Leaving adolescence behind for the United States

An unprecedented number of Central American minors have crossed Mexico and arrived in the United States in the last five years, growing to an all-time high in the spring and summer of 2019, before the migratory tide turned into a trickle, first by new restrictions of the United States Government, and later by the pandemic.

PHOTO GALLERY

• Migrant adolescents: they travel alone, they arrive alone

Many adolescents were forced by their parents to emigrate.

Specifically, although not legally, the families had free passage and the coyote networks - the traffickers who dominate the route - exploited that reality with discount packages.

Others left to be reunited with their mothers and fathers, who had left them behind as young children, or fled alone from the double drowning of poverty and violence.

With their childhood already stolen, all of these children and adolescents are trying to find paths to maturity in communities across the United States, where the social fabric is already frayed by the economic damage of the pandemic and by social and racial tensions.

The vast majority will grow up under the shadow of illegality, and the constant threat of being expelled from the country: soon, the US government will implement stricter rules that will defeat the already miniscule possibility of obtaining asylum for tens of thousands of children whose cases are pending. .

More information

• Pandemic and detention at the US-Mexico border

• The hunger that lasts a hundred years

• Guatemala and the things that are not said

• The routes of climate migrants

Adolescents have not garnered the world's attention, as did the iconic and controversial photo of a girl shed in tears at the border, but experts point out that they are precisely the most vulnerable to the trauma they suffered at home. hazards on the road and risks where they are established.

In a catastrophic paradox, they risk falling into the same intergenerational poverty and into the hands of the gangs from which many originally fled.

Can these young people break the chain of coyote blackmail, receive rapid resolution of their immigration procedures, benefit from the education to which they are legally entitled, and leave the cycle of exploitation behind?

Or will they be pulled even deeper into it by the explosive combination of the economic devastation of the pandemic and the constant presence of cartels ready to pounce on such vulnerability?

Respondents.

Everyone is afraid.

No one is willing to give up

In a year and a half, in dozens of interviews in remote villages in Guatemalan valleys, following the train tracks in northern Mexico, in the suburbs of the American metropolis - and of course: in WhatsApp messages - adolescents share with overwhelming candor the scars that mark them and the hopes that drive them.

Everyone is afraid.

Neither is willing to give up.

Origin

.

This is the beginning of the journey to the dreamed North from Guatemala, where misery and hunger push adolescents to pay for the services of traffickers to guide them along the way.

Alexander Socop, Francisco Rodríguez and Nick Oza

After undoing a rebellious lock under his cap and taking one last look at the impromptu soccer game outside a Tucson, Arizona shelter, Rolando (*) asked the question that weighed the most on his teenage heart: “How long do you think is my girlfriend going to wait for me? "

The 16-year-old Guatemalan was one of more than half a million

(a minor and his father or guardian) and unaccompanied minors, the vast majority Central American, who were detained by the US authorities for having crossed the border in an irregular manner. between Mexico and the United States in 2019;

it is the highest number ever recorded.

Rolando's father forced him to emigrate without taking into account the objections of the adolescent and his girlfriend, from the tropical mountains of the town of La Democracia, because a "guide" --as many migrants call traffickers - sold him a ticket to half price on the premise that as a family they would be allowed in.

And indeed, a few days after the border patrol found them just inside the border, Rolando and his father, with new papers calling them to appear again in front of

, were accompanied by the federal authorities of the United States to an old monastery transformed into a hostel run by a Catholic NGO.

Near the colonial-style pink bell tower, Rolando recounted his sadly common story: he had dropped out of school to start working on the coffee harvest after sixth grade, like most children in destitute villages in the steep highlands of Huehuetenango, where Communities, mostly indigenous, suffered the worst of Guatemala's civil war a generation ago.

Beginning in the seventh grade, school is still free, but parents have to pay the equivalent of 50 days of average salary for the annual expenses of books, uniforms and other necessities for each child.

