Young asylum seekers recount violence
The gap-toothed 7-year-old smiled shyly when the federal judge asked him to raise his hand and promise to tell the truth.
In his blue jacket and matching sneakers, Steven was by far the youngest in the downtown courtroom, which on Friday was filled with teenagers in middle and high school. Because he was so little, the judge asked his father, Jose Menjivar, to speak for him during his deportation hearing.
“Do you have a fear of returning to your home country?” Judge Chris Brisack asked.
Menjivar, a 37-year-old carpenter in Houston, paused. He thought of his parents’ home in El Salvador’s capital, where Steven lived until last year. Sandwiched between two neighborhoods controlled by rival street gangs, it had become a prison. Gangs forced Menjivar’s f ather to close his butcher shop and pay them $500 a week. They followed him to Steven’s school and lurked outside, inquiring how much Menjivar earns in the United States.
“Yes,” the father said. “We are afraid.”
Steven is one of nearly 31,000 Salvadoran children traveling on their own whom U.S. Border Patrol agents have apprehended since October 2013. Tens of thousands more have come here not
only from El Salvador, a nation of just 6.3 million, but also from Honduras and Guatemala with their mothers in what advocates say is a refugee crisis.
Critics, however, contend it is actually President Barack Obama’s immigration policies that are drawing them here.
On Thursday, 22 Democratic senators asked the Obama administration to stop high-profile immigration raids that have targeted recently arrived Central American women and children. The government argues they are priorities for deportation because they have exhausted their appeals in the court system, but the operation has roiled the immigrant community.
“We are deeply concerned that in its eagerness to deter additional arrivals from this region, the department is returning vulnerable individuals with valid protection claims to life-threatening violence,” the senators wrote.
Fleeing violence
They noted that a State Department briefing this month warned that El Salvador risks losing “an entire generation of young people due to violent conflict.”
The country’s homicide rate jumped 70 percent in 2015 to 103 murders for every 100,000 residents, making it the most dangerous country in the world after Syria, said Elizabeth Kennedy, a San Diego State University social scientist who studies child migration in El Salvador. She interviewed 322 children who had left on their own in 2014 only to be apprehended in Mexico and sent back. Sixty percent said they were fleeing violence.
“Given the high homicide rates and the lack of ability from the state to combat these gangs, clearly this is a refugee crisis,” Kennedy said.
No attorneys
In their letter, the senators said the crisis in the region is “undeniable,” noting a 1,200 percent increase in asylum applications filed by residents of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in neighboring nations in Central America, indicating the violence is “forcing people to flee.”
They asked the administration to grant a type of provisional work permit known as Temporary Protected Status for those residents who are in the United States, allowing them to legally stay. The designation has typically been used for people fleeing earthquakes or other natural disasters and has previously been issued for El Salvador and Honduras.
The U.S. State Department said last week it would also expand its refugee program for residents of these countries. But the government at the same time has expedited their court cases in a domestic policy that critics call “schizophrenic” with what it is doing abroad.
On Friday, Steven and six other children stood in
front of the immigration judge, all of them without an attorney.
Similarly, about 60 percent of 35,200 children appearing on their own in
Texas immigration courts between 2004 and 2015 had no legal representation, according to data analyzed by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Ac- cess Clearinghouse.
Having an attorney makes a huge difference. Nearly 70 percent of children without lawyers were ordered deported in that period, compared to only a quarter of those with counsel.
“Do you have a fear to return to your home country?” the judge asked.
Yes, said an 18-yearold girl from Honduras whom gangs tied up and beat at gunpoint. Yes, said a 15-year-old girl from Guatemala, who came here alone, looking for her mom. Yes, said Steven, who loves the red race car in the Pixar movie Cars.
A dangerous journey
The judge gave them asylum applications and ordered them to return in April. Menjivar said he wants to hire an attorney to help. He cannot fathom returning his only son, who attends Michael Kennedy Elementary School in Alief, where he excels at math.
Bringing Steven and his 11-year-old daughter Sandy to the U.S. was “the worst experience in my life,” Menjivar said, tears welling up in his eyes. “I know how dangerous the journey is.”
But he saw no other way. Their mother had left them years before. The gangs would soon recruit Steven to join their killing ranks and pressure Sandy into sexual relationships.
During El Salvador’s 12- year-long civil war in the 1980s, one at least could try to avoid the violence, he said, but now, “it’s everywhere.”
“People don’t understand what we are enduring over there,” he said.