New York Times
By Frances Robles
June 4, 2014
SAN
PEDRO SULA, Honduras — After a decade apart, 13-year-old Robin Tulio
was finally heading to the border to be with his mother. A maid, living
illegally in Baltimore,
she had decided the time was right to smuggle her son into the United
States.
Like
so many others across Central America, Robin said his mother believed
that the Obama administration had quietly changed its policy regarding
unaccompanied minors
and that if he made it across, he would have a better shot at staying.
She hired a smuggler, but Robin didn’t make it.
“It’s
too hard,” he said after being caught in Mexico recently and sent home
to Honduras. But his aborted journey helps explain why there has been a
rush of migration
of unaccompanied minors so severe that the United Nations declared it a
humanitarian crisis akin to refugees’ fleeing war.
Since
Oct. 1, a record 47,017 unaccompanied children have been apprehended at
the southwest United States border, most traveling from Central
America, part of a larger
wave that includes some youngsters accompanied by their parents and
some traveling alone.
Many
say they are going because they believe that the United States treats
migrant children traveling alone and women with their children more
leniently than adult illegal
immigrants with no children.
The
Obama administration says the primary cause of the influx of children
is rising crime and ailing economies in Central America, not policy
changes in the United States.
To
deal with the surge, the administration on Monday used a California
naval base to house recently apprehended minors and ordered the federal
emergency administrator
to develop a plan of action.
“We
have heard sort of rumors and reports, or suggestions, that the
increase may be in response to the perception that children would be
allowed to stay or that immigration
reform would in some way benefit these children,” said Cecilia Muñoz,
the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, in a conference
call with reporters on Monday. “It seems to be quite clear that what is
driving this is what’s happening in their
home countries.”
Officials
said that recently arrived children would not benefit from the
immigration bill passed by the Senate last year or from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,
a program that lets minors who meet certain criteria avoid deportation.
But
even as the government moves to confront the situation, children,
parents, immigration officials, lawyers and activists interviewed say
that there has been a subtle
shift in the way the United States treats minors.
That
perception has inspired parents who have not seen their children for
years to hire so-called coyotes, guides often associated with organized
crime, to bring them
north. It has prompted other parents to make the trip with toddlers in
tow, something rarely seen before in the region.
“If
you make it, they take you to a shelter and take care of you and let
you have permission to stay,” Robin said after he stepped off a bus on a
Thursday night with eight
others caught on their way north. “When you appeal your case, if you
say you want to study, they support you.”
In
San Pedro Sula, in northern Honduras, a group of women and their
children were huddled in a bus terminal earlier in the week, ready to
begin a multiweek journey to
Mexico and beyond.
“The
passage is easier with the kids, and this way we’re not dumping them
with relatives,” said Arelys Sánchez, who was traveling with two young
daughters. “I think with
them, it’s easier for them to let you stay.”
While
the Obama administration has moved aggressively to deport adults, it
has in fact expelled far fewer children than in the past. Largely
because of a 2008 federal
law aimed at protecting trafficked children, the administration in 2013
deported one-fifth the number of Central American children as were
expelled in 2008, according to federal government statistics.
Ana
Solorzano, an immigration official who tends to deportees in El
Salvador, said that as the number of deportees flown by air to El
Salvador from the United States started
to drop, the number of people returned by land from Mexico started to
rise. Of the 325 Salvadoran children who were deported last year, only
22 came from the United States, she said.
“They have not publicly recognized a change in public policy, but we see it,” Ms. Solorzano said.
Central Americans, she said, were left with the sense that the United States had “opened its doors” to women and children.
As
more of those children were released from federal shelters and the
number placed with parents or in foster care soared, other parents
noticed. Those parents were encouraged
by the opportunities children were being given to fight their cases in
court — even if they were ultimately unlikely to succeed.
“It’s
a massive Catch-22,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of
Defense, an organization that matches unaccompanied minors with
volunteer lawyers. “The problem
here is that the system is broken. It’s going to implode.”
One
federal judge slammed the Department of Homeland Security for
“completing a criminal conspiracy” by placing a recently smuggled child
with the undocumented immigrant
parent who had hired the smugglers.
Experts
say it is the dual dynamics of crime at home and perceived leniency
across the border that have inspired many in Central America to risk the
trip.
The
United Nations has consistently listed Honduras, for example, as the
country with the highest murder rate in the world. Its latest report
said Honduras had 90.4 killings
per 100,000 residents, nearly three times the rate a decade ago. In El
Salvador, that number is 41.
Elizabeth
Kennedy, a Fulbright scholar who is studying Salvadoran youth
migration, said 60 percent of the 326 students she had interviewed cited
gangs and crime as the
reason they were leaving.
“A
large number are forcibly recruited by gangs,” Ms. Kennedy said. “Most
kids lived in areas that are controlled by one or both of the gangs.”
In
Honduras, the authorities are receiving more buses filled with a larger
number of juvenile deportees, and they are increasingly younger and
often girls.
As
gang violence here worsens and word gets out that the children who made
it to the other side were reunited with long-lost parents with the
blessing of United States
immigration authorities, more and more youngsters are making the
treacherous journey.
Maynor
Dubón, 17, tried to cross the border last year. But he, too, was caught
and wound up at Casa Alianza, a children’s shelter in Tegucigalpa, the
Honduran capital,
for a year.
“You
really don’t know what moment you’re going to be killed,” he said of
life in Honduras. “The gangs say things like, ‘You work for me now.’
They asked me to join, and
I said, ‘Let me think about it for a few days,’ so I left. It’s like
being in hell.”
A
member of his immediate family was murdered at the family’s front door
this year, so he is using the barber skills he learned at Casa Alianza
to save money to try again.
He must leave, he said, before he turns 18 in September.
Government
officials say they are at a loss, because they cannot prohibit the
children’s departure, but they worry what such an exodus will mean for
the nation’s future.
“The
governments have to do something; we can’t continue like this. These
children are our future,” said Felipe Morales, executive director of the
Honduran federal children’s
services agency. “This is a tragedy.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment