The Growing Central American Refugee Crisis: Part I
Primary
Source http://www.wola.org/publications/mexicos_other_border
Despite a small
increase in apprehended migrants in 2013, the flow of undocumented individuals
into the United States remains near its lowest
levels of the past 40 years. The 414k people that US Border Patrol
apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border last year are far below historical
tends, as shown. In 2013, about 480k migrants attempted to cross the 1,969-mile
US-Mexico border against US Border Patrol and other law enforcement agencies’
19k agents. Thus, the US is advertised has having an 84% Effectiveness Rate. My next paper will address US enforcement capabilities
and its cost-effectiveness.
As shown here, in
2013 the number of Mexican migrants apprehended (265k, of which 11k are
children) also continues a slow downward trend. Mexican migrants make up about
64% of the total; so 36% (150k, of which 22k are children) are primarily from
the Northern Triangle of
Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Notice how Mexican migrants constitute an ever-smaller fraction of the
total. The recent growth in total migrant apprehensions owes entirely to
citizens of the "Northern Triangle."
But the trend is even
more alarming, if we shift our focus out to 2014. From Nov2013-Jun2014, a record 47k unaccompanied children have been apprehended along the
Mexico-US border. Of this number about 75% traveled from the Northern Triangle. This group is part of
a larger wave that includes some youngsters accompanied by their parents and
some traveling alone. We appear to be witnessing
an exodus of Central American citizens.
Many say they are going because
they believe that the United States treats migrant children traveling alone and
women with their children more leniently than adult illegal immigrants with no
children. The Obama administration says the primary cause of the influx of
children is rising crime and ailing economies in Central America, not policy
changes in the United States.
While violence and poverty appear to be the
main drivers, something did happen in late 2013 and early 2014 to increase
still further the rate of unaccompanied minor arriving in the United States. In
a sense, there have been two increases in arrivals of unaccompanied children.
One increase began at the beginning of 2012, most likely driven by the sharp
rise in violent crime in the Northern
Triangle. The next, even sharper increase began early this year. Both
trends are evident in the below graph which depicts month-by-month numbers of
unaccompanied minors held in the custody by the U.S. Office of Refugee
Resettlement (ORR, to which other U.S. authorities must turn over apprehended
minors within 72 hours of their arrival).
Note the larger-than-normal seasonal increases in migration
(and thus apprehensions) following both Jan2012 and Jan2013. Flight from
Central American violence, including specific threats from MS-13, Barrio 18,
and other criminal organizations, may likely be the most significant cause. But
observe the dramatically steeper increase after early 2014. The resulting
2008-14 trend line has now taken on an entirely different shape: that of a hockey stick.
Nobody is sure what happened about six months
ago to cause this sharp increase. There was no dramatic reported worsening of
Central America’s already severe violent crime or poverty rates. There is no
evidence that Central Americans suddenly came to view the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), (which only benefits people in the
United States before 2007) or the
stalled U.S. immigration reform debate as “green lights” to send their children
northward.
One possibility is that the “hockey stick” was triggered by word of
mouth spreading among the Central American population that the children who
arrived since 2012 were not being detained and quickly deported. (Smugglers
looking for customers may have helped spread this information.) Instead, after
receiving “notices to appear” in immigration court, they were being released to—and
thus reunited with—their family members.
This has happened not because of the 2012 or
immigration reform, but in accordance with an anti-human
trafficking law that the U.S. Congress unanimously approved, and
President George W. Bush signed into law, in December 2008. Section 235(b) of
the “William
Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act”
states that:
Unaccompanied
children from “non-contiguous countries” (that is, all countries other than
Canada and Mexico) must be transferred to the custody of the Department of
Health and Human Services. The HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement must see that
they are “promptly placed in the least restrictive setting that is in the best
interest of the child.” Placing a child in a “secure facility” is only called
for “if a suitable family member is not available to provide care.”
“To
the greatest extent practicable,” children are to have counsel represent them
in legal proceedings, which may include applications for protected status. The
UN High Commissioner for Refugees has noted
that many Central American children fleeing violence may meet the criteria for
refugee status.
As already stated, the
unaccompanied minor children are primarily from three Central American
countries: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
Why are the children fleeing?
The map displays the hometown locations of these unaccompanied children that
were apprehended in the US this year through 14May2014. The larger, darker blue
circles locate the primary hometowns of the children. For example, Honduras has several large circled areas: The
largest is San Pedro Sula (top center). More than 2600 children emigrated from
there so far this year; that’s 2.5 times more than any of the next three
highest home towns, also in Honduras. To help better understand why this city
has so many refugees, consider that the city has the largest number of violent
deaths per capita in the world (187 per 100,000; that’s about one death per 100
families per year)! The three top municipalities sending children to the US are
all in Honduras, making up 5% of all apprehended children. Following San Pedro
Sula are Tegucigalpa and Juticalpa, both with more than 800 apprehended
children during the same period. Young people flee to evade
gang recruitment or harassment, and some teenagers we interviewed spoke vaguely
of fleeing from gang trouble. Business owners, even those in the informal
sector, flee extortion. Corrupt security forces’ inability to protect citizens
too often leaves them with no choice but to leave.
