Americans Need to Face the Horror That Undocumented Children Have Experienced

A young boy is is helped down from the top of a freight car, as Central Americans board a northbound freight train in Ixtepec, Mexico. AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo Although there is no simple answer to the question of why so many children are crossing over, one of the most important reasons, particularly in Honduras, is […]

A young boy is is helped down from the top of a freight car, as Central Americans board a northbound freight train in Ixtepec, Mexico. AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo

Although there is no simple answer to the question of why so many children are crossing over, one of the most important reasons, particularly in Honduras, is the unprecedented violence resulting from the combination of a recent U.S.-backed coup and a U.S.-funded drug war that has perversely resulted in more powerful gangs of narco-traffickers. Sonia Nazario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the acclaimed best-seller “Enrique’s Journey,” told me in an interview on Uprising, “the narcos brought the viciousness and the reach of the violence to a whole new level.” Nazario has extensively investigated the driving forces behind the crisis facing Central American children: “These children told me, ‘I have been threatened multiple times by the time I am 11 years old; I have seen multiple people killed in front of me. I have got to get out, or I am going to die.’ ” But it’s not just the conditions at home that are unbearably dangerous — the journey itself that unaccompanied Central American children take to get to the U.S. is fraught with peril. I struggle to understand how anyone can deny sympathy to children who have been through so much. Perhaps those shouting hateful slogans are simply racist or without compassion. Or perhaps they are simply ignorant of the whole story. Nazario, who rode on top of many trains to recreate the journey of Enrique, a young Honduran man she met over a decade ago, wrote about the constant threats of violent beatings, rape, theft, kidnapping, starvation, imprisonment, exposure to the elements and loss of limbs. Children are preyed upon by bandits, gangsters, drug lords, police and even immigration authorities. Many thousands of children simply never make it to the U.S. Of those, the ones who end up back where they started are the lucky ones. The rest simply disappear, lost to the myriad ways there are to die horrible deaths. Nazario revealed the terrifying statistic that the Zetas gang of narco-traffickers today “are kidnapping 18,000 Central Americans a year, and they prefer kids.” Unaccompanied children usually carry one item that is most precious to them — a slip of paper with the phone number of a parent or relative in the U.S. written down on it. During her reporting, Nazario said she “saw these kids who would hide that slip in the sole of their shoe or the waistband of their jeans. They’d wrap it in plastic so when they crossed rivers, hopefully that precious number wouldn’t smudge.” The Zetas gang members who capture kids call the numbers on those slips of paper, demanding thousands of dollars of ransom from parents and threatening to kill the children. “And they do kill them,” she added. Confronting the trauma that the immigrant children have gone through is imperative in any discussion of what to do with them. Federico Bustamante works for Casa Libre youth shelter, which provides relief for undocumented minors. He has met thousands of children who have crossed the border, and told me the story of one teenager from Honduras who attempted to escape the gang violence by coming to the U.S., only to be detained for six months, have his request for asylum denied and be deported back to Honduras. “He was killed on Valentine’s Day,” Bustamante said. I asked him what he would say to the anti-immigrant protesters from places like Murrieta if he had a chance to speak directly to them. “I would tell them to look these people in the eye,” Bustamante said. “Even people who are against our cause, once they look these kids in the eye, it’s very difficult to see them as anything other than kids.” A 10-year-old girl named Julia Perez-Pacheco who also attended the pro-immigrant Los Angeles protest with her father brought along a letter to share with the gathering. She solemnly read, “I am representing the children who are crossing the border or finding their parents. I believe that family is important and that the families should be united.” She then articulated the most crucial fact missing from all the political debates — simply that “children are human and deserve to have their family with them.” Your support is crucial…

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