“They sit with their backs against the wall,” explains Oracio Martínez, the director of the basic at La Democracia.

So few come to the institute that classes were held in the afternoon at elementary school, with students crammed into child-size desks.

And this was before confinement by the pandemic imposed virtual learning.

Here, most families do not have screens, much less the Internet.

The director of the Institute for Diversified Education in La Democracia, Lecxi Magaly Mendoza, continues to teach by phone: "It is not the same, but we have no other way out."

His institute does not have computers and the first 43-inch screen was the gift of a couple of recently graduated students who managed to buy it thanks to a door-to-door collection by the municipality.

His first contribution was a chicken concentrate donated by the vet and resold to start the collection.

She is especially proud of one of these alumni, Heffner, because he finished his education even though he had been dreaming of “going North” for more than three years.

It was in that season that his best friends began to migrate and, in about six months, they already had enough to buy "large houses and land."

Heffner wants to help his four younger siblings, all enrolled in school, and build a house with a roof like that of his high school, whose corrugated metal was battered by a tropical downpour while the teenager shyly spoke of these dreams.

The Central American migrants interviewed are painfully aware that "we must comply" with the coyotes and cartels that control every step in Mexico

Heffner knows a "trusted" guide, but now the passage would involve a huge debt at usury rates.

Prices, reacting to increasingly restrictive policies throughout the Americas, have soared to 93,000 quetzals (10,000 euros), three times what Rolando and his father paid together.

And in La Democracia, Heffner knows well that the maximum that can be earned is about 2,500 quetzals (275 euros) a month working hard at various jobs, as he is doing.

Debt-driven migration, which chains parents and children, has increased as border dynamics changed and the smuggling business flourished.

Over several decades, millions of Latin American adults - including many parents of these adolescents - have come to the United States without authorization to work in basic jobs for which visas regulated by Congress are very rare, so cumbersome and expensive to obtain that are virtually unattainable.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of families and minors turned themselves in to border patrol agents requesting humanitarian assistance, following the instructions of traffickers who dropped them off with a bus a few meters south of the border.

Under US law, families had to be released in less than three weeks, and when unemployment remained at record lows, most found work quickly.

Experts argue that this is one of the fundamental reasons for the huge increase in children brought to the United States recently.

It also explains why few of them go to school there, missing the best chance to integrate, and instead are pressured to work as much as possible;

in the first place, to pay the debts of the traffickers.

Rolando had an uncle in Florida with a job for him and his father.

The boy hopes to save enough in a few years to return to La Democracia to find his girlfriend.

The only response to her lengthy WhatsApp message from Tucson was three tearful emojis.

The

business

.

Crossing the territory of the cartels

The American immigration court system is surrendering under more than a million pending issues.

Based on the need to stop more cases like Rolando's: families who crossed the border illegally were soon released and allowed to work awaiting their court dates for a trial that they will most likely lose in several years, as The US government released tougher asylum rules last June that received more than 85,000 public comments during the standard review period, which is likely delaying its completion and suggesting future lawsuits, according to advocates for the right to asylum. .

But the most critical test is whether and how these rules will affect the smugglers'

, a

that has proven to be remarkably resistant to policy changes and even the pandemic.

On their way to the United States, teens face numerous dangers in Mexico.

Lourdes Cárdenas, Cindy de la Garza, Nick Oza and Walfred Swanson

All the Central American migrants interviewed are painfully aware that "you have to comply" with the coyotes and cartels that control every step along Mexico and across a US border "blocked by drug traffickers," in the words of Richard Lee Johnson, migration researcher at the University of Arizona.

Human trafficking networks make at least $ 4 billion a year along this corridor, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Even US border patrol agents say that cartel vigilantes watch and exploit their every move, right down to shift changes in remote desert areas.

Cartels routinely target vulnerable migrants throughout Mexico for kidnapping and forced labor.

"We are territories of terror," says Catholic priest Pedro Pantoja, who for nearly two decades has run the Casa del Migrante shelter in Saltillo, Coahuila, a few hours' drive from South Texas.

