Children of the Border

Hurt, Kidnapped and Repatriated: Children of the Border

El Tecolote, News Feature, Rómulo Hernández, Posted: Oct 23, 2007

Traducción al español

It’s been just one year since “Lupe” left Veracruz, Mexico with her 3-year-old son. She was yet another humble woman who left Mexico to pursue her hopes of the “American Dream.” But the scorching temperatures in the Arizona desert took the last breath from her son. She walked several days with his small body. Finally, she left him at the foot of a tree to look for help.

She was found by the border patrol but “Lupe” didn’t immediately tell them about her son because she was afraid they would accuse her of killing him. She waited until she arrived at the detention center. Authorities searched for her son until they found him. She was accused of his death and on the verge of going to trial, but the Mexican Consulate in Tucson interceded, according to Juan Manuel Calderón, a Consulate official.

In other cases, when a young child is with a parent traveling the perilous border routes and they are seen by the border patrol, someone in the group grabs the child and flees, separating him/her from the parents or family members, according to the Consulate official. He did not clarify if this was the type of routine abduction that often takes place among human smugglers commonly called coyotes.

If agents find a minor the Mexican Consulate is notified. Then, if the child cannot give information due to being too young or speaking an indigenous language, they search the child’s belongings for a phone number or an address, the country’s officials said.

Frequently, when children show up at the border, they are alone, often carrying physical and emotional scars caused by assaults, blows, sexual abuse and accidents that they suffer during their passage. Others don’t make it to the border. They lose limbs as they hang onto pipes on the outside of the trains they hop on as they travel through southern Mexico. Not too long ago this practice was denounced by the U.S. Bishops’ Conference.

Unfortunately, these dramatic stories are all too common. Out of 50,000 boys, girls and teens repatriated in a year from the United States to Mexico, half of them were unaccompanied by an adult, according to a recent report from Margarita Zavala de Calderon, president of a national family agency in Mexico, the Consejo Consultivo del Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (DIF) de México.

Looking at only the state of Chihuahua, in a three-year period (2004-2007), Mexican authorities say 27,521 underage children, of which a third were girls, were deported from the United States. The Mexican Consulate in El Paso, Texas, reported that there were children as young as the age of two.

The American Immigration Law Foundation (AILF) reported a few months ago that around 2,000 to 3,000 bodies of men, women and children have been found along the southwest border since 1995, including at least 1,000 in southern Arizona which, according to critics of the migratory situation, is ten times the number of victims caused by the Berlin Wall during its 28 years of existence.

These statistics come to mind regarding the case of Saul, a U.S.-born eight year-old, son of Elvira Arellano, the Mexican woman who spent a year hiding in a church in Chicago who, lacking legal documents, was recently deported to Mexico. In the middle of their misfortune, both mother and child had the backing of human rights activists.

The child, now living without a mother in the United States, has slowly become a symbol of the migratory situation between the United States and Mexico.

Saul’s wandering through churches and forums, asking for a more humane migratory policy, slaps us, reminding us of the suffering of a border journey that does not always end with mere deportation.

Romúlo Hernandez is a journalist and author of the newly-released Half of a Tamarind, a series of short stories about a transgender looking for answers and acceptance through spirituality and solitude.

Translated from the Spanish by Brandon Delgado.