Migrant youths returned home if caught in Mexico
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — The children tumbled out of a white van, dazed and tired, rubbing sleep from their eyes.
They had been on their way north, traveling without their parents, hoping to cross the border into the United States. They never made it. Detained by Mexican immigration officers, they were taken to a shelter for unaccompanied minors in Ciudad Juarez, marched in single file and lined up against a wall for processing. For them, this facility about a mile from the border is the closest they will get to the United States.
“‘Mommy, I have bad news for you,’” one of the girls at the shelter, Elizabeth, 13, from Honduras, recalled telling her mother on the phone. “‘Don’t cry, but Mexican immigration caught me.’”
The minors at the shelter are part of a growing wave of migrants hoping to find a way into the United States, partly because they see President Joe Biden as more tolerant on immigration issues than his predecessor. Border officials encountered more than 170,000 migrants in March, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. That figure is a nearly 70% increase from February and the highest monthly total since 2006.
Of these migrants, more than 18,700 were unaccompanied minors detained at border crossings, nearly double the February figure and more than five times the 3,490 detained in February 2020, the documents showed.
If they make it across the border, unaccompanied minors can try to present their case to U.S. authorities, go to school and one day find work and help relatives back home. Some can reunite with parents waiting there.
But for those caught before crossing the border, the long road north ends in Mexico.
If they are from elsewhere in the country, as a growing number are because of the economic toll of the pandemic, they can be picked up by a relative and taken home.
But most of them are from Central America, propelled north by a life made unsustainable by poverty, violence, natural disasters and the pandemic, and they are encouraged by the Biden administration’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 brave it have to grow up fast.
At the shelter, most are teenagers, but some are as young as 5. Traveling alone, without parents — in groups of children, or with a relative or a family friend — they may run into criminal networks that often take advantage of migrants and into border officers determined to stop them. But they keep trying, by the thousands.
“There is a big flow, for economic reasons, and it will not stop until people’s lives in these countries improve,” said Jose Alfredo Villa, director of the Nohemi Alvarez Quillay shelter for unaccompanied minors in Ciudad Juarez.
In 2018, 1,318 children were admitted into shelters for unaccompanied minors in Ciudad Juarez, local authorities said. By 2019, the number had grown to 1,510, though it dipped to 928 last year because of the pandemic.
But in the first 2½ months of this year, the number has soared to 572 — a rate that, if maintained, would far surpass the total reached in 2019, the highest year on record.
When minors enter the shelter, their schooling stops because the staff are unable to provide classes for so many coming from different countries and different educational backgrounds. Instead, the minors fill their days with art classes, where they often draw or paint photos of their home countries. They watch television, play in the courtyard or complete chores to help the shelter run, like laundry.
The scene in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, tells only one part of a story playing out all along the border’s nearly 2,000 miles.
Elizabeth, the 13-year-old from Villanueva, Honduras, said that when Mexican authorities detained 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 ecstatic at first, thinking she had crossed, Elizabeth said; then, on hearing the news, her mother burst into tears.
“I told her not to cry,” Elizabeth said. “We would see each other again.”
If Elizabeth had made it across the river into Texas, her life would be different now. Even if apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, she would have been released to her mother and given a court date to present her asylum case.
The success of her asylum application would not be a given. In 2019, 71% of all cases involving unaccompanied minors resulted in deportation orders. But many never turn up for their hearings; they dodge authorities and slip into the population, to live lives of evasion.
For the majority of minors in the shelter, being caught in Mexico means only one thing: deportation to their home country in Central America.
About 460 minors were deported from shelters in Juarez in the first three months of the year, said Villa, the shelter director. And they often wait for months as Mexican officials routinely struggle to gain the cooperation of Central American countries to coordinate deportations, he said.
In early March, Elizabeth made it to the Rio Grande, on Mexico’s northern border. She began wading toward Texas when local authorities caught her and pulled her out of the water.
In mid-March, two weeks after her arrival, Elizabeth celebrated her 13th birthday at the shelter.