REYNOSA, Mexico (AP) — Before 14-year-old Brian Duran set
out from central Honduras in mid-April, he heard that child migrants
who turned themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol were being cared for
and not deported.
He knew that a couple of friends who left before
he did had given themselves up after crossing and been reunited with
family in the U.S. Sitting inside the walled compound of a migrant
shelter in this Mexican border city across the Rio Grande from Texas,
Brian wonders if that is still the case as he seeks a way to make his
own crossing.
"I don’t know what the environment is like now, if
they (Border Patrol) are supporting or if they are returning the
minors," he said Tuesday. He said he has an uncle in the U.S., but
doesn’t know where because he lost his number while journeying north.
Brian
isn’t alone in trying to get into the U.S. In the past eight months,
47,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended along the border in
the U.S. Southwest.
More than 11,000 of those were Mexican
children, who are generally quickly sent back across the border. But
nearly 35,000 were from the Central American countries of Honduras,
Guatemala and El Salvador. By contrast, just 6,560 child migrants were
put in U.S. shelters during all of 2011.
President Barack Obama
called the surge a crisis Monday, saying the influx has overwhelmed the
network of U.S. shelters for young migrants. He appointed the head of
the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Craig Fugate, to lead the
government’s response. The Obama administration has asked Congress for
$1.4 billion in extra funding to help house, feed and transport child
migrants and has turned to the Defense Department to temporarily house
some of them.
Detained youngsters are transferred within 72 hours
to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee
Resettlement to be housed in shelters until they can be reunited with
parents or guardians. Officials then begin searching for relatives or
other potential guardians in the U.S. The average stay for a child in a
U.S. shelter was 45 days last year. Most are reunited with family to
wait for their immigration cases to move forward.
A variety of reasons put young migrants on the path to the U.S.
"The
children don’t only travel because of poverty or reunification. In a
recent study we have detected that another important theme is migration
because of insecurity," said Julia Gonzalez, coordinator of the
nonprofit National Bureau for Migration in Guatemala.
A study
released in March by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
said about half of 400 kids interviewed reported they had experienced or
been threatened with serious harm. About 300 of those interviewed were
from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — countries that accounted for
about 90 percent of the children cared for by the Office of Refugee
Resettlement last year.
Brian said he left Comayagua, Honduras,
because "there is so much poverty there, the crime is tremendous. You’ve
got to sort things out because if not, you’ll starve to death."
He said his older brother got into trouble with gangs and drugs.
"I
don’t like that," Brian said. "I’m used to working, earning a living."
He sold agoutis, medium-sized rodents, as pets to earn enough money to
make his trip north. But he arrived in Reynosa penniless and now hopes
his sister in the Mexican state of Jalisco can send him money to cross
the border.
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have rampant
street gangs and a strong presence of organized crime and drug
traffickers resulting in some of the highest homicide rates in the
region and in the world. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the
world, with 90.4 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the
U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
Honduras’ economic growth of 3
percent in 2013 was largely based on money sent home by migrants. Almost
60 percent of the country’s 8 million people live in poverty, the World
Bank says.
Often, child migrants from Central America face the
greatest dangers in Mexico, where gangs prey on them as they ride trains
and buses north toward the U.S. border.
Mexico’s undersecretary
for North America, Sergio Alcocer, said his government is coordinating
with U.S. authorities and those in Central America.
"Mexico has
maintained that the only way to deal with such a complex phenomenon …
is under the principal of shared responsibility," Alcocer said. He said
Mexico plans to raise the issue at a regional immigration conference in
Nicaragua later this month.
At the Senda de Vida shelter in
Reynosa, a short distance from the Rio Grande, Brother Hector Silva said
more and more children like Brian are arriving.
"Our responsibility is to attend to them and not to take from them the vision that they carry,"
he said.
___
Associated
Press writer Christopher Sherman reported this story in Reynosa and
Alicia A. Caldwell reported from Washington. AP writers Sonia Perez in
Guatemala City and E. Eduardo Castillo and Olga Rodriguez in Mexico City
contributed to this report.