Parents face decision to send migrant children alone across border in rising numbers - The Dallas Morning News

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REYNOSA, Mexico -- Antulio Bamaca looked at his calloused hands with pride -- proof that he’s a good laborer. His 16-year-old son Everardo stood nearby like a shadow in this border city known for violence and as a migratory route.

Work and a new life was just across the Rio Grande.

Together, the asylum seekers from Guatemala had slim chances of passage into the U.S. But if they separated, the United States would probably welcome Everardo. As an unaccompanied teen, he might have luck under President Joe Biden’s policy permitting the entry of vulnerable minors.

Would they separate?

It is a dilemma many migrant parents now face. Rising numbers of unaccompanied migrant minors seem to indicate more families are allowing their children to cross the U.S. border alone. That has many -- on the political right and left -- saying there now exists a new policy of family separation -- one where the U.S. government ends up leaving the decision to break up a family with the parents.

That’s stirring up immigrant advocates, liberals and conservatives alike. Republicans sense another opportunity to lambast Biden’s immigration policies, just as forced family separations inside the U.S. became an explosive issue during the presidency of Donald Trump.

In March, nearly 19,000 minors crossed the border without a parent or legal guardian in what’s believed to be the highest monthly number ever. Just this week, nearly 750 unaccompanied children were taken into U.S. custody in a single day.

Expelled migrant Antulio Bamaca, from Guatemala, holds up his hands at a gazebo in a public square in the Mexican border city of Reynosa on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. “I need an opportunity to work,” he said regarding his reason for traveling to the U.S. with his teenage son. “I have worker’s hands, look.”(Lynda M. González / Staff Photographer)

Bamaca, a compact man, left Guatemala because of harassment over his indigenous roots as hurricanes devastated the economy. Now he weighed why solo passage for his son made sense, and didn’t:

“If I send him alone, well, a child needs someone who tells them what is the way to do things,” he said. “So I have fear about sending him alone. But he needs a better future.”

More families are making the “absolutely anguished decision” to send children north alone, said Dr. Amy Cohen, a psychiatrist who runs a nonprofit dedicated to reuniting families and trauma treatment. “These separations represent just terrible sacrifices. But, they are in a burning house, and the United States has locked the front door,” Dr. Cohen said.

Many families are precluded from making asylum claims because the large majority of migrants that now cross the border are being swiftly expelled under Title 42, a pandemic-related policy that allows for quick ejection of border crossers. And more people are trying to cross: Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has said that the numbers are likely to be the highest in 20 years.

The only window out is to send the child alone “in the arms of criminals, human smugglers,” Dr. Cohen said.

Expelled migrants mill around a gazebo in a public square in the Mexican border city of Reynosa on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. Migrants have resorted to living at the plaza as the U.S. continues to expel migrants under Title 42 — a pandemic-related public order still in place and left over from the Trump administration. (Lynda M. González / Staff Photographer)

Such difficult family separation decisions were made during the Trump era, too, when families found themselves stuck in border cities under his Remain-in-Mexico asylum policies of 2019 and 2020. Families were told to wait south of the border to be summoned for asylum court dates in the U.S.

Now, the sequel.

The year-old Title 42 policy which began under Trump has yet to be lifted by the Biden administration.

The big exception is for children traveling alone, and for certain migrant families with young children who Mexico refuses to accept back at the eastern end of the border because Mexico, too, lacks sufficient space for families with such vulnerable children.

“Title 42 is really forcing child separation in the most terrible way,” said Cohen who runs the nonprofit called Every.Last.One.

The solution? ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who leads ongoing Title 42 litigation, said the Biden administration must simply end it. “It can of course be dangerous for children to cross by themselves but unfortunately the Biden administration is forcing them to do so by not allowing families to enter. The administration must eliminate the Title 42 expulsion policy across the board, and not just for minors.”

A migrant woman brushes her hair as she and other expelled migrants sit at a plaza near the international bridge leading into the Mexican border city of Reynosa on Wednesday, March 31, 2021.(Lynda M. González / Staff Photographer)

Migrant families face a chain of traumatizing violence in their homelands, through travel in Mexico where they are prey for criminals, and again in border cities like Reynosa, where conditions can be warlike with kidnappings, extortion and street battles.

Conditions are so bad in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, across from South Texas, that the U.S. State Department gives the state the highest do-not-travel warning because of the crime, kidnappings, extortion and robberies that even target private passenger buses and those driving private vehicles.

In the Dallas area, therapist Jenifer Wolf-Williams specializes in immigration-related trauma. She also said Title 42 now plays a prominent role in families deciding to send a child across the border solo.

“Family separation comes in many forms,” said Wolf-Williams, who runs a nonprofit called Humanitarian Outreach for Migrant Emotional Health or HOME.

“To my knowledge, the U.S. government is no longer physically removing children from their parents’ arms,” Wolf-Williams said. “But U.S. policies are largely responsible for the high number of unaccompanied minors.”

