By Matthew D. LaPlante
Deseret News
May 17, 2017
ZACATECOLUCA,
El Salvador — Carmen de Jesus rose from her bed, night after night, to shake
off her nightmares and check on her teenage daughter.
She
could hardly bear to look at the sleeping girl.
The
day she would send her daughter north was approaching. And de Jesus was
overcome with guilt and fear.
She
knew the journey was replete with kidnappers, drug smugglers and extortionists.
She knew migrants faced long desert marches and swift river crossings. She knew
most travelers are turned back, and that some are never heard from again. She
knew young women are often sexually assaulted along the way.
And
she knew other parents whose children had met all these fates.
But
she was sending her daughter, nonetheless. Because she also knew if the girl
didn’t go, she was going to die.
The
threats on young Patricia’s life had begun in the fall of 2016. Members of the
Barrio 18 Sureños gang had concluded the girl was a police informant, and
pledged to kill her.
“I
knew they would do it,” de Jesus says as she looked out, through barred
windows, at a broken-down police car parked in front of a friend’s office in
the center of this bustling, volatile town, “because they had done it before.”
Less
than a year earlier, the same gang had leveled the same accusation against de
Jesus’ older daughter, Norma. In November of that year, a Barrio 18 member had
confronted Norma in the street.
It
didn’t matter that she was pregnant. The gang member shot her twice.
“Once
here,” de Jesus says, touching her cheekbone. “And once here,” she says,
dropping her fingers to her belly.
“I
couldn’t lose another daughter like that,” de Jesus says. “I had to do
something.”
And
so, over the next few months, de Jesus sold everything she had and hired a
smuggler to take her daughter to the United States.
“It
was a terrible choice to make,” de Jesus says. Her square jaw trembles and her
shoulders shake. “A terrible choice.”
And
it’s a choice facing thousands of families in this small Central American
republic. Nearly 5 percent of Salvadorans — more than 300,000 people —
abandoned their homes due to violence last year, according to a survey published in January by José Simeón Cañas
Central American University in San Salvador. In nearly 1 in 5 homes, according
to the survey, at least one family member had to flee El Salvador altogether
due to the violence.
The
migrants are often children. They are often alone. And they are often headed to
the United States, where many have family connections. There are from 1.5
million to 2 million Salvadorans living in the United States — a populace
rivaling the entire San Salvador metropolitan area. El Salvador ranks fifth in countries of origin for
U.S. immigrants and, per capita, no country sends more of its citizens to the
United States.
These
children are not criminals coming to sell drugs or laborers coming to steal
jobs, as they are often described in the heated rhetoric that frames
immigration reform. Their plight is far more akin to that of refugees who are
seeking asylum from war-ravaged places across the globe.
Whether
they’ll be treated that way by the new American administration, though, is an
open question. While “the vast majority of the world’s refugees were generously
hosted” by neighboring nations, the United Nations High Commissioner of
Refugees noted in an August 2016 report that “a number of countries took
measures to restrict protection space and prevent people from accessing
territory through physical, legal and administrative barriers.”
The
report did not point fingers at any specific nation for not doing its share to
help, but, specific to the situation in El Salvador, it called for “greater
international responsibility sharing.”
And
that was before the election of Donald Trump, who has pledged to build a “great
wall” across the U.S.-Mexico border and deport millions of undocumented
immigrants in what he has described as a “military operation.”
And
so, as Trump’s administration considers policy changes that may further limit
the ability of children like Patricia to reach safety in the United States,
many parents in El Salvador are feeling the pressure to make a decision — and
soon.
They
can risk their children’s lives by sending them north, or risk their children’s
lives by keeping them close.
And it
is a terrible choice.
Maria
Rojas doesn't want her son to leave.
“He’s just
a teenager,” she says of the boy, Wilbur, as he runs up the road in a
sweat-soaked soccer jersey, meeting his mother with a big, wet hug. “He is only
15.”
As
migrants go, though, Wilbur’s age wouldn’t put him out of place.
More
than 7,000 unaccompanied Salvadoran children were apprehended in the Southwest
border states between October and January, according to the U.S. Border Patrol, and total apprehensions of children
traveling without a family member were up 26 percent over the same time period
a year earlier. The majority of the apprehended children were teenagers, some
trying to make the voyage on their own. Some were younger children — including
babies and toddlers — entrusted to coyotes, human smugglers who are seen
as heroes by some parents and a necessary evil by others.
If he
gets a good coyote, Wilbur figures, his chances of making it through are 50-50.
His mother thinks the odds are lower.
That’s
what the U.S. government wants her to believe, too. The risks inherent in the
journey are a key message in the multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns the
United States has sponsored to dissuade Central American families from sending
their children north.
“Ellos
son nuestro futuro. Protejámoslos,” one ad that has run on Salvadoran television concludes.
“They are our future. Protect them.”
Rojas
wants nothing more than to protect her son. And for the moment, at least, the
village in which they live is relatively safe. Here Wilbur can play soccer in
the streets and help his mother sell shaved-ice minutas from her
roadside storefront. On Sundays he walks her to church.
But
Wilbur’s school is about two kilometers away, down a steep road that winds
though a lush forest, in the town of Santa Isabel Ishuatan — and he cannot get
there without moving through territory claimed by the gangs, known as maras.
The two
most powerful gangs, Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, both started in the 1980s
in the United States when refugees from El Salvador’s civil war — which pitted
the U.S.-backed government against communist revolutionaries — arrived in Los
Angeles in the midst of an American gang war between the Crips and the Bloods.
The Salvadorans who assembled into gangs in the midst of that turmoil were soon
deported, reorganized and began accumulating control over large swaths of
Central America.
Some
estimates put the number of gang members in El Salvador at 70,000 or more. (By
way of comparison, the Salvadoran military has about 25,000 active and reserve
members.) But over the past two years — as their members have been killed and
imprisoned by the thousands as part of a ferocious government crackdown —
Salvadorans in cities and villages across the nation say the gangs’ leaders
have become more aggressive about recruiting.
Three
boys from Wilbur’s neighborhood have recently joined. Rojas thinks those boys,
who had reputations as troublemakers, were destined for such decisions. “But my
son is not that way,” she says as she stirs a pot of sopa de gallina india.
“He is a very well-behaved boy. Everyone would agree. He has a good heart.”
The
gang members haven’t given Wilbur a choice in the matter. “They told me if I
didn’t want to join, they would kill me,” Wilbur says.
These
are not idle threats. More than 11,500 people were murdered in El Salvador in
the past two years — a homicide rate some 20 times higher than in the United
States. (By way of comparison, that would equate to 600,000 murders in the
United States in the same time period.) Per capita, the only country where more
lives were lost to violence in 2016 was Syria, according to data released in
early May by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Salvadoran
legislators have responded by passing anti-gang laws that gave police wide
latitude to use deadly force, and by packing gang members into prisons to the
point that the country’s Attorney General’s Office for Human Rights has
compared the cramped and disease-ridden jails to concentration camps.
The
drastic measures may be responsible for dip in homicides this year, but across
the nation Salvadorans say the violence is taking a greater toll on innocent
bystanders, on residents of gang-run neighborhoods who either can’t or won’t
pay extortion taxes known as la renta, and on children who decline to
join up when called upon to do so. Those are contentions backed by an analysis
of crime and survey data by the Columbian nonprofit InSight Crime, which also has reported a significant uptick
in the number of students who have dropped out of school to avoid the violence.
Wilbur,
who loves mathematics and social studies, is among the tens of thousands of
children who have stopped attending school.
“I
miss it a lot,” he says.
There
is hope, however, in Houston. Wilbur’s older half brother, who has been living
there for several years, has told him the high schools in Texas do not ask
about a person’s immigration status. He could re-enroll. Maybe even play some
sports.
But
first Wilbur has to get there.
A
14-year-old boy who lives down the road made his first attempt to enter the
U.S. in January but fell ill in Guatemala and was abandoned by his coyote. His
parents, who live in a dirt-floor shack, had spent everything they had on the
smuggler and had to beg family members and friends for money for a bus ticket
so the boy’s father could retrieve his son.
“He
was alone and sick in an empty house for three days,” says the boy’s mother,
Nohemy Rodriguez. “He was dehydrated and was having trouble breathing. I was
worried he would die.”
A bony
gray cat noisily darts across her corrugated metal roof, and she looks upward,
through the cracks in her ceiling, as dust falls from above. “We have nothing
here,” she says.
And so
Rodriguez, fearful and desperate, says she would like her son to try again.
Wilbur
says he understands the risks, but he nevertheless wants to try to make the
journey as his younger neighbor did.