The Honduran and Salvadoran
child migrants are from some of the most violent regions in those countries, driven
by a surge in gang and drug trafficking violence. Averaged over the entire
country, Honduras’s
murder rate was 90 per 100,000 in 2012, the highest in the world. In
2011, El Salvador was not far behind, at 70, ranking second in terms of
homicides in Latin America. By comparison, in 2013 the Mexican rate was 15; the
US rate, 6. Thus, it is clear that Salvadoran and Honduran children come from
extremely violent regions where many probably perceive the risk of traveling
alone to the U.S. preferable to remaining at home.”
But, the reasons driving the
migration may be different for Guatemalan children, who come from largely rural
areas, suggesting they are probably seeking better economic opportunities in the
US.
In 2011, US Border Patrol apprehended
almost 50k citizens of the Northern Triangle.
So far this year (as of 15June), it has apprehended 181,724: on pace to
register a three-year increase of 450
percent. The US may be the main destination, but several other countries are
seeing a similar rise in fleeing the Northern
Triangle. Between 2008 and 2013, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports,
the number of those countries’ citizens applying for asylum in nearby Belize,
Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama rose by 712 percent over the
five-year period.
In general, all these children
are not immigrants, legal or otherwise. They are refugees. And when we see this
exodus of child refugees, our country has a choice -- do we try to save lives,
or do we callously reject their pleas for help, and send them back to where
they are attempting to flee? America has done this before to tragic
consequences. In 1939, German families trying to spare their children from the
oncoming Nazi onslaught sent their kids via boat to the Americas (Cuba and the
US) in the hopes of saving their lives. America rejected them.
The Refugee Children’s Trek North
On our trip, we found a border very different from the U.S.-Mexico
line. This one is simple
to cross: with an ID card at an official entry point, by wading a river between
towns, or by stepping over an invisible line in the backcountry.). Starting in
2012, the number of U.S.-bound Central Americans making this first
crossing—among them tens of thousands of unaccompanied children—began a surge
that continues to intensify. The borderline between Mexico and Guatemala often
gets described as “porous.”
 |
| Monuments mark the border of Mexico and Guatemala |
We can attest to that. During our visit to the southern border zone,
we crossed the line in four different places without showing our passports. At
only two of those crossings did we interact with authorities from either government. In between the official crossings, the
border is still easily traversed: the walls, sensors, and constant patrols that
characterize the US - Mexico border zone are absent here.
On the Mexican side of the porous borderline, the security is mainly
a halfhearted effort to keep better records of who is entering. About 150
Guatemalan border police guard their border along its 714-mile border with
Mexico. While circulation in the immediate border zone is free, Mexico’s
border-zone security tightens
along the road network into the rest of the country and toward the United
States. Roads and rivers are heavily policed, but not impermeable. Numerous security
agencies with overlapping responsibilities coordinate poorly, suffer
from endemic corruption, and manage to stop only a tiny fraction of U.S.-bound
drugs. In 2013 the Mexican security apprehended some 86k Central American
immigrants and deported 93% of them.
A key reason for the porosity is a lack of
population density. Mexico’s southern border states account for less than 5
percent of its population; and Guatemala’s border states, about 20 percent. With
the exception of the area around the Pacific coastal highway, most of these
states’ populations live far from the border area. The border is either a
narrow river—the Suchiate in the southwest, the Usumacinta further north—or
just a straight line over land that is often uninhabited and covered by dense
vegetation.
 |
| Inner-tube rafts take people across the Suchiate Tiver between Guatemala and MX |
As a result, crossing the border is trivially easy, and Mexico has
chosen to focus its border security controls farther from the line, in the
Border States’ interior.
The “belts of control,”
Mexico’s scheme for securing the border inland from the borderline, have a
notable weakness: two lines of northbound cargo trains
that, for reasons we did not hear explained clearly, are policed very lightly.
For tens of thousands of yearly Central American migrants these trains,
nicknamed “La Bestia” (The Beast), are the main option for getting
across Mexico. The long ride atop the train is physically dangerous, and the
lack of security leaves migrants at the mercy of Central American gangs,
bandits, kidnappers, and corrupt officials. The stunning frequency of
kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking, rape, and homicide puts Central
American migrants’ plight in Mexico atop the list of the Western Hemisphere’s
worst humanitarian emergencies.
