Thousands of young migrants, mostly from Central America, make their way to the border, many hoping to meet parents in the United States. But for those caught in Mexico, there is only one near-safe deportation.
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – The children rushed out of a white van, dazed and tired, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.
They had been heading north without their parents, hoping to cross the border into the United States.
You never made it.
Arrested by Mexican immigration officials, they were taken to a shelter for unaccompanied minors in Ciudad Juarez, marched in a single file, and lined up on a wall for processing. For them, this facility is the closest to the United States about a mile from the border.
“‘Mom, I have bad news for you,'” one of the girls at the shelter, Elizabeth, 13, from Honduras, recalled telling her mother over the phone. “‘Don’t cry, but Mexican immigration got me.'”
The minors at the shelter are part of a growing wave of migrants hoping for a way to the United States, also because they see President Biden as more tolerant of immigration issues than his predecessor Donald J. Trump. Border officials encountered more than 170,000 migrants in March, according to the New York Times. This is an increase of almost 70 percent compared to February and the highest monthly total since 2006.
Of these migrants, more than 18,700 unaccompanied minors were detained at border crossings, almost twice as many as in February and more than five times as many as 3,490 in February 2020, the documents showed.
If they make it across the border, unaccompanied minors can try to take their case to the American authorities, go to school and one day find work and help relatives at home. Some can reunite with the parents waiting there.
But for those caught before crossing the border, the long road north ends in Mexico.
If they are from other parts of the country, as a growing number is due to the economic burden of the pandemic, a relative can pick them up and take them home.
But most of them are from Central America, fueled by lives that have become unsustainable through poverty, violence, natural disasters, and the pandemic, and encouraged by the promise of the Biden government to take a more generous approach to immigration.
They will often wait months in shelters in Mexico for precautions to be taken. Then they are deported.
The journey north is not easy and the young migrants who face it have to grow up quickly.
At the shelter, most are teenagers, but some are only 5 years old. When traveling alone, without parents – in groups of children or with a relative or family friend – they may come across criminal networks that often take advantage of migrants and border officials determined to stop them. But they keep trying by the thousands.
“For economic reasons, there is a great flow and it will not stop until people’s lives in these countries improve,” said José Alfredo Villa, director of the Nohemí Álvarez Quillay shelter for unaccompanied minors in Ciudad Juárez.
In 2018, 1,318 children were admitted to emergency shelters for unaccompanied minors in Ciudad Juárez, local authorities said. By 2019, the number had risen to 1,510, although it had dropped to 928 last year due to the pandemic.
In the first two and a half months of this year, however, the number rose to 572 – a rate that, if left, would far exceed the total achieved in 2019, the highest year ever recorded.
When minors enter the shelter, their schooling stops and staff cannot provide instruction for so many from different countries and with different educational backgrounds. Instead, the minors fill their days with art classes, in which they often draw or paint photos of their home countries. They watch TV, play in the yard or do the housework so that the shelter runs like laundry.
The scene in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, tells only part of a story that takes place along the nearly 2,000 mile border.
Elizabeth, the 13-year-old from Villanueva, Honduras, said when Mexican authorities arrested her in early March, she thought of her mother in Maryland and how disappointed she would be.
When she called from the shelter, her mother was delighted at first and thought she had crossed, Elizabeth said; When she heard the news, her mother burst into tears.
“I told her not to cry,” Elizabeth said. “We’d meet again.”
The New York Times agreed to use the middle names of all unaccompanied minors surveyed to protect their identities. Her family circumstances and the outline of her cases have been confirmed by officials at the shelter who are in contact with her relatives and the authorities in their countries to arrange for their deportation.
If Elizabeth had made it across the river to Texas, her life would be different now. Even if she had been arrested by United States Customs and Border Protection, she would have been released by her mother and given a court hearing to present her asylum application.
The success of her asylum application would not be a given. In 2019, 71 percent of all cases involving unaccompanied minors led to deportation orders. But many never come to their hearings; They evade the authorities and slip into the population in order to lead a life of flight.
For the majority of minors in the shelter, being caught in Mexico means only one thing: deportation to their home country in Central America.
According to Mr Villa, the director of the shelter, around 460 minors were deported from emergency shelters in Juárez in the first three months of the year. And they often wait for months while Mexican officials routinely struggle to win cooperation from Central American countries to coordinate deportations, he said.
Elizabeth has no idea who will take care of her when she is sent back to Honduras. Her father left the family when she was born, she said, and the grandmother she lived with is dying.
When Elizabeth’s mom left in 2017, she broke it, she said.
The mother had taken out loans to help Elizabeth. When loan sharks came after the family requesting the repayment, they went to the United States to look for work, Elizabeth said.
“When my mother left, I felt my heart go, my soul,” she said and cried.
Elizabeth’s mother got a good job landscaping in Maryland and wanted to spare her daughter the treacherous trip to the United States. But when the grandmother was no longer able to take care of Elizabeth due to her health, it was the girl’s turn to say goodbye.
Elizabeth said she doubted if she would ever see her grandmother again.
In early March, Elizabeth reached the Rio Grande on Mexico’s northern border. She began wading towards Texas when local authorities caught her and pulled her out of the water.
Mexican immigration officials took her to the Nohemí Álvarez Quillay shelter, named after an Ecuadorian girl who died of suicide in 2014 after being imprisoned at another shelter in Juarez. She was 12 years old and on her way to reuniting with parents who had lived in the Bronx since childhood.
In mid-March, two weeks after her arrival, Elizabeth celebrated her 13th birthday at the shelter.
When the shelter’s staff were cutting the cake for Elizabeth – minors are prohibited from handling sharp objects – three other children were dropped off by immigration authorities just hours after the eight that had arrived that morning. They watched cartoons while waiting for the shelter officials to register them.
Elizabeth’s best friend since arriving, Yuliana, 15, had been by her side and was arrested by Mexican authorities in December when she tried to cross the border with her 2-year-old cousin and pull by the hand of her 4-year-old . old cousin. Yuliana is from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, one of the most violent cities in the world.
Both girls said they saw parents struggle to put food on the table before making the tough decision to immigrate to the United States. And both felt that their failure to cross them had raised the enormous expectations that had been placed of them: reuniting with a lonely parent, going to work, and sending money to family members left behind.
Home is no place for girls – Honduras or the United States. Home is where their families are. They want to be there.
“My dream is to get ahead and raise my family,” said Yuliana. “It is the first to help my mother and my brothers. My family.”
The day she left San Pedro Sula to join her father in Florida, she said her mother made a promise to her.
“She asked me never to forget her,” said Yuliana. “And I replied that I never could because I would go for her.”
