The Children's Crusade at the U.S.-Mexico Border

"I heard there was an opportunity to come."

"I heard on the news that mothers with their babies and minors could come."

"[My baby's father?] He abandoned us. We have nothing."

Mayra, 17, Guatemalan refugee

 

"[It's nonsense that more migrants were coming because I am] a nice guy."

"They come because their circumstance is so bad."

U.S.President Joe Biden 

A young girl carries a child inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection holding area in El Paso, Texas. Lucas Jackson/Reuters

 

Since October of 2020, roughly two-thirds of unaccompanied minors taken into custody at the border of Mexico and the U.S. have travelled from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The remainder for the most part are Mexican children. Currently the number in the custody of a U.S.Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) refugee office managing a government shelter system stands at 9,200. Most of these children are in their teens, but there are hundreds under 12 years of age.

Among the unaccompanied children many hope to become reunited with family members. Many others have left their homes to escape violence and poverty, a fact well understood by immigration experts. Slumping economies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has been the cause of many more migrants leaving their home countries. Hurricanes have recently battered Central America.

 

A young asylum seeker arrives with her family at a bus station after being released by US border patrol in Brownsville, Texas, on 25 February. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

 

Under the new Biden administration, a recent change in policy permits unaccompanied children into the United States even while single adults and families crossing illegally continue to be expelled. Under the previous Trump and Obama administrations in 2019 and 2014, similar spikes in migrant crossings from Mexico to the U.S. also occurred.

While the potentially dangerous trip to the border is undertaken by some children on their own, or through a smuggler, in alternate instances children travel with older siblings, grandparents or other relatives and they can be separated by Customs and Border Protection once caught at the border.

Upon being taken into custody the children are meant to be transferred out of Customs and Border Protection to shelters operated by Health and Human Services within a 72-hour period. With limited shelter space, however, border detention centres may see children remaining for longer periods, and this is what is happening at the present time, due to an influx of greater numbers.

 

Children play between tents at a makeshift migrant camp in Matamoros, Tamaulipas state, Mexico. Bloomberg

 

Originally constructed to house adult men for short periods of time, the border stations have the potential to pose COVID-19 health risks to children and staff alike, in overcrowded conditions. When they gain the shelters, children can be released to parents or other sponsors or alternately placed in foster care where asylum can be pursued or alternate ways sought to remain in the U.S. -- other than to be deported.

 

Of the approximately 200,000 unaccompanied children entering the country from fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2019, four percent were removed, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data. Several emergency shelters for children in Texas have been opened by the administration, along with plans to utilize the Dallas convention centre for up to three thousand migrant teen boys to be housed.

 

Looking to the longer term, the Biden administration is planning to establish programs permitting Central Americans to apply for refugee status in the United States from their home countries, while also making an effort to improve conditions in those countries. Allied with that effort, a program has been restarted allowing certain Central American children with parents living lawfully in the U.S. to apply for a refugee resettlement from their home countries.

 

A U.S. Border Patrol agent releases a young asylum seeker with her family at a bus station on February 25 in Brownsville, Texas. (CNN)

Estas en Tu Casa ("This is Your Home")

"Today, Mexico extends you its hand."
"This plan is only for those who comply with Mexican laws, and it's a first step towards a permanent solution for those who are granted refugee status in Mexico."Mexican President Peña Nieto

"The majority plan to cross the border. And that's my intention, too."
"Because, yes, while life here is calmer than at home, it's still not like the U.S. where it would get better. That's the goal: to have a better life."
Jose Santos, from Honduras
 

"It's a kind offer - but it's not the plan that we have, to stay here halfway up."
Anna Lisset Velazquez, from Honduras

"To those in the Caravan, turn around, we are not letting people into the United States illegally."
"I am bringing out the military for this National Emergency."
"They [migrants] will be stopped!"
U.S. President Donald Trump

Central American migrants rest on the steps of a Catholic church in Pijijiapan, in southern Mexico, as a thousands-strong caravan that is slowly making its way toward the U.S. border stops for the night Thursday. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
 
Mexico, which has a problem with its own poverty-stricken, violence-averse population seeping over the border into the U.S. has made a generous offer to the estimated seven thousand marchers intent on crossing the Mexican border into the United States to find new homes for themselves in the land of plenty. Mind, there's plenty of poverty and violence in the United States too. But wherever people live in penury, lacking government support and security, their minds swivel to one place and one place only; the United States of America.

Offering to the law-abiding citizens who are wearily making their way on a long journey of hope to a destination where they will be refused entry, a humanitarian gesture of compassion for people who have opted to make themselves homeless. To those people there will be extended temporary ID cards and work permits, medical care, schooling for their children, and housing in local hostels until such time as those who accept and whom Mexico will accept establish themselves and become independent.

Sounds like a solution, and it would be one, if Mexico was the destination that all those people stream toward, but it is not. For the marchers, it is a border they must cross, a country they must traverse to arrive at the point where another border beckons. But beckon it does not. There are lawful means of entry, to make application, to await consent to enter, and these marchers are deliberately bypassing all of that. The U.S. has a monumental problem as it is, of tens of millions of illegals living there.

And should it decide that the plight of all those seven thousand marchers must be resolved, and they will take a deep breath and permit them entry and begin processing them, it would send a signal to all the other disaffected people in Central America, in Africa, in the Middle East and elsewhere that the U.S. border is easily breached, and the kindhearted people of America will welcome them. The size of the current march will seem minuscule in comparison to the unbridled hordes that will assemble to achieve the goal of living where opportunity beckons.

The Economist

Only it doesn't, not for them. For the last hundred years people everywhere, from Europe to Africa, Asia to the Middle East, have yearned to go to America. A hundred years ago the persecuted minorities of Europe spoke of a country where the streets were paved with gold, an allegory that owed its persistence to the knowledge that those who did make it to America wrote home about how successful they had become, how wealthy, how happy with life they were. Everyone wanted to share that. And for a while many did.

Is there any other country in the world where people everywhere else aspire to join? China? Brazil? Egypt? Russia? India? South Africa? France? There are no long marches of desperate people willing to undertake dangerous, long journeys in an effort to find haven and leave the miserable past behind, streaming toward a country promising a future that their current locations do not and cannot and would not offer them. But one country cannot absorb them all, not even a small proportion of those anxious to join it.

And so, for the United States, what the aspiration of so many represents is a "national emergency"; the very notion of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of economic migrants joining the already-established illegal migrants now ensconced in the United States represents a nightmare of administrative and accommodation proportions. Those failed nations governed by despots, by autocrats, by inept and inadequate rulers who despise those living under their heel need the rescue of revolution.

And to inspire them there is always the example of Somalia and Syria.

Families with small children get truck rides in Tonala to meet up with the thousands more Honduran migrants and refugees 25km further along up the highway [Sandra Cuffe/Al Jazeera]