Due to the pandemic, the Casa is only welcoming the most vulnerable, a much smaller than usual, but constant number of migrants still trying to reach the United States traveling on the infamous train known as La Bestia, now wearing masks.

Although the closure of the shelters means that many have not had the opportunity to bathe or wash their hands in weeks since they left home.

Although more asylum seekers have stayed in northern Mexico in the past year, the vast majority are aiming for a new life in the United States.

Nixon, 19, received asylum in Mexico after fleeing Honduras, where he said he even attempted suicide due to

for his bisexuality.

However, a couple of days after resting at the Casa del Migrante along with his blind mother, Nixon waited all night in a tent, flimsy shelter in a thunderstorm, for a

take them the last few meters across the Rio Grande. .

"I'll be safer there," Nixon said.

Unless he paid for this latest tranche of extortion from the cartels, Nixon risked sharing the fate of Carlos, also a 19-year-old Honduran who had made it to the U.S. border, but without enough money to cross.

Terrified to witness the chilling torture of immigrants by the cartels, Carlos and his cousins ​​decided that their families, including their baby, would be better off if they turned around.

After putting on an impeccably clean white shirt, Carlos left the Casa del Migrante to go wait by the tracks and catch a freight train that was going "

.

Sitting silently next to a crumbling cliff between their little backpacks, a large jug of water and two packets of tortillas, the young people let go of their broken dreams: “I wanted to be someone.

You set yourself many goals, but ... ”.

When some wagons finally began to move behind him, Carlos took out his ID and without saying a word picked it up: he was born on July 4.

From shelters and prisons, to finding other roads in the United States

Bresan had also passed through the Saltillo shelter and narrowly escaped the cartels.

Raised by his grandmother, after his parents abandoned him as a baby near a large city in central Honduras, Bresan made a living harvesting pineapple and coffee.

When he was 16, his cousin was killed in a shooting outside the

for refusing to sell drugs.

His grandmother died of a heart attack ten days later.

Bresan fled and crossed Mexico, asking for food.

Poverty is no reason.

Gang-caused violence, which is rarely considered grounds for asylum, would be virtually eliminated under the new rules

With no money to cross the river into Texas, he was kidnapped at gunpoint by the mob.

He managed to escape through a window.

Four months later, he found a place to

the other side of the border fence in California and was immediately arrested.

For more than a year in a shelter in Phoenix, Arizona, where he was elected president of the student council, he saw all the other unaccompanied minors being turned over to their relatives, but the only

he managed to find was deported to Honduras three days earlier. of your departure.

Bresan says that he was never tempted to flee from that super-regulated life.

But on the day he turned 18 he was transferred to jail "chained" hands, feet and waist.

It took three months for him to be released and to move to the same Tucson shelter where Rolando and his father stayed.

Bresan began attending the institute;

in the afternoon, he liked to draw in the shady garden of the old monastery.

For the first time in his life, he could walk freely and without fear of being killed just for wearing a cap in the colors of a gang.

Even so, he took his temporary permission to stay in the US “everywhere” pending a final decision on asylum: “If they stop me, this won't do anything to me”.

Asylum.

Poverty is no reason

The International Refugee Convention adopted by the United States and most other countries on the planet guarantees asylum to those who cannot return home due to “a well-founded fear of persecution” for five reasons: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

Reaching the United States does not guarantee a better life quickly for migrant adolescents.

The process of requesting asylum and adapting to a new language and country is complicated for them.Mikala Morris and Nick Oza

Poverty is no reason.

Gang-caused violence, which is rarely considered grounds for asylum anymore, would be virtually eliminated with the adoption of the new rules, which would also mostly exclude those who cross a third country before reaching the US. of the majority of Central American migrants obtaining asylum, already infinitesimal, are about to be further reduced.

One of the few who beat those odds is Estefany, who was 13 when a coyote told her to swim across the Rio Grande to join her mother, who had left her in El Salvador nine years earlier.

