From the border to Pittsburgh
The journeys of two unaccompanied migrant children
Surrounded by loved ones in June, Bartolo Garcia, 21, and Andrea Mendez Peraza, 19, moved their tassels to the left side of their mortarboards to become high school graduates in Pittsburgh in a ceremonial rite of passage.
But a few years ago, life brought them to a different vital crossroads — the U.S.Mexico border — all by themselves.
Bartolo and Andrea are strangers with a similar path: They both crossed the U.S. southwestern border a few weeks after their 16th birthdays — in 2013 and 2015, respectively — joining the thousands of unaccompanied children fleeing poverty and violence in Central America.
Three years ago, Andrea came to the U.S. from El Salvador with the help of a “coyote,” a Mexican slang term for a smuggler, in a group of about 10 Salvadoran women, children and family members she had never met before.
“They say the coyotes never help the people, they only want the money. So they treat you like animals,” Andrea said.
Luckily, nothing bad happened to her over the trek, she said. For nearly a month, she would spend 8 to 12 hours per day traveling by bus to get to the United States.
“You cannot speak because when you speak, people hear that you are not from that country,” she said.
Bartolo left Guatemala and crossed the border through the desert on foot.
Not long after entering the U.S., Andrea and Bartolo each were stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and soon each would travel through the maze of the U.S. immigration system.
Surge in undocumented youths
The number of undocumented immigrants caught crossing the southwest border has decreased in the past 10 years.
However, in the past 15 years, the demographics of undocumented immigration have shifted, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. While single adults still remain the largest group apprehended at the border, that number has shrunk in recent years. Meanwhile, the number of families and children fleeing the violence in Central America has grown.
While much coverage has focused on children separated from their families, most youths who cross the border are unaccompanied, traveling alone, according to a report by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Since 2010, more than 300,000 unaccompanied children have been stopped at the border — and Bartolo and Andrea are just two of them.
Fleeing the Northern Triangle
As a teen in San Salvador, Andrea began carrying a stress ball to help ease her anxiety.
“If somebody would sit next to me, I was looking at this person, and I would try to have something in my hands because I was really nervous when I was out all the time, when I was alone,” she said.
Four years ago, Andrea, just 14 or 15 at the time, was raped in a region where violence — especially violence against women — is widespread. El Salvador also has one of the highest murder rates in the world, with 60 murders per 100,000 in 2017.
After the rape, Andrea’s attacker soon asked her for money, and when she didn’t comply, he sent a photo of the assault to her mother. Her mother had come to the U.S. nine years ago to prevent Andrea’s then-9-yearold brother from becoming a drug mule for local gangs, leaving Andrea to live with her grandmother.
“He told me, if I didn’t do what he wanted, he was going to kill my grandmother,” Andrea said, crying during a recent interview. “So my mom told me please come here [to the U.S.]. Here you will be better.”
Globally, the number of asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — increased five-fold between 2011 and 2015, reaching 110,000 in 2015.
Before coming to the U.S., Bartolo worked the fields in the small town of Bulej, Guatemala, with his parents and four siblings, speaking primarily in his indigenous language of Chuj. In Guatemala, more than half the country is below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.
“I wanted to help my parents. Because in Guatemala we don’t have too much money. That’s why I came here, to help them,” Bartolo said.
In limbo
According to The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, HHS must place unaccompanied minors promptly in the “least restrictive setting,” so many youth migrants, including those separated from their family, end up in shelters.
For many months, Andrea said, she stayed in Texas at one of the shelters in the Southwest Key network, the largest licensed shelter provider for immigrant children caught crossing the border. Southwest Key has received more than $950 million in federal contracts since 2015. Bartolo stayed in a shelter in Miami.
Like most unaccompanied youths, Andrea and Bartolo then were placed with a sponsor, an adult, usually a family member, who agrees to take responsibility for them during their ensuing court process. Andrea’s sponsor was her mom in Pittsburgh. For Bartolo, it was an older cousin of his living in Monroeville.
Last year, the Office of Refugee Resettlement released 42,497 children to sponsors nationwide, 501 of whom came to Pennsylvania, and fewer than 50 to Allegheny County.
HHS officials, such as Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan, have raised concerns about the U.S. government’s Unaccompanied Alien Children program incentivizing undocumented immigration. Others worry about inadequate oversight in the sponsor system, leaving children like Bartolo susceptible to dangerous living conditions.
When Bartolo arrived in Pittsburgh in 2014, he knew little English and was working for less than minimum wage as a cook at a Chinese restaurant for 12-hour days, six days a week to send money back to his family in Guatemala.
