The children’s crossing
More children and families are making the dangerous trip in rafts across the Rio Grande, hoping they will be allowed to stay in the U.S. and seek asylum, said Arelis R. Hernández in The Washington Post.
MISSION, TEXAS— The question startled Hidalgo County Deputy Constable Roque Vela as he took a quick census of the group of roughly 30 migrants he encountered recently on a dusty road along the Rio Grande in South Texas.
“Do you think they are going to be able to help us?” a Honduran mother asked in Spanish, clutching her emerald-eyed toddler and a backpack full of papers she hopes explain her need for asylum in the United States. “That’s not a question I can answer,” responded the veteran deputy, who rarely says more than a few words to the hundreds of families, teenagers, and children he finds each week in “Rincon del Diablo,” or Devil’s Corner, a heavily wooded span of federal land along the river that’s full of thorny brush and a maze of footpaths so confusing that migrants routinely get lost. He escorts those he finds to the base underneath the Anzalduas International Bridge for processing by U.S. Border Patrol agents, who will answer the woman’s uncertainty in one way or another.
Last year, as the coronavirus pandemic began, the Trump administration used a temporary public health order to turn away nearly all migrants who arrived seeking asylum. In recent months, following pressure from court challenges and a change in administrations, many more children and families who have made the dangerous journey to the border have been allowed to stay—though the criteria can be cruelly unclear to many migrants.
The Biden administration has kept
President Donald Trump’s order in place, and most adults are still sent away without the chance to plead for asylum. Central American teenagers and children traveling without their parents are now allowed to stay, which has led some parents to send their children across the border alone.
The fate of migrant families is less clear. The administration has emphasized that it continues to expel families, but the latest government data shows the vast majority are now allowed to stay. As migrants gather stories of who has made it across and who has been turned away, the reasoning can seem random. Against so much uncertainty, why do they come?
Many of the migrants Vela finds in Rincon del Diablo say they are motivated by a complicated and varied set of personal and practical reasons that intersect where survival meets opportunity. The journey to the border can be life-threatening—authorities say a 9-year-old migrant girl drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande earlier this month—but so, too, is staying where they are. A smuggler is both exploiter and allied facilitator. Many migrants are both potent in their determination—one Guatemalan mother said she had been expelled five times in the past year with her 10-year-old daughter—but powerless against a U.S. immigration system that was not designed to efficiently handle or respond to their particular needs.
And despite all they’ve heard—about family separations during the Trump administration, and pleas from the Biden administration not to come—three dozen migrants recently interviewed at the border say the decision to migrate is influenced but does not hinge on a particular president or message. Violence, hunger, climate change, persecution, the economic fallout of the pandemic, and reuniting with family are more-powerful motivators. They still
Vbelieve the United States is where they will be safe and can prosper if given the chance. And for many, they see no other option.
“There is no justice for women in my country,” said a 17-year-old Guatemalan girl who said she fled after being sexually abused by criminal gangs. Her family paid smugglers $3,000 to cross the border with a large group of teenagers traveling without their parents. “I cannot go back. I do not want to go back to my country.”
ELA’S DUTIES HAVE evolved in the past decade from tracking single Mexican and Central American men seeking economic opportunity, along with cartel members running drugs, to waiting by the riverside for rafts packed with migrant families to land and watching the ponytails of little girls bounce with each step of their long walk toward Border Patrol stations. Each successive administration’s efforts to manage the flow leaves border officers like Vela in the same place.
Vela steers clear of politics. It’s not his job. But he can’t escape the emotion that comes each time there’s a sudden influx in migrants—first in 2014, then in 2019, and now this spring. He still remembers the shock he felt in 2014 when he found a child who had no arms traveling by herself. Night after night in 2019, shadows emerged from the tall grass and grew into long silhouettes as migrants walked toward the headlights of his truck begging for water. The latest generation of migrants tell Vela they want the same things his Mexican grandparents found when they settled in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas decades ago.
“Here we go again,” Vela said as he spotted a group of spooked mothers with small children ducking into the brush during a patrol last week. He grabbed his loudspeaker attached to his truck. “No corres! Estamos aquí para ayudar.” Don’t run. We are here to help.
The 8-year-old girl, dressed in a red hooded coat, was traveling with Antolino Martinez and his 11-year-old son, who fled the violence of Honduras and were trying to enter the United States for a second time. “We found her two days ago walking by herself in Mexico,” said Martinez, 42, who carried the girl’s satchel until they reached the Border Patrol station.
Criminal gangs forced Martinez’s sixthgrader to stop attending school in Honduras, and he said he had struggled to work or operate a business with the same organizations demanding payments from him. But he won’t dare send his son alone. Not yet. The father’s plea to anyone who me. But when I did look back, she was gone. I don’t know what happened to her.” The girl, who turned 15 during her monthlong trip north from Honduras, left after flooding from two hurricanes caused the back wall of her house in Colón to collapse. She, her mother, and younger brothers had been living with relatives, but the arrangement was unsustainable because of a lack of work and money for food. In her front shirt pocket, the teenager carried the addresses of relatives in the United States, hoping for a reunion with them and a chance to take care of her siblings financially.
T IS HARD for the deputies to understand what compels a parent to allow a child to migrate solo. “I just don’t get it,” Vela said to his co-worker, Deputy Constable Ray Reyna. “I feel bad for them, but we can’t have everyone come.”
I“My son’s 9, and I won’t let him outside in the front yard by himself,” Reyna added. The stories they hear from the children they meet no longer surprise the deputies. “I just followed the people,” the 9-yearold Honduran boy said, explaining how he knew which direction to walk. About 10 days before he reached the border, he said, he was absorbed into a group of about 40. The boy asked a reporter if he could use her phone to call his family to let them know he had arrived.
He flipped the hem of his white undershirt, revealing worn digits written in permanent marker. Then he pulled the underside of the shirt further up to show where his father had written the address and phone number for his uncle in Tennessee.
In a later interview, the boy’s uncle, Ronaldo Valle, said the 9-year-old traveled with his father from Honduras but they were turned back the first time they tried to enter Texas. So the father sent his son across alone. “It’s impossible to live in Honduras anymore,” said Valle, who left his homeland a year ago. “With the government corruption, the hurricanes, and the gangs, what is there left to do there but suffer? Imagine, having so many dreams but not having any way to pursue them. They die.”
Vela never finds out what happens to the migrants he meets after delivering them to busy Border Patrol agents. Do the children ever find their families? Do mothers get the chance to explain why they came? In a pocket pad, he notes just the basics: age, country of origin, and sex. That is what he logs in his reports, year after year.