New York Times
By Jim Dwyer
April 19, 2014
Noemi
Álvarez Quillay took the first steps of the 6,500-mile journey to New
York City from the southern highlands of Ecuador on Tuesday, Feb. 4,
after darkness fell.
A
bashful, studious girl, Noemi walked 10 minutes across dirt roads that
cut through corn and potato fields, reaching the highway to Quito. She
carried a small suitcase.
Her grandfather Cipriano Quillay flagged down a bus and watched her
board. She was 12.
From
that moment, and through the remaining five weeks of her life, Noemi
was in the company of strangers, including coyotes — human smugglers,
hired by her parents in
the Bronx to bring her to them. Her parents had come to the United
States illegally and settled in New York when Noemi was a toddler.
Noemi
was part of a human flood tide that has swelled since 2011: The United
States resettlement agency expects to care for nine times as many
unaccompanied migrant children
in 2014 as it did three years ago.
For
these children wandering thousands of miles, it is a grueling journey,
filled with dangers. The vast majority come from Central America.
Noemi’s trip was about twice
as long. She had already tried once, leaving home last May, but was
detained long before she even made it halfway.
“I went with a coyote and spent two months in Nicaragua and came back from there,” she wrote in a school information sheet.
She
got a little closer this year. In March, a month after she left home,
the police picked up Noemi and a coyote in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The
authorities took her to
a children’s shelter. She was described as crying inconsolably after
being questioned by a prosecutor. A few days later, she was found hanged
from a shower curtain rod in a bathroom at the shelter. Her death,
ruled a suicide by Mexican authorities, remains
under investigation by a human rights commission there.
The
number of unaccompanied minors caught entering the United States and
then referred for placement is expected to reach 60,000 in the 12 months
ending Sept. 30, said
Lisa Raffonelli, a spokeswoman for the Office of Refugee Resettlement,
an increase from 6,560 in 2011. In Mexico, the number has more than
doubled.
No single factor explains these surges, but in Noemi’s hometown there are clues about the forces at work in her story.
In
the district of El Tambo in Cañar province, her maternal grandparents,
Mr. Quillay, 57, and María Jesús Guamán, 59, live in an adobe home with
no running water. About
15 years ago, during an economic crisis in Ecuador, their adult
children began migrating to the United States without visas.
“My four children went to find decent lives,” Mr. Quillay said. “So I took over five grandchildren from when they were little.”
They ate from the grandparents’ farm. “We don’t have the little sweets that they sometimes ask for,” Mr. Quillay said.
“She
was just born when her father left, and when she was 3, my daughter
decided to go herself,” Ms. Guamán said of Noemi. “I raised my
granddaughter the same as the others.”
As
the children grew, their parents sent money to pay for the construction
of a two-story concrete house nearby where the five grandchildren,
cousins, lived on their own.
Leonela
Yupa, a cousin and playmate of Noemi, remembered playing “cocinita”
with her — fashioning from their imagination a little kitchen where they
fixed pretend meals.
Noemi often joined in one of the world’s universal games: hide and
seek.
The
children moved through a landscape that is a hybrid of peasant houses,
like the home of their grandparents, and larger, modern ones that are “a
symbol of the success
of the Ecuadorean immigrant,” said Rafael Ortiz, mayor of El Tambo.
The
Quillays’ unparented household was common. “We have 1,040 students, and
at least 60 percent are children of migrant parents who have been under
the care of grandparents,
uncles or older siblings,” said Magdalena Choglio Zambrano, a guidance
counselor at the regional high school.
The
parents abroad “at times send a little shirt, shoes, $100, but it is
not the same as being papa or mama,” Noemi’s grandfather said.
A
generation of children who grew up on their own in El Tambo have
started to leave, getting a hand from their parents abroad, but still
requiring shadowy journeys.
“Now
we are seeing that the migrants are small children or teenagers whose
parents are sending for them, running the risk of putting them in the
hands of the coyotes to
whom they pay 15, 20, 25 thousand dollars,” said Ms. Choglio, the
guidance counselor.
The cost of the trip depends on whether the smuggler uses airline flights to cut down on overland travel, Mayor Ortiz said.