"I
don't know what will happen if I migrate," he has told his mother,
"but if I stay here I know I will die."
Rojas
has been praying — begging God to tell her what to do. She is still waiting for
an answer.
She
has heard, though, that the new U.S. president is cracking down on illegal
immigration and wants to build an enormous wall along the Mexican border. She
fears what little window is open might soon be closed.
If the
boy goes, she says, it will happen by June.
“It’s
a horrible thing,” she says. “I feel terrible about the idea. But what choice
do we have?”
Past
the abandoned train tracks, the police officers warn, things are bad. Past the
river it is even worse.
Kevin’s
home is past both.
“There
are shootings every night,” the quiet 17-year-old says of his neighborhood,
near the border of San Salvador and the volatile city of Apopa, where he lives
with his mother and older sister.
Four
of his friends have been killed by the gangs, including a teenager named
Rolando who was shot to death in front of the school Kevin attends.
Such
is the scale of the violence here that Kevin actually considers himself
fortunate an attack on his life came not in a hail of gunfire but by a gang
member with a baseball bat.
His
offense? Not pledging allegiance to one of the three local gang cliques that
have formed a temporary truce with one another to go to war with the police. He
was bedridden for a month as he healed. Now that he’s better, the gang members
are after him again.
“They
told me ‘join us and your family will be respected,’” he says. “‘If not, we
will kill you.’”
He’s
already made one attempt to escape to the United States. He walked and rode all
the way to Mexico City — the halfway point in the journey. That’s where a
suspicious bus driver flashed his headlights at a police officer, who pulled
Kevin off the vehicle and asked for his identification.
“They
can tell by your accent that you’re not Mexican,” he says, shifting his cadence
in an impression of the Spanish he heard spoken to the north.
During
his presidential campaign, Trump blamed Mexico for the problems stemming from
illegal immigration. But Mexico plays a big role in apprehending undocumented
migrants from south of its border — often long before they get anywhere close
to the U.S. border.
More
than 1,100 Salvadoran minors — more than half of them under the age of 11 —
were caught in Mexico in the first three months of this year alone, according
to the Mexican government’s Immigration Policy Unit.
The
deportees return by the busload, every day and sometimes multiple times a day,
to a U.S.-funded government complex on the eastern outskirts of San Salvador.
There, officials say, they help returnees reintegrate into Salvadoran society.
“We
try to identify the most vulnerable people,” says Krissia Borjas, who works at
the complex.
Sometimes,
Borjas says, children will break down in fear of being sent back to the
neighborhoods they came from. “They will say, ‘If I go home, they will kill
me,’” she says.
There
are police officers stationed at the reintegration complex, but they describe
themselves as “intelligence officers” focused on interviewing returnees about
the human smuggling rings. There are officials from human rights groups, too,
but they are on the lookout for wrongdoing by police and government officials.
Multiple
workers at the complex struggled to explain the process for protecting children
who disclose they would be in danger if they were returned to the neighborhoods
from which they fled. One official said such pleadings are “passed along to a
committee that tries to help find solutions.”
Kevin
doesn’t believe there is a solution to his predicament and, in any case, no one
asked him if he was in danger. Since being deported from Mexico last year, he’s
tried to stay inside his home as much as possible as he awaits his next
opportunity to escape.
As
Kevin speaks of his plight he rubs a bright orange crucifix between his thumb
and fingers.
“My
mother is also too afraid to leave our home,” he says. “We can’t even go to
church.”
An
uncle in New York is raising money for a coyote, and Kevin’s mother wants her
son to leave as soon as possible. Every day that passes, she worries, is a day
he has cheated death.
“She
wants me to go,” he says. “She says it’s best if I am in the United States.”
But
Kevin tears up at the thought of leaving his family. If he makes it though, he
says he’ll do whatever it takes to get a job and save money. As soon as he can,
he’ll send for his sister and mother.
“All
we want is to be together,” he says.
Their
signs declared “Repatriate Illegals,” “Bus Illegal Children to the White House”
and “Return to Sender.”
“Go
back home,” hundreds of American protesters chanted in the summer of 2014 as
they stood in front of three busses carrying undocumented migrants, refusing to
let the vehicles pass.
The
detainees, American officials said, were mostly children who had been picked up
in Texas. They were to be processed at an immigration center in the Southern
California town of Murrieta before being placed with family members, mostly in
other parts of the country.
