Tell Me How It Ends

I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.

We wanted to become “resident aliens,” even though we knew what applying for green cards implied: the lawyers, the expenses, the many vaccinations and medical exams, the months of sustained uncertainty, the rather humiliating intermediate steps, such as having to wait for an “advance parole” document in order to be able to leave the country and be paroled back in, like a criminal, as well as the legal prohibition against traveling abroad, without losing immigration status, before being granted advance parole. Despite all that, we decided to apply.

The green card application is nothing like the intake questionnaire for undocumented minors. When you apply for a green card you have to answer things like “Do you intend to practice polygamy?” and “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” and “Have you ever knowingly committed a crime of moral turpitude?” And although nothing can or should be taken lightly when you are in the fragile situation of asking for permission to live in a country that is not your own, there is something almost innocent in the green card application’s preoccupations with and visions of the future and its possible threats: polyamorous debauchery, communism, weak morals! […] The intake questionnaire for undocumented children, on the other hands, reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality.

Their answers vary, but they often point to a single pull factor: reunification with a parent or another close relative who migrated to the U.S. years earlier. Other times, the answers point to push factors—the unthinkable circumstances the children are fleeing: extreme violence, persecution and coercion by gangs, mental and physical abuse, forced labor, neglect, abandonment. It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.

We wonder if the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color: of better, purer breeds and nationalities. Would they be treated more like people? More like children? We read the papers, listen to the radio, see photographs, and wonder.

It’s curious, or perhaps just sinister, that the word “removal’ is still used to refer to the deportation of “illegal” immigrants—those bronzed barbarians who threaten the white peace and superior values of the “Land of the Free.”

But, despite the dangers, people continue to take the risk. Children certainly take the risk. Children do what their stomachs tell them to do. They don’t think twice when they have to chase a moving train. They run along with it, reach for any metal bar at hand, and fling themselves toward whichever half-stable surface they may land on. Children chase after life, even if that chase might end up killing them. Children run and flee. They have an instinct for survival, perhaps, that allows them to endure almost anything just to make it to the other side of horror, whatever may be waiting there for them.

So when I have to ask children that seventh question—“Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?”—all I want to do is cover my face and my ears and disappear. But I know better, or try to. I remind myself to swallow the rage, grief, and shame; remind myself to just sit still and listen closely, in case a child does happen to reveal a particular detail that can end up being key to his or her defense against deportation.

Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken. And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.

In real and practical terms, what the creation of that priority docket meant was that the cases involving unaccompanied minors from Central America were grouped together and moved to the top of the list of pending cases in immigration court. Being moved to the top of a list, in this context, was the least desirable thing—at least from the point of view of the children involved. Basically, the priority juvenile docket implied that deportation proceedings against them were accelerated by 94 percent, and that both they and the organizations that normally provided legal representation now had much less time to build a defense.

The priority juvenile docket, in sum, was the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children. Ethically, that answer was more than questionable. In legal terms, it was a kind of backdoor escape route to avoid dealing with an impending reality suddenly knocking at the country’s front doors.

From the beginning, the crisis was viewed as an institutional hindrance, a problem that Homeland Security was “suffering” and that Congress and immigration judges had to solve. Few narratives have made the effort to turn things around and understand the crisis from the point of view of the children involved. The political response to the crisis, therefore, has always centered on one question, which is more or less: What do we do with all these children now? Or, in blunter terms: How do we get rid of them or dissuade them from coming?

In the media and much of the official political discourse, the word “illegal” prevails over “undocumented” and the term “immigrant” over “refugee.” How would anyone who is stigmatized as an “illegal immigrant” feel “safe” and “happy”?

The MS-13 was originally a small coalition of immigrants from El Salvador who had sought exile in the U.S. during the long and ruthless Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992), in which the military-led government relentlessly massacred left-wing opposition groups. […] The primary ally of that government, we discover (and should have predicted), was the United States. The Carter administration and, perhaps more actively, the Reagan administration funded and provided military resources to the government that massacred so many and led many others to exile. Around one-fifth of the population of El Salvador fled. Many of those who sought exile ended up as political refugees in the United States—around three hundred thousand of them in Los Angeles. The whole story is an absurd, circular nightmare.

Later on, in the 1990s, anti-immigration policies and programs in the U.S. led to massive deportations of Central Americans. Among them were thousands of MS-13 members—those perhaps quite understandably unwanted in the country. But the policies backfired: gang deportations became more of a metastasis than an eradication. Now the gang has become a kind of transnational army, with more than seventy thousand members spread across the United States, Mexico, and the Northern Triangle.

[…] until all the governments involved—the American, Mexican, Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan governments, at least—acknowledge their shared accountability in the roots and causes of the children’s exodus, solutions to the crisis will be impossible.

If the child answers the questionnaire “correctly,” he or she is more likely to have a case strong enough to increase its chances of being placed with a pro bono attorney. An answer is ‘correct’ if it strengthens the child’s case and provides a potential avenue of relief. So, in the warped world of immigration, a correct answer is when, for example, a girl reveals that her father is an alcoholic who physically or sexually abused her, or when a boy reports that he received death threats or that he was beaten repeatedly by several gang members after refusing to acquiesce to recruitment at school and has the physical injuries to prove it.

If the children are very young, in addition to translating from one language to another, the interpreters have to reconfigure the questions, shift them from the language of adults to the language of children.

Because immigration court is a civil court, these child “aliens” are not entitled to the free legal counsel that American law guarantees to persons accused of crimes. In other words, that fourth sentence in the well-known Miranda rights—“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you”—does not apply to them. Therefore, volunteer organizations have stepped in to do the job.

As the Mexican government has progressively increased its hold on La Bestia, travel aboard the trains has become more and more risky and new routes have been improvised. There are now maritime routes that begin on the coasts of Chiapas, along which the migrants travel with coyotes aboard rafts and other precarious vessels. We’ve heard the many stories about migrants crossing the Mediterranean—that massive cemetery of a sea—so it’s easy to imagine what kinds of stories we’ll hear in the next few years, of migrants amid the enormous waves of the Pacific Ocean.

Between Hempstead and Tegucigalpa there is a long chain of causes and effects. Both cities can be drawn on the same map: the map of violence related to drug trafficking. This fact is ignored, however, by almost all of the official reports. The media wouldn’t put Hempstead, a city in New York, on the same plane as one in Honduras. What a scandal! Official accounts in the United States—what circulates in the newspaper or on the radio, the message from Washington, and public opinion in general—almost always locate the dividing line between “civilization” and “barbarity” just below the Río Grande.

No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact a transnational problem that includes the United States—not as a distant observer or passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated the problem.

The belief that the migration of all those children is “their” (the southern barbarians’) problem is often so deeply ingrained that “we” (the northern civilization) feel exempt from offering any solution. The devastation of the social fabric in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries is often thought of as a Central American “gang violence” problem that must be kept on the far side of the border. There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.

But not all schools are complying. For months now, Alina has been trying to find a different school for Manu. The two girls are not as vulnerable to gang coercion, she thinks, provided that they keep to themselves. But she tells me that Manu can no longer go unnoticed. For a while he was admitted to a school in Long Beach, but then they told him his English wasn’t good enough and that he needed to take language classes first. Other schools said he didn’t meet the eligibility criteria, or that he’s missing some document or another, or that there’s simply no space.

There are things that can only be understood retrospectively, when many years have passed and the story has ended. In the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds.