For Central Americans, children open a path to the US
CHANMAGUA, Guatemala: To mark attendance in Diana Melisa Contreras’s kindergarten classroom, students place tongue depressors into little white cups painted with their names.
There were 29 cups at the start of the school year. Then Contreras’s students and their parents began leaving their small village in the coffee- growing hills of southern Guatemala, joining the torrent of migration to the United States. With more families preparing to depart in the coming weeks, Contreras has been told her class will only have five students next term, and she will be transferred to teach at a different school.
“They’re all going to the United States,” she said. “I’m being left without kids.”
More than ever before, if you look at the current surge of Central American migrants to the United States, you will see the face of a child. The past five years have rewritten the story of who crosses America’s southern border: It is no longer just the young man travelling alone looking for work. Now that man, or woman, will often be holding the hand of a young boy or girl.
Last month, 23,121 members of “family units” were arrested along the US southern border, the highest number on record and a 150 per cent increase since July. With the number of single adults attempting to sneak into the United States declining, families and underage minors now account for more than half of those taken into custody by US border agents.
Thousands more children are coming in the migrant caravans President Donald Trump has likened to “an invasion,” carrying toys and stuffed animals and collapsing, at times, from exhaustion.
This is happening because Central Americans know they will have a better chance of avoiding deportation, at least temporarily, if they are processed along with children.
The economics of the journey
The economics of the journey reinforces the decision to bring a child: Smugglers in Central America charge less than half the price if a minor is part of the cargo because less work is required of them.
reinforces the decision to bring a child: Smugglers in Central America charge less than half the price if a minor is part of the cargo because less work is required of them.
Unlike single adult migrants, who would need to be guided on a dangerous march through the deserts of Texas or Arizona, smugglers deliver families only to the US border crossing and the waiting arms of US immigration authorities. The smuggler does not have to enter the United States and risk arrest.
The Trump administration tried to deter parents this spring when it imposed a “zero tolerance” family- separation policy at the border. But the controversy it generated and the president’s decision to halt the practice six weeks later cemented the widely-held impression that parents who bring children can avoid deportation.
In villages such as Chanmagua, where years of depressed coffee prices have pushed families to the breaking point, young children and teenagers are seen as boarding passes to the flight for economic survival. Their absence is evident on soccer teams with too few players and coffee farms with thinner staffs at harvest time. Just this year, 100 adults and children have left, including 17 from the town’s only kindergarten class, local officials said.
Within this exodus, a small number of cases have particularly troubled the town. Some parents have given up their children to other adults - sometimes for cash - to help the adult enter the United States, according to town officials, charity workers and residents. These transactions sometimes involve a minor travelling with a relative or godparent; in other cases, they say, the adult has no relation to the child.
Such arrangements are referred to, euphemistically, as “adoptions.”
“This is the most serious problem that we have,” said Juan Jose Arita Rivera, the town’s mayor.
US border security officials say they, too, are concerned by the growing number of adults showing up with children who are not their own, a symptom of what they call a worsening humanitarian crisis that puts families and children in the hands of predatory smuggling networks.
Between April 19, when US Customs and Border Protection began tracking the increase in suspected cases of fraudulent parentage, and Sept. 30, the end of the 2018 fiscal year, CBP agents had separated 170 families after determining the child and adult travelling together were unrelated.
In Guatemalan villages, community leaders fear more children will be exploited. “This is a crime. This is human trafficking,” said Marleni Villeda, 46, who helps run a school for at-risk children, one of whom, she contends, recently left for the United States with a man who may not be a relative. “What is happening here is a tragedy.”
Often, these cases can be more complicated than they first appear. The families involved face hunger and threats of violence. There are disagreements about paternity and allegations of abuse. Far from a common practice, illicit “adoptions” seem to brand the participants with a scarlet letter in their own community.
For three months, Denys Adelmo Mejia lived like a fugitive. Gang members wanted to recruit the 23-year- old auto mechanic. He hardly ventured outside.