The Mexican states closest to its southern border, and those along
the shortest route between Central America and the United States, saw the most
returns and deportations. Chiapas, which includes the most densely populated
border zones, was in first place
with 43 percent of the 2013 total (34k), followed by Veracruz, Tabasco, and
Oaxaca. Chiapas is the Mexican state with the highest percentage of its
population, 74.7 percent, living in poverty, as well as the highest percentage
of its population living in extreme poverty, at 32.2 percent.
As at Mexico’s northern border, gangs extort businesses, and
assaults and property theft are common. Border communities have seen a
troubling recent rise
in the number of femicides—homicides of mostly young women—that jumped from 22
in 2010 to 97 in 2012. Migrant women are frequently the victims. In fact,
much—probably most—violent crime against migrants goes unreported in official
statistics, as the victims do not notify authorities for fear of being
deported.
Human trafficking is another security problem linked to migration. A
February 2014 study
by the Observatorio Nacional Ciudadano stated that between 2010 and
2013, Chiapas had the second highest number of registered cases of human
trafficking in Mexico. A frequent phenomenon is young women, often minors, from
Central America forced to work as prostitutes in border cities and unable to
leave. Community leaders pointed out to us several bars as we drove through the
border zone—often in very remote, rural towns—where this is a common
phenomenon. The presence of trafficked women in these establishments appears to
be an open secret, yet the authorities rarely act. A 2013 crackdown in
Tapachula closed dozens of these bars, but at least half, local activists told
us, reopened shortly afterward.
While it appears tranquil on the surface, this zone is receiving
greater Mexican and U.S. government interest not only because of the surge of
Central American migration, but because of its importance for the drug trade.
The U.S. government estimates
that as much as 80 percent of cocaine trafficked to the United States during
the first half of 2013 passed through Guatemala, and the vast majority crossed
the land border into Mexico.
Migrants Train Transit
While Mexico’s borderlands have a long
tradition of migrants who settle there, the post-2011 influx of Central
American arrivals consists mostly of people who intend to pass on to the United
States. Mexican authorities and migrant shelters in the southern border zone
are seeing increases in Central American migration similar to that recorded by
U.S. authorities.
The migrants’ first part of the trip is simple. Under the Central
America-4 visa system, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua do not
require each other’s citizens to present visas or passports. Needing only their
identity cards, citizens of the Northern
Triangle easily cross Guatemala to reach Mexico. Hondurans can take regular
buses and be at the Mexico border in less than 24 hours. Salvadorans cross
Guatemala to Tapachula or to the Pan-American Highway crossing in Ciudad
Cuauhtémoc. Then the real journey begins.
Migrants crossing at
the southern border tend to pass through one of three corridors:
The Pacific coast route, which includes the
Soconusco region cities of Tapachula, Huixtla, Mapastepec, Pijijiapán, Tonalá,
and Arriaga.
The Central route, which includes the cities of
Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, La Trinitaria, Comitán, and San Cristóbal de las Casas.
The jungle route, which includes the border highway from Benemérito de las Américas to Tenosique
and Palenque.
Though the borderline itself is porous, Mexico has chosen to enforce
its borders further inland. As the distance from Central America increases, so
do migrants’ chances of running afoul of Mexican authorities. Roadblocks and
checkpoints make it difficult to travel to the US border along Mexico’s road
network.
This map illustrates the main cargo train
lines and stops. The pink line is the far shortest route to the U.S. border, which
explains why south Texas has seen the vast majority of Central American migrant
arrivals.
Generally, the most vulnerable migrants are
those who cannot afford to hire a smuggler, whose fees for transit across
Mexico can exceed US $8,000. For the tens of thousands per year who lack such
resources, Mexico’s cargo train network
is far less policed than the road network. This is so for reasons that we
did not hear explained clearly. Migration officials’ comments appeared to
ascribe responsibility to the cargo train companies themselves, although the
tracks run on federal land.
Whatever the reason, the chance of encountering
authorities is far lower on the tracks. Migrants in the southern border zone
are drawn to “La Bestia” (The Beast), the train that heads northward to
central Mexico and then on to the U.S. border. For hundreds of miles they ride
on the roofs of the train cars trying to avoid fatal falls, hot days, frigid
nights, and low-clearance tunnels. Every eight
to ten days or so, trains depart from two routes that originate near the
southern border.
 |
| Migrants ride atop freight train near Ixtepec, Mexico |
Migrants currently board the train’s northern
route in Tenosique, which proceeds to Palenque, and then follows a track along
the Gulf of Mexico through the state of Veracruz. Another route, following
Chiapas’ Pacific coast, used to begin in Tapachula, until Hurricane Stan
destroyed the track in 2005. Now, the route starts in Arriaga, and passes
through the state of Oaxaca before joining up with the other train route.
