The Journey
Cristian is a shy 16-year-old with a meticulously gelled mohawk. On a late July afternoon, in the uptown Kingston offices of the Worker Justice Center, he begins to recount his journey.
Four months earlier, he crossed an entire continent by bus, foot, taxi, van, freight train, and finally plane, from his rural hometown of Santa Cruz, Guatemala, to Kingston. It took almost 30 days between the travel and staying in "bodegas," stash houses, or spaces where groups of migrants sleep, often side-by-side on the floor, awaiting the next step of their journey. Before crossing the border, he stayed in one bodega packed with about 50 people for whom there were seven mattresses and three beds. Once he was in Texas, he hid in another with about 30 people for 12 days, eating only two or three sandwiches per day.
From there they took a van to be dropped off to walk across the desert, hoping to avoid being pulled over on the highway on their way into the interior of the US. After walking for about four hours, Cristian and several others were apprehended by the Border Patrol, taken to a juvenile detention center in Corpus Christi, and entered into the immigration system. He was there for three days and was then transferred to a youth shelter for another eight days before finally being put on a plane, alone, to reunite with his father in New York. Cristian hadn't seen his father in four years.
A Global Trend
Cristian is one amongst a rapidly growing number of unaccompanied youth who are migrating northward from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. According to the US Department of Homeland Security, almost 70,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended at the US-Mexico border during fiscal year 2014 (October 1, 2013 — September 30, 2014). This is a 77 percent increase over the year prior.
The Central Americans who are apprehended are taken into detention and processed. Under a Bush-era anti-human-trafficking law, minors from countries other than Mexico and Canada who enter the US have the right to make a case for themselves as refugees instead of entering deportation proceedings automatically as adults.
According to the recent report Children on the Run put out by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, the number of unaccompanied and separated children from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador who have been apprehended at the border has doubled each year since 2011, and migrants expressing a fear of persecution or torture were they to return to their home country increased nearly seven-fold between the years of 2009 and 2013, when 36,1745 individuals sought asylum. The youth are not only coming to the US but are also seeking asylum in the neighboring countries of Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama. These countries registered a combined 435 percent increase in asylum applications in 2012.
According to the UN, the reason for the surge is increased criminal activity in countries with weak governments, combined with entrenched poverty. Honduras and El Salvador consistently rank among the countries with the highest homicide rates worldwide.
Why They Are Coming
Felipe has sharp eyes and a quick smile and speaks the indigenous language of Q'eqchi' in addition to Spanish. He works in a local restaurant and crossed the US/Mexico border for the first time in 2002.
Late one night in December he received a surprising phone call from authorities in Texas—his sons were in custody. Without telling him, they emigrated from the rural Petén region of Guatemala, known for its Mayan ruins. For over two weeks, they traveled through Mexico, sleeping under bridges and in the countryside before being detained with 16 others in Houston, Texas.
Gelber, the younger son, who is 17, has been reunited with his father. His 22-year-old brother was deported in August as he was not covered under the antitrafficking law. From the age of seven, Gelber had worked as a goat shepherd and at 12 left school altogether. Both father and son refer consistently to the armed gangs and narco-traffickers that roam the countryside in their native region, which is near the Mexican border.
On his reasons for coming Gelber says, "I didn't have a way to move forward in Guatemala. I wanted to study and I couldn't because of the money and the school was far away. Also, [the narcos] come to your house and demand money and you have to give it, otherwise they will kill you."
Felipe says that they have been hearing about this type of violence for many years but that the killings have become commonplace, including an incident in 2012 in which 28 people were shot on a nearby farm. "The people have become scared, people don't want to go out, they don't even go to church so they have closed the churches. It is quite dangerous." His son adds, "Just a little while ago, [the narcos] killed my dad's cousin, and just before I came here they went to my cousin's house and told him they would kill him."
Guatemala is not alone in being plagued by gang and drug-related violence. Manuel moved to Sullivan County in 2006, after working packing bananas for Chiquita in his hometown of La Lima, Honduras. His wife made the journey north two years later, leaving her young son, Manuel Jr., in the care of her sister. In New York, they worked in various chicken processing and egg factories, and now Manuel works doing year-round maintenance at a Jewish bungalow camp.
Over the years, their only child recounted incidents of seemingly random and ubiquitous violence at the hands of the gangs. Manuel remembers, "My son was once almost killed for his cell phone! For an entire year he hardly left the house except to go to school. My wife and I just kept thinking about the situation our son was in, how he was abandoned there, living with my sister-in-law. He was well cared for, he went to church, he was a good young man, but the violence in Honduras is dire."
They made the difficult decision to have their 15-year-old attempt to enter the United States illegally. "He didn't want to come here like this. If he could not have come legally to visit, to see us, he would not have come [like this]. He went to ask for a visa to be able to come legally to the country and they didn't give it to him. Because of the situation, we made the decision." After being detained and sent to a shelter, Manuel Jr. now lives with his parents while awaiting his hearing.
Not only are the youth at risk of experiencing violence or being killed, but many are also actively recruited to become gang members themselves, especially young men. "In Honduras there is an extreme violence that the military cannot control," Manuel says. "The gangs have taken control of almost everything there. They are recruiting young people, like my son, that are 14-, 15-, 16-years-old."