The
protest was a harbinger, perhaps, of the seething anger over illegal
immigration that drove many Americans to support a presidential candidate who
kicked off his campaign with a promise to build a border wall, noting “the U.S.
has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”
Now,
four months into Trump’s presidency, his administration is working to make good
on campaign promises to clamp down on what he and others see as lax border
control and immigration procedures.
Among
the policy changes that have been considered: Separating children from their parents
when families are caught crossing together — a proposal human rights groups
called cruel. As of early April, the Department of Homeland Security reported, that
specific policy was no longer under consideration. But the breakup of families
doesn’t have to come as a result of heavy-handed policies; that was happening
long before Trump became president.
The
U.S. stiffened its approach to stopping migrants in 2014 under former President
Barack Obama, who pressed Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to help stem the
tide of Central American migrants. Nieto obliged, and Mexico has since deported
hundreds of thousands of migrants, many of them children fleeing gang violence.
Trump
has said on many occasions that Obama didn’t do enough. And in mid-April he and
Attorney General Jeff Sessions promised even tougher enforcement was on the
way, singling out the dangers of Mara Salvatrucha gang members who are in the United
States, to bolster their push for more stringent immigration enforcement.
The
heightened attention to stopping undocumented migrants has resulted in “a road
full of anguish,” says professor Juan Ricardo Gómez Hecht, who teaches at the
College of High Strategic Studies in San Salvador.
Mexico’s
stepped-up enforcement of well-known migration routes has pressed human
smugglers to explore new and more dangerous pathways. That, in turn, has pushed
up the coyotes’ fees. Salvadoran parents who have negotiated for the transport
of their children in recent months say successful coyotes are now charging
$7,000, with the best smugglers demanding $10,000 and more. The average
Salvadoran makes less than $400 a month, according to the World Bank.
Gómez
Hecht says some parents — unable to pay the toll for even one child — have
taken to accompanying their young children to northern Mexico and dropping them
off close to a border patrol station with a note in their pockets in the hopes
they will be found and placed with relatives in the United States.
“Can
you imagine leaving your child and not knowing if you will ever see them
again?” Gómez Hecht asks. “It is heartbreaking.”
Gómez
Hecht, who lectures around the world on illegal migration, says Americans often
believe migrants come to the United States looking for work. But especially as
it pertains to children, he argues, migration isn’t driven by economic forces.
“They
don’t want a better life,” he says. “They just want to stay alive.”
Every
day, people line up in Zacatecoluca to plead for Bufete de León’s help getting
their children out of El Salvador.
They
all want their sons and daughters to migrate legally, says the attorney whose
practice includes immigration assistance, but the process is almost impossible.
It takes weeks to get a 10-minute appointment with the U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Office in San Salvador, which is a half day’s bus ride away and
only open during weekdays, excluding both U.S. and Salvadoran holidays. All
appointments must be made via the internet — a luxury to which less than half
of the country has access. And those seeking asylum face a particularly
convoluted quandary: Not only must they prove they face political, racial or
religious persecution, but they must also make the claim from within the borders
of the United States.
“So
they must make it across the border to begin with,” de Leon says, “and even
then, if they don’t have a relative already in the United States, it is
hopeless.”
It’s
even more hopeless if they don’t have legal help in the United States. Nearly
90 percent of unaccompanied migrant children without a lawyer receive an order
for removal, according to the Congressional
Research Service. For those represented by an attorney, though, only about
13 percent are ordered to leave the country.
De
Leon does what he can to help his clients create a best-case scenario for their
kids. At the very least, he tells the mothers and fathers who come to his
office, their children must travel north with the contact information for
family members willing to provide for their care, an affidavit describing the
threats and violence they face in El Salvador, and another letter from police
attesting the child’s life is at risk.
The
latter document is hard to get. Police officers at a station in San Salvador’s
volatile San Antonio neighborhood say they get about five requests a day for
such a letter, but cannot write one themselves. The requests must be sent to
police headquarters, and a response can take weeks, months or never happen at
all.
“A lot
of people are afraid to go to the police for any reason,” de Leon says,
“because the gang members, when they threaten anyone, say, ‘If you go to the
police we will know because we have people there.’”
That
is generally true, de Leon says.
“Gang
members,” he says, “do what they say they are going to do.”
Given
the dangers in El Salvador, de Leon says, the apparent hardening of attitudes
and policies toward illegal immigration up north isn’t much of a deterrent.
