Central American Child Immigration a Problem

Story first appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
South Texas is seeing a rise in children from Central America who have slipped across the border unaccompanied into the U.S. from Mexico after that country began deporting fewer kids who arrived without visas, Raleigh Immigration Lawyers say.

The influx across the U.S. border is causing a political outcry in the state, where the federal government has set up five temporary shelters to deal with the growing numbers of young immigrants.

From October to the end of April, the U.S. government has detained more than 6,500 unaccompanied minors who had crossed the border, nearly double the number detained in the comparable period the previous year, according to U.S. officials.

Most of them come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, countries that are close to Mexico's southern border, and generally range in age from 14 to 17, though some are younger.

The jump comes as illegal immigration is down sharply overall, thanks to declining immigration from Mexico paired with a rising number of people returning south from the U.S.

While young immigrants have been picked up in increased numbers all along the southern border, the situation has become particularly acute in Texas. In one shelter at an Air Force base in San Antonio, about 200 children live in a squat, brown military barrack, sleeping on cots.

The Texas Governor criticized the situation in a letter to President Obama on Friday, calling the immigration surge a humanitarian crisis that the federal government wasn't doing enough to alleviate. He noted that dozens of young immigrants to the U.S. recently had to be quarantined due to a measles scare and an outbreak of chicken pox.

The White House referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security. A spokesman for the department declined to comment on the Mexican law or to discuss the reasons behind the increase in border crossings by Central American children.

Immigration experts say a Mexican law enacted last May, which lets some kids who enter that country remain there without visas for humanitarian reasons, allows more children safe passage to the U.S. border. The children are often transported by smugglers hired by family members, experts say. Kids started coming in January and the surge just hasn't stopped.

In the past, unaccompanied children from Central America would be detained and deported" from Mexico. Many of the children are escaping gang violence and poverty and seek to reunite with parents who are in the U.S.

Mexico's new immigration law strengthens"the protection of non-accompanied minors in Mexico, and ensures that when children are deported, they are returned to their home countries safely. It is too early to tell whether the law had led to a decline in the number of children that Mexico sends back to their native countries. Mexican authorities interview all non-accompanied minors and through established protocols, work with Consular officials from Central American nations in Mexico to ensure the minors return to their countries of origin safely.

The federal Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the children were being well cared for at the temporary Texas shelters.

The kids have constant adult supervision and medical care, said a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families, as well as three meals and two snacks daily. The agency said it allocated $33.5 million to cover additional costs associated with the surge in youth immigration.

Officials recently allowed a reporter to tour the temporary shelter at the Air Force's Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, but not interview detained immigrants. The children get English lessons and have access to a room where they can play video games and board games and another where they can watch movies. Their dorm rooms were lined with drawings on green construction paper, with inspirational saying such as, "Without grief, there is no triumph."

Many of the children are quickly reunited with family members in the U.S. and remain with them while they fight against deportation—a difficult challenge, immigration experts said. Children not reunited with relatives are sent to permanent shelters. Authorities plan to operate the temporary Texas shelters through the end of the summer while permanent shelters expand to deal with the surge.


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