Sitting at the bus and gas station in Plattsburgh, N.Y., 24-year-old Naomie shakes her head. She spent more than a year on what she calls le chemin de l’enfer, the road to hell, to escape persecution in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and meet up with a long-lost uncle in Montreal, only to end up exhausted and without any money back at this convenience store in upstate New York.
Naomie fled her country to neighbouring Angola in 2021, after she was raped by her stepfather, a soldier. In Angola, with next to no resources for asylum seekers, she met a man in a market who said he was willing