“We
don’t know anything, not how they go or where they go,” Ms. Guamán
said. The parents “made the arrangements directly from there, and they
called to tell us when we
had to send the girl.”
Both
grandparents say they and Noemi were reluctant for her to leave. Ms.
Guamán said she argued with her daughter, the girl’s mother.
“I
said to her, ‘Why take her away? She’s studying here, she’s doing
well,’ ” Ms. Guamán said. “But my daughter says education in Ecuador is
no good and it’s better for
her to study there. And she took my Noemi away, only for this to
happen.”
Noemi
had to be persuaded by her parents. “She was crying, she said she did
not want to go,” Sara Yupa, one of her cousins, recalled. “Then she was
quiet.”
Little is known about Noemi’s travels until about 4,000 miles later, more than a month after she left home.
On
Friday, March 7, in Ciudad Juárez, police saw Domingo Fermas Uves, 52,
urinating outside a pickup truck, according to Alejandro Maldonado, a
police spokesman. Inside
was Noemi. In the official account, Mr. Fermas told officers that he
was part of a network of smugglers hired by the girl’s family to take
her to the United States. The man gave false details about the girl,
saying she was 8 years old and from an inland state
in Mexico. The police recorded her name as Noemi Álvarez Astorga.
Noemi
was taken to Casa de la Esperanza, a shelter for Mexican minors whose
name means “House of Hope.” Over that weekend, she was questioned by a
prosecutor. After that,
a doctor described Noemi as being “terrified,” according to a report in
El Diario of Juarez.
On
March 11, when called to eat, Noemi instead went into the bathroom.
Another girl could not get in. The doctor, Alicia Soria Espino, and
others broke open the door and
found Noemi hanging by the cloth shower curtain.
The
next day, her parents in the Bronx received a phone call from a woman
who told them that Noemi had safely crossed the border. Later that day,
they received a second
call saying that she had died, according to Ecuadorean consular
officials.
The
authorities determined that the girl initially thought to be an
8-year-old Mexican was probably the 12-year-old Ecuadorean. In part
because her parents, who do not
have legal immigration status, decided not to go to Mexico, DNA tests
were required to confirm her identity, said Jorge W. Lopez, the
Ecuadorean consul general in New York. Autopsies found no sign of a
sexual assault, a common crime against migrants.
The
man said to have been the smuggler, Mr. Fermas, was arrested but was
later freed by a judge, who did not find enough evidence to hold him for
prosecution, said Ángel
Torres of the federal prosecutor’s office in Ciudad Juárez. “Mr. Fermas
is still under investigation for immigrant trafficking,” Mr. Torres
said. In published interviews, Mr. Fermas has said that the story about
the pickup truck was untrue and that the police
had entered his house and taken the girl under the guise of rescuing
her. In the week after Noemi’s death, 370 foreign child migrants were
detained across Mexico, according to the national immigration agency.
Nearly half were traveling alone.
The
minors coming from Central America and Mexico are “propelled by
violence, insecurity and abuse,” the United Nations high commissioner
for refugees said in a report
issued the day after Noemi’s death. The prospect of immigration reform
in the United States is also enticing, Mr. Lopez said, because of the
belief that anyone already in the country illegally will be allowed to
stay.
Noemi’s
parents have said little publicly. Her mother, Martha V. Quillay, who
works in a hair salon, spoke briefly with a reporter, then curtailed the
conversation. Her
father, José Segundo Álvarez Yupa, a construction worker, said it was
too difficult to discuss. “These are private matters,” he said. “This is
a very painful thing. It’s all over. We want to recover, we want to
move on.”
Last
week, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who was visiting New York,
called on the family at their home in the Bronx to offer condolences.
Ms. Quillay posted pictures
from the president’s visit on her Facebook page.
Msgr.
James Kelly, pastor of St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn,
which has a large number of Ecuadorean parishioners, said recently that
he heard every day
about the young people traveling alone.
“I
had parents in here yesterday whose child was coming north,” Father
Kelly said. “They wanted a Mass said, that the journey would be safe.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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