Her father had finally decided to send the teenager to the US from his hometown, La Libertad, due to gang threats.

Already when Estefany was eight or nine years old, the gang members had asked her father as a “wife”, the young woman recounted.

Like thousands of teenagers, however, at first it was very difficult for him to adjust to a new family in a new country: "I know she is my mother, but nothing else."

Estefany remembers her reaction when meeting with her mother.

“He always worked.

I hardly saw her.

It took me a while to give him confidence ”.

Estefany was granted asylum in a few months thanks to a leading law firm that represented her

.

She worked hard to learn English, encouraged by several teachers who were “always there” for her, and finished high school last year in suburban Dallas, Texas, as her graduation photo shows in a large frame that she displays in her small room, crossed by a long hammock in the white and blue of El Salvador.

“The move to this country selects people with exceptional resilience,” says Paul Zoltan, a Dallas attorney whose free clinic helped Estefany file initial asylum documentation, along with that of more than 300 families since 2014.

But even this image of success is overshadowed by lingering fear.

After just over a semester at a

, being the first in her family to reach this level, in hopes of one day becoming a chemical engineer, Estefany retired.

She was struggling with

classes

because of the pandemic and, until "the virus calms down," she prefers to work two jobs, often 15 hours a day, to keep moving toward her dream of being "financially stable," especially since her mother He has no papers and his younger brother is still in school.

Raised in a poor indigenous family, María's mother was attacked when she was her daughter's age and never went to school: “I want better for them.

I don't want like me "

Maria's mother also has no papers and got into debt to a coyote to bring her children to Phoenix, Arizona, where the 14-year-old and her older brother arrived after spending two months in a Texas shelter.

There he slept next to a window that couldn't be opened.

Before the pandemic closed her school, Maria was thriving in eighth grade, reading aloud in English;

with some stumbles, but with an indelible smile.

Although she has added one more battle to a life that is already full of challenges, Maria is adjusting to

learning

.

One afternoon, watching Maria do her homework in English on her school-provided tablet, her mother stops pounding tortillas for a moment in her small kitchen and fills with pride.

Raised in a poor indigenous family, she was assaulted when she was Maria's age and never went to school.

“I want better for them.

I don't want like me, ”he says in hesitant Spanish.

Palermo also does not want her children to have her life.

This 35-year-old Honduran knows all too well the dangers that threaten migrant adolescents.

When he was 11 years old and gangs took over his neighborhood, his brother sent him to the United States with little time to hug the best friend with whom he liked to go hunting iguanas after school.

A year later, in Florida, he was already skipping courses to work and send money to his mother.

Over time, he became a coyote himself, crossing the U.S. border about 300 times, he estimates.

But he gave up.

After a dozen deportations, and alone, he helped bring his three children.

He is concerned about the eldest, a 14-year-old from the

, who has no interest in school or work.

"I feel like I'm going to lose it," Palermo says.

The fact that these teens lose themselves or find their way to happy and productive citizenship is something urgent not only for them, but also for the communities around them, now even more divided by the economic and social upheavals of the pandemic.

Confinement in the United States, almost exactly a year after Bresan began to orient himself, trapped the teenager in New Jersey, where he lived with a family from Honduras.

He was helping with remodeling projects to cover expenses and attending a private school four days a week to earn his high school equivalency certificate.

The first time he traveled on a ferry across New York City Bay, with a freezing wind, he took photo after photo on his mobile of the Statue of Liberty in front of Newark, where the young man keeps his regular appointments with the women. federal immigration authorities.

More than four years have passed since Bresan, "falling into the United States" as he passed the border fence, felt "free and saved."

His asylum claim is still pending.

(*) The last names of the protagonists are omitted to protect young people vulnerable to criminal extortion or in a precarious immigration situation.

This report was supported in part by a grant from the National Geographic Society.

Thanks to Scott Dierks and Walfred Swanson.

FUTURE PLANET can follow on

.