This means that migrants arriving in Tapachula
must walk—or risk road transport—to Arriaga, 150 miles to the northwest. This journey,
which might take a migrant two weeks on foot, is treacherous. In order to avoid
the eleven checkpoints that we counted between Tapachula and Arriaga, migrants
will often dismount combis or taxis before the checkpoint, walk miles in
brush land, and then board another combi on the other side of each
checkpoint. For years,
migrants on this journey have been robbed, beaten, sexually assaulted, and even
killed.
Migrants and shelter personnel told us—and have
denounced publicly—that in Arriaga, Palenque, and Tenosique, the Central
American gangs are currently charging a fee of US$100 for permission to ride
atop the train. Different groups dominate different segments of the journey
north, and each charges fees, meaning that a migrant is often forced to pay
hundreds of dollars for a “safe” passage on the trains across Mexico.
Individuals we interviewed expressed concern
about possible collusion between criminal groups and the train company or train
operator. They cited incidents in which a train stops in a remote area for no
apparent reason, and criminal groups then board it to rob and abuse migrants.
In other cases, coyotes (human smugglers) traveling with the migrants
will pay the train operator to stop to let migrants climb on board. Many of
these smugglers are also armed, as they claim they must protect their
“merchandise.”
Migrants kidnapped by criminal groups are taken
and held in safe houses, under unspeakably
brutal conditions, until relatives, usually in the United States,
pay steep ransoms. Many of their captives are never seen again. Migrants on the
train line, who are assumed to be carrying cash, also face the threat of
regular banditry by groups of bajadores who assault and rob them.
Migrants and shelter personnel told us that the
gang extortion, kidnapping, and banditry problems have worsened dramatically in
the past few years as Central American migration has increased. The response
from the security forces has been scarce. Throughout the train line—usually in
exchange for payment—corrupt federal, state, and municipal police, as well as
railroad employees, turn a blind eye to the criminal groups’ marauding, and at
times aid and abet it.
Troublingly, our conversations with migrants,
and shelter workers’ own assessments, revealed that many of the travelers have
only a vague idea of the dangers that await them, whether on the train or in
the forbidding deserts on the U.S. side. Shelters attempt to educate about the
risks further north.
The train lines that begin near the Guatemalan border end up at a
series of junctions north of Mexico City. Migrants dismount in the neighborhood
of Lechería, but are not permitted to await and board new trains there. They
must walk about 15 miles north to Huehuetoca municipality, and from there they
can board trains to Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, or Reynosa. Most
Central American migrants choose the latter two, as south Texas is a far
shorter journey.
In Lechería and Huehuetoca, anti-migrant sentiment borders on
xenophobia. The local population views migrants as a nuisance, associating them
with behavior like petty theft, vandalism, and panhandling, and makes clear
that those who arrive on the trains should keep moving on. Shelters have had a
hard time staying open here in the face of determined opposition, and even threats
and acts of aggression.
Arrival at the US Border
Finally, most of the North
Triangle migrants reach the US border. This chart shows the recent history
of children migrant apprehensions at the border, specifying where and how many.
Note the huge disparity of migrants arriving in Texas’ Rio
Grande area, dwarfing all others border areas. About 75% of these children come
from the Northern Triangle; the
balance is from Mexico. As suggested earlier, it is not very surprising that so
many end up in South Texas: it’s the shortest route from their homes in the Northern Triangle, Also observe the
dramatic migrant increases in the past two years. It’s even more striking when
you consider that the 2014 figures are for only the first five months! It is
not at all surprising that there is a massive immigrant crisis at the border.
Under present law the US must adjudicate each of these cases involving Northern Triangle children, before
determining what to do with them. The children and families are initially held
in government facilities in the US. Because the US Immigration Courts are so
backlogged, most of the families/children will be sent to other family members
living within the US, until the courts are able to address each case.
How long will it take for the court system to make a
determination as to where to ultimately place these refugees? These legal
proceedings take time, especially now that the system adjudicating such cases
is overwhelmed. As a result, even if their status is never legalized and they
end up eventually being deported, migrant children may end up spending a 1-2
years (or even more) living with parents or other close relatives who had come
to the United States earlier.
There are currently some 250 US judges working
in US Immigration courts. Last year they heard 37k cases (~10k were for
immigrants from the Northern Triangle).
The existing 2013 backlog counts some 350k cases to be processed, an increase
of 23k cases since 2012. That’s
1400 cases per judge! Not
surprisingly, on 11Jul2014 the DoJ requested action for adding temporary judges
to help speed up processing of the mounting backlog. Interestingly, in 2013
only 426 of the 9898 asylum cases heard for Northern
Triangle immigrants were granted; that’s only 4%. The number and time table
for adding on new judges and likely changing case priorities, is still unclear,
but hopefully help alleviate the problem.
Stay tune for more…..
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