“The
American political situation is terrible these days,” he says, “but parents
here just want their children to survive, so they will accept the risks of
going to the United States.”
And
some parents will accept those risks even when their children have no one
waiting on the other side.
When
that happens, and a U.S. immigration judge approves a child’s asylum claim,
organizations like Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County are called
upon to help. The northern California nonprofit matches unaccompanied migrant
children to guardians — and does what it can to help the children adjust to
their new lives. But the organization’s director of refugee foster care, Angela
Albright, says that adjustment can be a significant challenge.
Americans
tend to assume that children who have fled such misery should be happy to have
finally arrived in a safe and stable situation, Albright says.
“People
sometimes think these kids can’t wait to come here and to become Americans, but
that’s not the case,” she says. “These kids aren’t coming by choice. This is a
migration out of necessity.”
The
older children, she says, are often tormented by survivor’s guilt. “They
struggle with feeling like they never should have left, feeling like they’ve
abandoned their families,” Albright says. “They think, ‘Oh my gosh, I left them
and now they’re going to die.’ No child should have to hold onto that.”
And the
younger migrants, Albright says, don’t always fully understand why they were
sent away by their parents. “They ask questions like, ‘Why didn’t my parents
fight to keep me?’” she says.
For
these reasons, Albright says, some migrant children struggle to attach to their
foster families. “They haven’t developed the ability to trust the caregivers in
their lives,” she says. “They’re expecting to be pushed away, and so they push
their foster families away first, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
For children
who have been through multiple traumas, the stakes are exceedingly high.
“When
children are exposed to trauma, their brains can’t develop, and that can result
in pathologies,” says Pia Escudero, who directs the Los Angeles Unified School
District’s mental health program, where she works extensively with
unaccompanied migrant youth. “That can mean the court system or the jail
system, hospitalization and substance abuse.”
And
that, in turn, can lead to deportation — just like what happened to thousands
of young Salvadorans in the 1980s and 1990s, which begat an epidemic of gang
violence, which in turn begat the latest generation of unaccompanied migrant
children.
Francisco
Jose has a tattoo of a compass below his left bicep.
The
lifelong resident of the San Salvador suburb of Zacamil always wanted to be a
Boy Scout. He likes the Scout motto: “Be prepared.”
Over
the past few months he has been preparing his daughter and son for the journey
north.
Renata,
who is 12, will go first.
“Basically,
I don’t feel like I have another option,” says Jose, whose teenage cousin was
murdered four years ago when he refused to join a gang. “There is no hope
here.”
Outside
the window of the recreation center where he works, which is next to a busy
city park, police officers are frisking a teenage boy.
“The
violence. The political situation. The economic situation,” Jose says. “I don’t
see an end to the dangers my children face.”
If all
goes according to plan, Renata will leave in December with a coyote Jose has
known since childhood. If that voyage is successful, 7-year-old Marcelo will
follow in March.
In the
meantime, Jose says, he’s taking every opportunity to prepare his children. “We
talk about things like bravery,” he says. “We talk about their future in the
United States, and how they must do whatever it takes to get there.”
Jose
has told his daughter she will be in a bus the whole way, “but that is not
completely true,” he says. The coyote has not settled on the route yet, but
Jose says he knows it will be a long, difficult and likely dangerous journey.
As the
voyage gets closer, Jose says, he will tell Renata “step by step, everything
she will have to do.”
He
will tell her to follow her coyote’s instructions — obeying him as she would
her father.
Jose
tries to not think about what could happen to his daughter if she is separated
from the trusted smuggler, but he is not blind to the risks. Like pretty much
everyone else in El Salvador, he knows about the things that often happen to
girls and women during the voyage. One Amnesty International report concluded that 60 percent
of Central American girls and women are sexually assaulted during the migration
journey.
One
official at the returnee reintegration center says mothers often speak to their
daughters about rape before the trip. “They put them on birth control,” the
official says, “which does not lessen the risks but does reduce the
consequences.”
The
fate for girls who stay in El Salvador is little better, Jose says.
“A
young lady who stays here must become the girlfriend of a gang member,” he
says. “It doesn’t matter if she wants to or not.”
Jose
already knows how painful it will be to let his children go. He remembers
everything about the day he sent away his eldest son, who now lives with
relatives in the United States.
“I
worried I would never see him again,” Jose says. “Letting him go was very
hard.”
“After
that,” he says, “I always felt incomplete.”