Many families are deciding that it is more risky to have their children stay home than to undertake the journey north. When asked if entire communities are leaving, Felipe and Gelber nod emphatically and answer in unison, "Sí, muchísimas." One can begin to imagine a countryside littered with ghost towns.
Many immigrants feel that these Central American governments cannot do anything to protect their citizens, or worse, that government authorities might be just as corrupt as the gang members. Gelber paid bribes to Mexican police during his journey through the country, something he was accustomed to because his experience with the Guatemalan authorities was no different. Manuel expresses frustration with those in the government who don't eradicate the roots of the violence through economic development or a stronger social net. He says, "The most important thing would be that [if] the Honduran people [had] work, maybe there would be less violence, less crime."
Local Response
After being detained at the border and logged into the system to await an immigration hearing, the youth are placed in temporary shelters across the country. The Hudson Valley is home to a number of these shelters, which work to reunite the youth with members of their families. If that is not possible, they will ultimately be transferred to the foster care system.
Many of the youth reunite with family members who are already established in the large immigrant communities of the New York metro region. Almost 6,000 minors were reunited with sponsors in New York State from October 2013 to September 2014. Once they are here, their families struggle to find legal representation, enroll the child in school, apply for health insurance, and connect with mental health services, often lacking legal status themselves and all the while not knowing if the child will be able to stay or if he or she will be deported in a matter of months.
Because this is a new and growing trend, many community-based and regional service agencies have had to organize their efforts to serve recently arrived youth and their families.
On September 19, the Worker Justice Center, in collaboration with La Voz magazine, organized a forum on unaccompanied minors for service providers throughout the Mid-Hudson region at the Everett Hodge Center in Kingston. The room was packed with social workers, lawyers, health-care providers, and the police chiefs of Kingston and Saugerties.
Kerry Conboy, an immigration counselor with Catholic Charities, the agency contracted to represent youth who are housed in the shelters, explained some of the possible legal remedies, including asylum and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), an immigration remedy available to young people who have been abandoned or neglected by one or both parents.
Lawyer Mark Grunblatt, who has provided services to the Salvadoran community for many years, says, "Immigration court is a crazy place. You have the language barriers, but also you are dealing with the issue that the governments back home are just not very functional." For that reason, it can be difficult to secure basic paperwork. In regard to the processing of the youth he said, "There is a special court on the 12th floor of 26 Federal Plaza that is absolutely flooded right now, that just hears SIJS cases." The youth will have their first appearance before a judge many months after they were first detained, and the backlog continues to grow. Because many youth will be unable to obtain counsel, some nonprofits and legal clinics send volunteer attorneys to the immigration court to represent whomever comes in that day.
Advocates voiced concerns about the potential psychological trauma of the young people who are arriving. Emma Kreyche of the Worker Justice Center said, "Most of the young women who cross are expecting to be raped. When that is the expectation, we can only imagine what they are fleeing from." The group has begun to compile a list of mental-health-care providers who speak Spanish to distribute to youth and sponsoring family members.
Overall, many local agencies do not have enough Spanish-speaking staff who are trained to work with youth who may have been traumatized to keep up with the demand.
Seeking Home
Some of the children who are coming are reuniting with parents whom they haven't seen in many years. Others have left their parents behind. Manuel tears up when he describes meeting his son at La Guardia. "After so many years, when I saw him, I hugged him—it had been so long since I had seen him. It was a huge joy for my wife and I when we saw him." Given the danger of the journey, the joy of parents seeing their children again is mixed with relief that they have arrived safely.
Grunblatt estimates that somewhere between a quarter and half of the youth will be able to stay in the US legally. He emphasizes that "immigration law is a wild and self-contradictory pile of rules from the days when the door to the US was wide open to the days when it swung shut again. It's done this repeatedly for 238 years now. Some of the laws are ancient, some now have to do with being a terrorist. It keeps shifting as attitudes keep shifting."
The outcome of these cases is impacted greatly by whether the youth are able to secure legal counsel. Because immigration is a civil matter, there is no right to representation. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, approximately a third of the youth who went to court over the last three years were represented by an immigration attorney. Almost three of four youth with representation have been permitted to remain in the United States, while 85 percent of youth without representation were given deportation orders. Because of the expedited nature of many of these removal proceedings, advocates have voiced concerns about a lack of due process. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government for failure to provide legal representation during deportation hearings.
Obama's recent announcement of administrative relief indicates a shifting attitude on a national level. Time will tell if this will trickle down to the hearings many of the youth will be attending this year. Cristian, Gelber, and Manuel Jr. are currently awaiting their hearing before an immigration judge. In the meantime, they and their counterparts have entered American public schools for the first time.
As they learn English and acclimate to their new lives, they begin to dream about the possibilities, even though their time in the US may be limited. Manuel Jr. is applying for political asylum, as are many others, though one has to meet quite a high bar to qualify. Gelber hopes to study literature, especially poetry, which he grew up reading in Guatemala. Cristian might want to be a mechanic.
Speaking on the differences between his hometown and Kingston, Gelber says, "Well, it's not the same as being in your own country. It's different. Here you can walk in the street and nothing happens to you."
Their parents have high hopes that they might be able to stay, enjoy their newfound safety, and study. But as Manuel says, "I don't get to decide this. It's decided by an immigration judge."