Hurricanes, poverty, violence

In Reynosa, Laureano Sanchez was one of the expelled ones. The Guatemalan tried his luck crossing the Rio Grande with his 13-year-old daughter, but was quickly shuffled back across the border. He shook his head. “It’s so difficult, but then I think nothing is difficult for God,” he said.

Sanchez said he would never send his daughter alone across the river. “It’s too dangerous,” he said, gazing at her as she woke up from her morning slumber. One recent day, he huddled with his masked daughter inside a green iron gazebo in a park, thankful for the charity groups that bring blankets and food to migrants whose numbers fluctuate day by day from 100 to 200.

Laureano Sanchez, a migrant from Guatemala, lays among dozens of other expelled migrants sleeping in a gazebo in a public square in the Mexican border city of Reynosa on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. (Lynda M. González / Staff Photographer)

Sanchez had planned to meet up with relatives in Minneapolis and find a job to provide for his family back in Guatemala. He chose his oldest child to accompany him and left behind the three youngest.

“We got a loan to come here,” he said. “The idea was that they would let us pass and we would work to cancel that debt.”

Now they are stuck in the makeshift camp.

For weeks, migrants have gathered in the park, where they use the hoses for water to brush their teeth and to wash their clothes. A tent went up one night and a plastic tarp the next.

Many take turns charging cell phones at a gazebo electricity outlet. Boys shared a pair of blue skates, using each one like a skateboard.

Some days the numbers at the park camp go down when migrants agree to go to another location, organized by the Mexican government at a college gym in Reynosa.

Guatemalan migrant Hermelindo Ak, left, and his 17-year-old son Sergio pose for a portrait from where they currently live at a gazebo in a public square in the Mexican border city of Reynosa on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. (Lynda M. González / Staff Photographer)

Hermelindo Ak left Guatemala with his 17 year-old son Sergio and arrived at the Texas-Mexican border in March. After they crossed the border, they were quickly expelled back. “They wouldn’t tell us why we were being sent back,” Ak said. “They just said there was no passage.”

Returning to Guatemala is a poor option, Ak said. “We will face extortion and get killed,” he said.

Would he send his son alone?

“If there is no other way, I’ll consider it.”

Then, he paused, rethinking: “It is not safe. Well, if we die, we die together.”

As he thinks about sending his son alone again, tears come to his serious, dark eyes.

Nearby, Noemi Palma has set up a camp with her purple mattress. She came with her 13-year-old son Jose and other family members. She left Honduras because of gang recruitment of her son. “They start recruiting the kids at 11 and up for la mara,” for the gangs.

“I never thought it would be like this,” she said, gazing out at the misery of the makeshift camp in the park.

“Let us cross. Give us an opportunity. We can help your country, but we are fleeing our own.”

Would she send her son alone?

“Send him alone? No. No. No. I can’t separate myself from him. No mother wants to separate themselves from their child.”

Flores pact

As startling as child migration may be to some, its roots go back decades. Pivotal litigation to protect unaccompanied minors began in the mid 1980s and was forged into a consent decree now known as the Flores agreement of 1997. The litigation established basic rules for how migrant children were treated after arriving in the U.S. It takes its name on behalf of the first plaintiff, a teenager from El Salvador who arrived in the Los Angeles area.

Today, migrant minors from northern Central America continue to make up the bulk of unaccompanied children crossing the border without a parent or legal guardian.

Last week, a small seven-year-old boy from Honduras was believed to be among them.

A Guatemalan boy and a El Salvadoran boy share a pair of roller-skates in a gazebo in a public square in the Mexican border city of Reynosa on Wednesday, March 31, 2021.(Lynda M. González / Staff Photographer)

At the dreary Reynosa plaza off the international bridge, his mother Heidi Rodriguez was frantic. She was searching for the boy, her son Omar Antonio, who had been sent north alone.

The 39-year-old Honduran mother arrived in Reynosa a month ago with plans to rebuild her life in the U.S. In Honduras, she owned a tortilla shop, but she was worn down by the constant payment of a “war tax,” as extortion by gangs is known.

“I just couldn’t pay anymore,” the woman said, as she braced herself from the wind in her parrot-green hoodie and jeans.

She was staying in Reynosa when she got a call from the boy’s grandparents that they had sent little Omar north to be with his father. But the mother had long ago separated from the father. The grandparents didn’t tell the mother until the boy had reached Reynosa.

Rodriguez pleaded with Mexican authorities to help her at the bridge, showing them a photo of her son, she said.

Suddenly, Mexican government officials called Rodriguez Chirino into their bridge offices. The mother rushed into the front doors. Officials blocked others from entry.

Whether she would learn the fate of her child is unknown.

The Link Lonk


April 09, 2021 at 06:18PM
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/immigration/2021/04/09/parents-face-decision-to-send-migrant-children-alone-across-border-in-rising-numbers/

Parents face decision to send migrant children alone across border in rising numbers - The Dallas Morning News

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