Thousands of young migrants, mostly from Central America, are moving to the border, many hoping to find parents in the United States. But for those caught in Mexico, deportation is almost certain.
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – The children fell out of a white van, stunned and tired, wiping the sleep from their eyes.
They were on their way north, traveling without their parents, hoping to cross the border into the United States.
They never did.
Arrested by Mexican immigration officials, they were taken to a shelter for unaccompanied minors in Ciudad Juárez, marched in single file and lined up against a wall for prosecution. For them, this facility about a mile from the border is the closest they will reach the United States.
“’Mama, I have some bad news for you,’” recalls one of the girls at the shelter, Elizabeth, 13, from Honduras, who told her mother on the phone. “’Don’t cry, but Mexican immigration caught me.’”
Minors at the shelter are part of a growing wave of migrants hoping to find a way to the United States, in part because they see President Biden as more tolerant of immigration issues than his predecessor, Donald J. Trump. Border officials found more than 170,000 migrants in March, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. This number represents an increase of almost 70% in relation to February and the highest monthly total since 2006.
Of these migrants, more than 18,700 were unaccompanied minors detained at border crossings, almost double the number in February and more than five times the 3,490 detained in February 2020, the documents show.
If they manage to cross the border, unaccompanied minors may try to present their case to the American authorities, go to school and one day find work and help relatives at home. Some may meet with the parents who are waiting there.
But for those caught before crossing the border, the long road to the north ends in Mexico.
If they are from other parts of the country, since an increasing number are due to the economic impact of the pandemic, they can be picked up by a relative and taken home.
But most of them are from Central America, driven north by a life made unsustainable by poverty, violence, natural disasters and the pandemic, and encouraged by the Biden government’s promise to take a more generous approach to immigration.
They will wait in shelters in Mexico, often for months, for arrangements to be made. Then, they will be deported.
The journey north is not an easy one, and the young migrants who face it need to grow fast.
At the shelter, most are teenagers, but some are only 5 years old. Traveling alone, without parents – in groups of children, or with a relative or family friend – they can come across criminal networks that often take advantage of migrants in border officers determined to stop them. But they keep trying, by the thousands.
“There is a great flow for economic reasons and it will not stop until the lives of people in these countries improve,” said José Alfredo Villa, director of the shelter for unaccompanied minors Nohemí Álvarez Quillay in Ciudad Juárez.
In 2018, 1,318 children were admitted to shelters for unaccompanied minors in Ciudad Juárez, local authorities reported. In 2019, the number had grown to 1,510, although it dropped to 928 last year because of the pandemic.
But in the first two and a half months of this year, the number soared to 572 – a rate that, if maintained, would far exceed the total reached in 2019, the largest year on record.
When minors enter the shelter, their schooling is interrupted, as employees are unable to teach classes to so many who come from different countries and different levels of education. Instead, minors fill their days with art classes, where they usually draw or paint pictures of their home countries. They watch television, play on the patio or perform tasks to help the shelter work, such as laundry.
The scene in Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, tells only part of a story that unfolds over almost 2,000 miles from the border.
Elizabeth, the 13-year-old girl from Villanueva in Honduras, said that when Mexican authorities arrested her in early March, she thought about her mother in Maryland and how she would be disappointed.
When she called from the shelter, her mother was ecstatic at first, thinking that she was gone, Elizabeth said; then, on hearing the news, his mother started to cry.
“I told her not to cry,” said Elizabeth. “We would see each other again.”
The New York Times agreed to use the middle names of all unaccompanied minors interviewed to protect their identities. The family situation and the outlines of their cases were confirmed by social workers at the shelter, who are in contact with their relatives and the authorities of their countries to arrange for their deportation.
If Elizabeth had crossed the river to Texas, her life would be different now. Even if she was arrested by the United States Customs and Border Protection, she would have been released to her mother and would have a court date to file her asylum case.
The success of your asylum application would not be guaranteed. In 2019, 71 percent of all cases involving unaccompanied minors resulted in deportation orders. But many never attend the hearings; they evade the authorities and infiltrate the population, to live a life of evasion.
For most minors in the shelter, being caught in Mexico means just one thing: deportation to their home country in Central America.
About 460 minors were deported from shelters in Juárez in the first three months of the year, according to Villa, the shelter’s director. And they often wait months while Mexican authorities routinely struggle to win cooperation from Central American countries to coordinate deportations, he said.
Elizabeth has no idea who will look after her if 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 mother left in 2017, it broke her, she said.
The mother had made loans to support Elizabeth. When moneylenders came after the family in search of payment, she went to the United States in search of work, said Elizabeth.
“When my mother left, I felt my heart and soul leave,” she said, crying.
Elizabeth’s mother got a good job as a landscaper in Maryland and wanted to save her daughter from the treacherous trip to the United States. But when her grandmother’s health left her unable to care for Elizabeth, it was the girl’s turn to say goodbye.
Elizabeth said she doubted that she would ever see her grandmother again.
In early March, Elizabeth arrived in Rio Grande, on the northern border of Mexico. She started wading towards Texas when local authorities picked her up and pulled her out of the water.
Mexican immigration officials left her at the Nohemí Álvarez Quillay shelter, in honor of an Ecuadorian girl who died by suicide at another shelter in Juárez in 2014 after being detained. She was 12 years old and was on her way to reunite with parents who have lived in the Bronx since she was a child.
In mid-March, two weeks after her arrival, Elizabeth celebrated her 13th birthday at the shelter.
While the shelter staff cut the cake for Elizabeth – minors are prohibited from handling sharp objects – three more children were left by immigration authorities, just hours after the eight that had arrived that morning. They watched cartoons while waiting for shelter staff to register them.
Elizabeth’s best friend since she arrived, Yuliana, 15, was at her side, apprehended by Mexican authorities in December, when she tried to cross the border by carrying her 2-year-old cousin and pulling her 4-year-old cousin’s hand. old cousin. Yuliana is from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, one of the cities most devastated by violence in the world.
Both girls said they saw a father struggle to put food on the table before making the difficult decision to migrate to the United States. And both felt that the fact that they had not crossed had changed the tremendous expectations that had been placed on them: to meet with a lonely father, to work and to send money to the relatives who were left behind.
For girls, home is not a place – Honduras or the United States. Home is where your families are. That’s where they want to be.
“My dream is to progress and raise my family,” said Yuliana. “It is the first thing, 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 her promise something.
“She asked me to never forget her,” said Yuliana. “And I replied that I never could, because I was leaving for her.”