Associated Press
November 17, 2015
For
years, Brian Mejia begged for his father's blessing to slip out of his
village in El Salvador and make the perilous trek to the United States,
away from the gang violence
that drove his father across the border. For years, Gabriel Mejia said
no, recalling his own days-long journey through the desert, his skin
sore from the persistent pricks of cactus needles.
Gabriel
Mejia could no longer stand the persistent bloodshed in his homeland,
15 years after arriving in the U.S., and was beginning to come around to
the idea of sending
a smuggler for his 19-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter, Wendy.
Then, they got word they wouldn't need to sneak in, thanks to a State
Department program aimed at helping children reunite with their families
on U.S. soil.
On
Thursday night, Mejia and his wife, Virginia de la Paz Marquez,
anxiously waited with the U.S.-born siblings their elder children had
never met: 1-year-old Elias and
8-year-old Janet, wearing a sweater emblazoned with a pink heart. Mejia
made faces at the baby; his wife fended off tears and bouts of
nervousness as weary travelers streamed through the gate and down the
stairs to baggage claim. Then, they were overcome as
their years apart ended: Marquez alternated between laughter and tears
as she embraced her son, then her daughter, both teens wearing an
oversized tag identifying them as refugees.
Brian
and Wendy are among the first six teenagers to travel legally to the
United States under the Central American Minors program, said Ruben
Chandrasekar, executive
director for the Baltimore office of the International Rescue
Committee. The resettlement agency is submitting hundreds of
applications on behalf of parents desperate to bring their children to
America. However, there are more than 5,000 children and teens
just like them who have applied but are still waiting to be contacted
by the Department of Homeland Security. So far, only 90 children have
been interviewed.
Critics
say the program, which was established in December 2014 to offer a safe
and legal alternative for children making the trek into the United
States illegally, has
so far done little to rescue children and young adults from pervasive
violence in parts of Central America. They say the children who have
applied otherwise have no protections in their home countries while they
wait up to a year and a half for their applications
to be processed.
Only
parents in the U.S. legally can file an application for their kin, who
must be 21 or younger, unmarried and living in one of the qualifying
countries — El Salvador,
Guatemala and Honduras. (Gabriel Mejia had been granted legal status in
the U.S.)
All
three countries are plagued by gang violence; El Salvador is one of the
most violent countries in the world. Over the summer, 677 people were
killed in the span of
one month. The country routinely sees 40 slayings in a single day.
Mejia said his children often faced threats of physical violence in El
Salvador, but added that they didn't share much about their experiences
over the phone for fear of wiretaps.
Last
summer, more than 60,000 unaccompanied children from those nations
crossed the border into the United States, where some were detained and
deported while others were
forced to navigate a complex legal system with no guidance. Many of
those children employed smugglers to help in their journey. Some
children were abused along the way or sold into slavery; some did not
make it to the border at all.
Chandrasekar
said while the program is not a solution on its own, it will ultimately
help some families reunite and offer relief to children experiencing
violence. However,
Chandrasekar said the State Department should expand the program to
make more families eligible for safe, legal resettlement. For example,
children whose parents are not in the U.S. legally are not eligible, and
the program ignores the fact some children need
to flee immediately.
"This
is not an immediate solution for kids who are facing a credible fear of
persecution," Chandrasekar said. However, the program does give
children a right to apply
for citizenship if they are granted special refugee status.
"What
we would like to see, we'd like the State Department to strengthen the
program so that parents living here with status can apply for their
children as quickly as
possible," he said.
State
Department officials say they are preparing to interview roughly 530
children in the coming months for possible resettlement in the United
States.
The
program is "one small part of the U.S. government's approach to the
Central American child migrant crisis," said Simon Henshaw, principal
deputy assistant secretary
of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. He said the
program's initial slow pace is due in part to the fact that the majority
of applications were submitted only in the past few months. Henshaw
also said that of the 90 interviewed so far, only
a handful expressed concerns about their safety.
"What
it does do is it reunifies families, which is a bedrock principal of
U.S. immigration policy," Henshaw said. "We're very happy to bring
children out of danger and
see this program continue."
For
Mejia and Marquez, the program was a dream come true. But because of
the program's glacial pace, Mejia said he wasn't always hopeful that
he'd ever see his children
again.
Mejia
left their home village outside El Salvador's capital city in 2000, in
search of more lucrative work opportunities in the U.S. Eight years ago,
Marquez hired a smuggler
and made the trek to join her husband, leaving the children with their
grandmother. That decision haunted her.
"On
many occasions I'd tell my husband I wanted to go back," she said as
she waited anxiously by the airport gate for her children. "I told him
it's not fair that I'm
not experiencing what they're experiencing. But he kept saying be
patient, be patient, there will be an opportunity for us. When we heard
about the program I had faith, we believed something would happen, and
now it is."
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment