removal of noncitizens, including longtime green-card holders, who were convicted of a “crime of violence.”

The court determined that the statute’s language was vague, voiding the deportation order of a Philippine man who had twice pleaded guilty to breaking into an unoccupied California house.

As a 19-year-old, Meth and his friends broke into an empty house. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to residential burglary, then served one year in prison. A court initially ruled that it was not a “crime of violence” and therefore not an aggravated felony under the federal law, which would have required the cancellation of his green card.

But in 2013, the Department of Homeland Security appealed the decision and won, raising Meth’s conviction to an aggravated felony that invalidated his green card.

Meth said that, months later, immigration authorities came to his mother’s house, asking where he was. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent eventually called him, posing as a parole officer.

“They said they wanted me to sign some paper. And I was like, ‘OK, I’m at work, you wanna meet me here?’ ” he recalled. “Twenty minutes later, three cars showed up.”

Authorities picked him up from his job as a fabricator, where he made signs and boxes out of acrylic, and in January 2014 deported him.

His story is typical of Cambodian deportees, the overwhelming majority of whom arrived in the U.S. as children, their parents having fled the country in the 1970s when the Khmer Rouge began its genocidal campaign that killed nearly 2 million people.

Some deportees were born in refugee camps in Thailand or, like Meth, the Philippines; most had lived in the U.S. for decades and obtained green cards. Many, like Meth, had never been to Cambodia before they were deported and had few if any relatives still living there.

Meth emigrated to the U.S. as a 5-month-old and grew up in California, in low-income communities in Long Beach, Modesto and Stockton, often surrounded by gang violence.

He said he and his parents didn’t understand the importance of pursuing U.S. citizenship, believing his permanent residency to be genuinely permanent.

After arriving in Cambodia, Meth for the first time met his aunt, the only member of his family remaining in the country. And although he speaks Khmer, he can’t read or write in Cambodia's language.

Native Cambodians, he said, view deportees as suspicious foreigners. “They don’t like us with tattoos,” he said in a California accent as West Coast rap played over the speakers at the Cool Lounge. “They say that we're the bad guys.”

Learning to live in Cambodia “was a culture shock,” he said. “And then depression, because my son was still young and my wife was there by herself.”

Ho, an accountant who visited him in Cambodia nearly every year, had to support their family on her own.

“I’m just in disbelief how the system worked and my husband was wrongfully deported,” Ho said. “Like literally, at that point, what do I do?”

Meth was living alone, without a Cambodian identification card required for him to work legally. His situation became even more complicated when he suffered a serious motorcycle crash that left him paralyzed for months — a common occurrence in Cambodia, where road accidents are the leading cause of death.

Friends and family raised money for his surgery, but the dearth of quality medical providers in Cambodia stunted his recovery, leaving him with a pronounced limp and unable to lift heavy objects.

Other deportees have been less fortunate: Sophorn San of Providence, R.I., who arrived in Cambodia in December, died in a gruesome motorcycle crash last month.

While recovering from his crash, Meth contacted the legal aid organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus. In May, one month after the Supreme Court decision, lawyers filed a motion to reconsider Meth's deportation.

The high court’s 5-4 ruling was the result of an unlikely alliance between its liberal justices and Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s first appointee to the court. In a partially concurring opinion, Gorsuch wrote that the statute’s vagueness left “judges to their intuitions and the people to their fate.”

Immigration advocates hailed the ruling, saying it would spare thousands of legal residents from deportation. But the Trump administration has pushed back against individual cases.

Department of Homeland Security lawyers opposed Meth’s repatriation, according to court documents reviewed by The Times. Contacted for this article, a representative referred to an earlier statement by the department that the Supreme Court ruling “allows our nation to be a safe haven for criminals and makes us more vulnerable as a result.”

But in November, an immigration judge sided with Meth, declaring his removal order “erroneous” and restoring his green card.

Advocates hope the Dimaya ruling will open doors for the return of other noncitizens.

“We all dream of bringing deportees home,” said Kevin Lo, one of Meth’s lawyers. “Veasna is hopefully just the beginning.”

But others warn that immigration judges retain vast discretion and can refuse for any reason to reopen cases, even those involving the “crime of violence” convictions addressed by the court. Individual cases such as Meth’s do not set a precedent, they say.

Bill Herod, the American founder of the Khmer Vulnerability Aid Organization, a Phnom Penh-based assistance group for deportees, urged Cambodians removed from the U.S. not to get their hopes up.

“Those considering legal action permitting their return to the U.S. will have our cooperation,” he said in a statement. “But as the process may be lengthy and uncertain, we hope this will not interfere with the hard work they are now doing in building new lives of freedom and responsibility in Cambodia.”

Meth never thought he would get back to the U.S. and seemed in disbelief even days before his flight.

“Coming here, it’s always in the back of my mind that I want to go home,” he said. “While you keep going with your life, you try something.… If it work out, it work out. It doesn’t matter how long it take.”

Meth sat at the Cool Lounge with a group of friends munching on takeout Mexican food, a cuisine that reminded them of California. The bar draws a large clientele of deportees — its owner was also sent back from the U.S. — and Meth was struggling to shake a kind of survivor’s guilt.

“You’re here for a certain time and then you bond, you become brothers because that’s all you got,” he said. “I’m blessed, man. It’s hard to explain the feeling because, at the end of the day, I got friends here with kids and no chance of going home.”

​​​​​​​​​​​On Feb. 27, Meth departed Phnom Penh for San Francisco, carrying physical and emotional scars from Cambodia: He wore a shirt depicting San, the deportee killed in the recent crash, flanked by graffitied angel wings.

“I’m excited to see my kids and to be back on American soil,” Meth said in a text message after landing. “I don’t quite know how to express it, but I just want to go outside and kiss the ground or something.”

Bashirul Shikder paced in his cream-colored hotel room here, his face tightening to hold back tears.

He had traveled thousands of miles from his home near Miami and spent a frustrating week in Irbil trying to score meetings with diplomats, military commanders, militiamen, activists, aid workers, journalists or anyone else who might be able to help him.

Room 202 of the Classy Hotel was the closest Shikder, 38, had gotten to his two children since March 2015, when his wife took them, left Florida and traveled to Syria to join Islamic State.

At the time, the extremist group controlled a sprawling territory encompassing a third of both Syria and Iraq. The self-declared caliphate has since been reduced to a few houses and tents in Baghouz, a dust-swept Syrian village 200 miles southwest of Irbil.

Now U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab militiamen were closing in on Baghouz.

And somewhere out there were 8-year-old Yusuf and his 4-year-old sister, Zahra.

Life in Florida seemed blessed.

Shikder worked in information technology. His wife, Rashida Abdul Hamid, was a stay-at-home mother. They would go to a spot near the fishing bridge in North Miami Beach from where they could watch the waves, and became regulars at their favorite Arabic restaurant.

Both were U.S. citizens from Bangladesh — her family had moved to Orlando when she was a year old, and he arrived in 2007 after studying in Canada — and both were devout Muslims.

On March 15, 2015, Shikder boarded a plane for what he thought would be “a trip of a lifetime.” He was flying to Saudi Arabia to do umrah, an abbreviated version of the pilgrimage to Mecca required of all Muslims.

Once he arrived, Shikder sent his wife photographs and videos, along with messages asking her about what gifts to bring back for the family. But there was no response.

After nine worry-filled days, he called her parents, who broke the news about his wife and children.

They had left on a flight to Istanbul, Turkey, three hours after him. His wife’s sister Aisha had gone with them. From Turkey, they made their way to the city of Raqqah, then the de facto capital of Islamic State in Syria.

Shikder immediately contacted the FBI, then raced back to Miami.

“It was like the whole sky fell down on me,” he said. “Until Rashida did this, she was my everything. I shared everything with her.”

There was no word of his family until almost a month later, when a strange number appeared on his cellphone. A man with a British accent came on the line, asked for him, and told him his wife and children were now in “Dawlat al Islam” — Islamic State.

The man berated Shikder for not joining them there and threatened that if he didn’t do so in a month his marriage would be annulled and children taken away.

Shikder stalled for time. He said he wanted to come but that he had to take care of his sick mother at home.

About a week later, his wife contacted him on the messaging app Viber.

“We were both crying,” Shikder recalled. “I said ‘Rashida, what did I do to you in this life for you to do this to me?’”

She apologized that everything had happened so fast, he said.

Her attraction to Islamic State was something he would never understand. He begged her to return, but she said her passport had been taken away.

They continued to communicate over the months that followed, but Shikder never felt he could speak freely. He knew Islamic State members were nearby.

“It was very, very difficult,” he said. “Sometimes when we were talking I wanted to be angry, as a husband and as a father to my lovely children…. I wanted to tell her to come back, but I couldn’t say it.”

But after nearly a year and a half, the militants were no longer convinced of his sincerity.

In June 2016, his wife filed Case No. 13020 in Raqqah’s sharia court using her nom de guerre, Umm Yusuf al Amreekiyah, which means “Mother of Yusuf the American woman.”

She wanted her marriage annulled because her husband “lives in the land of infidels, and does not want to emigrate,” according to a court document later obtained by Shikder.

The judge granted the annulment on June 10, 2016.

Abdul Hamid quickly remarried and in 2017 gave birth to a daughter, Safya.

By then, Islamic State was steadily losing territory. Eventually Abdul Hamid and her three children wound up retreating with the militants to eastern Syria.

At least that is what Shikder’s sister-in-law Aisha told him in online messages.

Then early this year, she sent another message: The mother of his children was dead, killed in a shelling or airstrike that had disfigured Yusuf and Zahra.

Over the last few weeks, thousands of families had streamed out of Baghouz to flee the violence. They have emerged wraith-like from the desert, gaunt and covered in dust. They travel to Kurdish internment camps hundreds of miles away.

Many children don’t make it. Since December, according to the United Nations, more than 50 younger than 5 have died en route or shortly after reaching Hol — a camp that shelters more than 50,000 people — and hundreds more have been hospitalized for severe malnutrition and diarrhea.

Shikder spoke to the U.S. consul in Irbil and reached out to the office of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio asking to cross into Syria to look for his children.

“They said it’s not safe, but I said that [Islamic State] is already defeated,” he said. “What does it mean that I can’t search for my own children?”

Last week, Shikder thought his nightmare had finally ended; an aid group told him Yusuf and Zahra had been found. He ran out to shopping centers in Irbil to buy them warm clothes.

But he soon discovered there had been a mix-up with the names.

With Baghouz under assault over the weekend, Shikder managed to contact somebody who was with the militants and was told his children were with them.

He sent messages pleading for the release of all remaining children. But he never heard back.

“I’m just watching TV and seeing all these people, all these children, and they’re coming out with their father and mother,” he said. “My children have no one.”