U.S. border authorities see spike in unaccompanied minors
TIJUANA, Mexico — It’s 10 a.m., but it’s still pretty early for a group of teenage boys who are just waking up inside a migrant shelter for unaccompanied children along a busy highway in Tijuana.
At Casa YMCA de Menores Migrantes, the three Mexican teenage boys — aged 15, 16 and 17 — check their phones as they slowly sit up and stretch their feet out over the edge of their bunk beds.
“About 80% of the kids we receive here are Mexicans, girls and boys and adolescents, between the ages of 12 and 17 who are deported from the United
States and they arrive every morning,” said Valeria Ruiz, the new director of Casa YMCA, the only shelter in Tijuana for under-aged migrants.
Like thousands of other children in recent years, they’ve traveled to the border from south Mexico without their parents, and they were caught trying to cross into the United States.
Typically, U.S. immigration authorities process unaccompanied Mexican minors and release them to Mexican authorities. Then, the kids wait in one of the most dangerous cities in the world to be reunited with their families.
It’s a growing trend that has human rights advocates and child welfare workers in Tijuana alarmed.
In the San Diego Sector, across the border from Tijuana, there has been a 40% increase in the number of unaccompanied Mexican children trying to cross the border alone and undetected, during the first quarter of this fiscal year compared to the previous quarter, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.
Unlike unaccompanied minors in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, U.S. border authorities are able to deport these kids back to Mexico because they are not making an asylum claim, according to Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Jeffery Stephenson.
Mexican migrant children who do make an asylum claim often end up detained for many months in U.S. facilities.
Stephenson said border agents routinely work with the Mexican Consulate, Mexican immigration authorities, and the DIF, the Sistema de Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, Mexico’s child welfare agency, to turn unaccompanied children back over to Mexican authorities, who are responsible for reuniting them with their families.
The process has been the same for years, he said.
Some boys at Casa YMCA confirmed last week they were not trying to flee violence or political persecution in their home states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Most said they were trying to find a job in the United States to support their families back home.
“I tried to cross, but they got me,” said Isaias, referring to Border Patrol. He asked the San Diego Union-Tribune not to use his last name.
At 17, he’s the oldest of the group, and he said he’ll never try to make the journey north again.
“I just came to work. But it was very cold and very hard and actually we saw some very ugly things while trying to cross the border, and for nothing,” he said, shyly. He declined to elaborate.
Ruiz said helping teenagers who have been through traumatic events during their journey north or back home is some of the most challenging work she faces.