AP
January 27, 2016
The
young Salvadoran woman was robbed and forced to dodge kidnappers
working for a drug cartel during her four-month odyssey to this border
city of belching factories
and swirling dust across the Rio Grande from Texas.
She
hoped to be on the other side long before Pope Francis visits the
region next month and delivers what promises to be a highly symbolic
homily addressing immigration.
Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims will flock to the border to hear him
speak, and America's political class will likely be listening as well.
Francis' Feb. 17 Mass in Ciudad Juarez comes just eight days after the
New Hampshire primaries, and three before contests
in South Carolina and Nevada.
Immigration
has been a hot-button campaign issue particularly among Republican
hopefuls such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who have taken an
increasingly hard line with
Trump vowing to deport the more than 11 million immigrants living in
the country illegally and Cruz aiming to end birthright citizenship for
their U.S.-born children. It is also an issue close to Francis' heart,
and while analysts doubt he will wade too blatantly
into the political thicket, his very presence along the border speaking
on the issue will turn heads.
"Migration
is a complicated situation and he's not going to ignore the demands of
national sovereignty ... (but) he's calling for a more open and generous
approach," said
Tom Quigley, former Latin America policy adviser for the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops. "You can't assume that he's going to say
'You all come,' but he will clearly be urging the United States
government, implicitly at least, to find ways of addressing
the reasons why people are leaving El Salvador and Honduras and other
countries."
For
the Salvadoran woman, who gave only her last name, Miranda, all the
talk makes little difference to her plans. She said she was not even
aware the Pope was coming,
and nothing Trump or the other candidates say can dissuade her from
seeking a better life.
Back
home in El Salvador — which last year recorded a homicide rate of 103
per 100,000 inhabitants, believed to be the highest of any country not
in open war — she faced
death threats from hyper-violent gangs that rule entire neighborhoods
largely unchallenged.
"It
does not make you want to go less," Miranda said of the rhetoric,
"because you know that immigration is never going to stop."
Violence
is also rampant in neighboring Guatemala and Honduras, the latter of
which had been the world's reigning murder capital in recent years.
Gangs in all three countries
kill with impunity, extort broad swaths of the population and recruit
young people so aggressively that some stop attending school or even
leaving home.
Living
in many parts of those countries "is like living in a dark, dangerous,
dead-end alley, and migration is a dark, dangerous tunnel — but it's a
tunnel," said Kay
Andrade Eekhoff, who works for Catholic Relief Services in El Salvador
overseeing programs for at-risk Central American youth.
Statistics
show that many continue to risk the tunnel, despite a surge in
enforcement by the U.S. and by Mexico along its own southern frontier.
U.S. Customs and Border
Protection says apprehensions of unaccompanied children mostly from
Central America totaled 17,370 in October-December. That was up 117
percent from the same period a year earlier, while apprehensions of
families rose 187 percent. Still, total detentions remain
well below historic highs.
Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agents on Jan. 2 began rounding up Central
American immigrants who entered without permission since May 2014.
Earlier
this month Secretary of State John Kerry announced an expansion of a
program letting Central Americans apply for refugee status before
traveling north. But some
say they may not qualify, or it's simply too dangerous to wait.
Those
in a hurry include a 20-year-old man in San Salvador who was deported
from the U.S. just months ago. On his last trip north, last summer, the
Gulf drug cartel kidnapped
and held him in Reynosa for five weeks until his family scraped
together ransom. U.S. border agents later captured and sent him home. A
police officer's son, he's now planning to try again after getting gang
threats.
"They
told me if I did not join them, something was going to happen to me or
my dad," the man said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of
gang reprisals.
Francis
has made the plight of migrants one of the hallmarks of his papacy,
denouncing what he called the "globalization of indifference" toward
people desperate to flee
poverty and persecution. He has taken his message of compassion to
Lampedusa, Italy, destination for many African migrants, and to the
European Union and the United Nations.
Last
fall in the U.S. Congress, Francis lectured lawmakers that "we must not
be taken aback by (migrants') numbers but rather view them as persons."
He reminded them that
they, too, descended from immigrants drawn by the dream of a new
future.
In
Ciudad Juarez, the Argentine-born Francis plans to celebrate Mass in a
huge open field on the border and then walk to the Rio Grande to salute
people on the other side
in a powerful show of solidarity with his Latin American compatriots.
Vatican officials say he intends to address violence and drug
trafficking as well. Francis will also come close to fulfilling his wish
to cross the border during the U.S. visit, something
that was ultimately scrapped for logistical reasons.
It's a message that resonates with Sister Norma Pimentel, director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.
"They
are people and we need to treat them that way," said Pimentel, whose
work Francis has praised and who was invited to meet him in New York
last year. "They need our
help, and so we welcome them to restore their dignity."
Pimentel's
center at the Sacred Heart church in McAllen receives about 100
migrants a day who have been detained, processed and released by the
Border Patrol. Each adult
gets an electronic monitoring anklet to ensure they make court
appearances.
On
a recent morning, Erica Johana Garcia was breakfasting with her two
children at the center before catching a bus for the final leg of their
journey to Los Angeles.
They left Guatemala after thugs told her 15-year-old son they would
rape his 8-year-old sister if he didn't join their gang.
Fingering her ankle bracelet, Garcia, 34, vowed to fight to be able to stay.
"I can't go back because I risk my children," she said, "especially my son."
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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