At the time, he was in a house managed by owners of the restaurant, with about a dozen other men — a situation that Joyce GallagherRamirez, Bartolo’s lawyer and an immigration attorney for Jewish Family and Community Services in Pittsburgh, says is quite common.
Then one day, Bartolo began to develop a growth on his back, sending him to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with Pott disease, or spinal tuberculosis, plus a heart murmur and potential malnourishment. All the while, a medical guardianship agency had to make his medical decisions because Bartolo was a minor, and he had no legal custodian — his cousin was just a sponsor.
“Say what you say about folks that are undocumented or whatever, but this is a kid who could have died,” said Monica Ruiz, the civic engagement and community organizer at Casa San Jose, a Latino outreach center in Beechview. “And his whole life changed.”
Legal protection and beyond
For Bartolo and Andrea, local community organizations have been key for moving forward.
Grace Muller, Bartolo’s service coordinator at Casa San Jose, urged Bartolo’s older cousin to take Bartolo to the hospital. She visited him there and met with his case managers to discuss his follow-up care. Sometimes, she would help take him on the four-hour, round-trip bus ride from Monroeville to the TB Clinic at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC in Lawrenceville and back. And when Bartolo’s cousin no longer could take care of him, Ms. Muller helped file a dependency petition, which eventually led him to being enrolled in the foster care system through Pressley Ridge, a nonprofit focused on family services.
Ms. Muller arranged for Bartolo to receive pro bono legal services through JFCS because he, like many unaccompanied children, lacked adequate funds.
For many unaccompanied migrant youths, the most common pathway to permanent resident status is by receiving asylum or Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, a category for those who have been abused, abandoned or neglected, Ms. Gallagher-Ramirez said.
While all unaccompanied minors are in removal proceedings in immigration court, for youths who pursue Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, a family court judge must find that the child has been abused, abandoned or neglected by one or both of their parents, and that it’s not in the child’s best interest to be returned to the country of origin, said Jamie Englert, director of immigration legal services at JFCS.
“In some of these cases, when a child is pursuing Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, there are three government bodies going on at the same time: the immigration court, the family court and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services application process,” Ms. Englert said. “It’s really convoluted.”
Soon, Bartolo received the status and eventually his green card, Ms. Muller said. There’s a large backlog in green card applicants for special immigrants, partly due to the rise in unaccompanied youths, so it can take months or even years for those with the status to get a green card.
Meanwhile, during the process, Casa San Jose’s Monica Ruiz, or “Moniquita” as Bartolo now calls her, and her family cared for him as their foster son at their home in Brookline while he attended Brashear High School, before transferring to Hill House Passport Academy Charter School.
“In the beginning, he would always say, ‘How am I ever gonna pay you for all of what you’ve done?’ And I would always say to him: The day that you graduate, the day that you walk across that stage — I’m going to cry because this just happened — that is the day that you will pay me back. That is the day,” Ms. Ruiz said. “And when he walked across that stage, and he’s like ‘ Now we’re even, right?’”
In the fall, Bartolo plans to train with the Carpenters Training Center in Robinson to become a carpenter, like his Guatemalan grandfather.
When Andrea came here, she never thought she could go to college. But that changed with the help of the Latino Community Center, an organization that supports Pittsburgh’s small but growing Latino community.
“I think if she would have been here from the beginning, her GPA would’ve been, like, a 4.5. She’s super smart,” said Rosamaria Cristello, the LCC’s executive director. “But we’re talking about students that have to go to immigration court hearings during their high school years. They’re going through all these additional things that their peers don’t have to go through.”
The LCC’s college readiness program, launched last October at Brashear High School, provides one-on-one mentoring services, including college tours, financial aid assistance and college application help for Latino students there. With the help of the program, 10 first-generation immigrant youths graduated from high school this year, nine of whom had no plans of going to college.
“I remember when I was in my first year at Brashear, it was a little population,” said Andrea, speaking about the Latino community at her high school. “But this year, a lot of people from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras come here because the situations in our countries are not too good.”
After Andrea received a low score on her first SAT college entrance exam, Ms. Cristello and Andrea crafted a list of famous Latinas, such as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and astronaut Ellen Ochoa, so Andrea could feel like she belonged in her testing classroom as the only Spanish-speaking student.
“I think it took some time for her to see, ‘I can do this. This is a path that is available to me,’” said Ms. Cristello, who also was a first-generation college student.
Andrea received asylum last year with help from a JFCS lawyer and plans to attend the Community College of Allegheny County this fall, hoping to pursue a degree in business.
A tattoo on her forearm is a reminder of her journey: “Inhale the future, exhale the past.”