“One night, he told me, ‘Mom, I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to talk to the girl’s mother, and if she wants to give her to me, then I’m going to go,” said his mother, Teresa de Jesus Luna.
The girl’s mother was Gilda Lopez, a 33-year- old maid who lived a few doors down, in a dirt-floor shack, the walls a patchwork of burlap bags and boards with exposed nails. Her five children, including the eldest, Elizabeth Dayana, 9, slept alongside her on a ratty slab of foam.
Lopez, a single mother, left each morning at dawn to clean houses and came home 12 hours later. A month of this would bring in US$ 60. In her home, there was rarely enough food.
When Mejia came asking for a child, Lopez was willing to let her daughter go.
“I don’t have any support here,” she said, tears in her eyes. “And so I made the decision that my girl should leave.”
That decision has shaken this village of some 3,000 people, where gossip travels quickly. Town leaders, such as the mayor, and the head of the Catholic charity foundation, say Mejia, who left earlier this year, has no relation to Elizabeth Dayana, and they are concerned for her welfare.
“As an organisation, what worries us most is: What’s going to happen to those kids over there,” said Josue Villeda, who runs the foundation in honour of Sister Maria Caridad, an American nun who spent much of her life in Chanmagua.
“If someone isn’t a relative or anything, who is going to watch over the child’s education in the United States? Their health? Their basic needs?”
Lopez, the mother, and Mejia both say Mejia is the girl’s father. Lopez said Mejia, who would have been around 14 years old when Elizabeth Dayana was born, for years denied he was the father but now says that he is.
Reached by phone in Kansas City, Mejia said he saved thousands of dollars by travelling with a child. His smuggler would have charged US$ 10,000 if he had been travelling alone, he said; with Elizabeth Dayana, it cost US$ 4,500 for both of them. He has three years to pay this off - in monthly instalments - or his mother could lose her house.
“When you come with a child, (the smuggler) only delivers you to the Border Patrol,” said Mejia. “When you’re coming alone, they have to take you all the way across the desert.”
He and the girl now share a duplex with Mejia’s brother and his brother’s wife. Mejia wears an ankle bracelet as he waits for his asylum case to move through immigration courts. Because he cannot work legally or get a driver’s licence, he said he cannot enrol Elizabeth Dayana in school.
“Since she had never lived with me, at first she was rebellious,” he said. “But I told her that I’m the father - and it wasn’t that her mom had just given her to me - I was her real father. And now she has been behaving well.”
Dina Casanga is 19 and has four children. The eldest, Benjamin, is either 5 or 6 years old, depending on which of his birth documents is to be believed.
Such documents, issued by the Guatemala’s National Registry of Persons ( RENAP), are at the centre of the controversy over true parentage in the disputed cases in Chanmagua. The town’s mayor, and other officials, allege the RENAP office in nearby Esquipulas will issue, for a fee, documents establishing a parentchild relationship, particularly for single mothers who did not have a father initially registered.
RENAP did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Elmer Oseas Moran, 20, left Chanmagua with the young boy, Benjamin, in October, headed for the United States.
In an interview with The Washington Post, the mother, Dina Casanga, first described Elmer as “the father” and later as “an acquaintance,” and said she did not know his last name.
Casanga’s father, Héctor Casanga, 50, disputes Moran is the boy’s father and is pressing a legal complaint against his daughter. He said he raised the boy for several years, and his daughter had no right to give his grandson to someone else.
In his cramped home, he showed copies of two RENAP documents. The most recent one, dated Oct 12, listed the boy’s last name as Moran Casanga, taking the last name of the man who left with him. But the earlier document shows his name as Casanga Vasquez, the same as the mother, and it had no information identifying a father.
“She named him as her husband, so he could take the boy with him,” said Héctor Casanga, the boy’s grandfather. “She invented that to take him away from me, and RENAP gave her a paper.”