We Built the Wall Read online

  A doctor in El Paso fitted Carlos with prosthetic limbs at no cost. To recover from the surgery, he began riding a bicycle. Two years later, with the support of MexenEx, he rode seven hundred miles in twelve days from El Paso to Austin. He wore shorts, his prosthetic legs in full view, to raise awareness of the plight of Mexicans who seek political asylum.

  As we talk about these cases, Carlos Spector grows indignant. As these Mexicans fight for their rights here and start their lives over again, he says, those back in Mexico are largely forgotten. Many U.S. judges, Cipriana points out, don’t understand that although Enrique Peña Nieto has taken over from Felipe Calderón, “and that even though some narco bosses and military officers have been arrested, that doesn’t mean things have changed locally, or that people who left can go back now.” Paying an extortionist or a kidnapper is illegal in the United States; in Mexico, it is often the only option.

  MexenEx’s greatest achievement, Carlos says, has been to create a model of cooperation between citizens in the two countries. “Here in the United States we’re ready and willing, with resources and with exiled Mexicans who are still angry, and want to do something,” he notes. “But we can’t do it alone, and Mexico can’t either—we need each other.”

  Furthermore, Carlos says, the organization’s success depends on Mexicans’ willingness to share their stories about the incredible violence in Mexico, about which most Americans are ignorant. “The only way to let people know,” he says, “is for these Mexicans to talk about it themselves.” The organization’s work is further complicated by the fact that its membership is always in flux, as Cipriana points out. “Once some people get their legal status straightened out,” she notes, “they don’t feel the need to keep on working with the organization.” Many are forced to leave El Paso to look for work; others leave “for security reasons.”

  MexenEx, Carlos says, is part of the “New Juárez” in El Paso, where the approximately 100,000 exiles from violence in Chihuahua during the Calderón administration, most of them from Juárez, have moved. “There are many categories of people who make up this new exile community,” he explains, including people with dual citizenship, permanent residency, and visas who have entered the country legally. “Now, the time has come to activate this community.”

  In addition to his work with MexenEx, Carlos hopes to change how the law is applied in relation to organized crime. Asylum petitions must be based on one of five categories, one of which is political opinion; resisting extortion, Carlos argues, should qualify as the basis for an asylum petition because it is a political act.

  “If the state is managing the extortion, if the state itself is organized crime, and you decide not to accept being extorted, and you don’t pay, you are performing an act of civil resistance, a political act. Internationally, and in U.S. jurisprudence, it is acknowledged that when the state extorts you, a political act has taken place. If the state controls crime, then the crime is happening with the support of the state. The major political challenge is to change the terms of the debate and debunk this myth of organized crime … Out of the one hundred cases of asylum I have, I can show you that in every case of repression or persecution, the state is directly or indirectly involved …

  “For me, this movement starts with Mexican communities here and there who make demands on systems and institutions … That’s where we have to start, to create a culture of insisting and forcing the government to respond to people’s concerns … We don’t have financial or political resources on a national level, but we do have our voices.”

  12

  The Never-Ending Wave

  Rosario is slender, with a dark complexion, long black hair, and an easy smile. Wearing skinny jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt, she sits in a waiting room between two men dressed in suits, busily sending text messages on their phones. Any minute now, she will be called in to one of the rooms in this building of long, white hallways and cool walls that houses Federal Immigration Court. Just fourteen years old, with no lawyer to represent her, Rosario is about to sit before a judge for the first time in her young life.

  Rosario and her brother José, fifteen, arrived in the United States a few months earlier from Sensuntepeque, El Salvador. They belong to a statistic that alarmed authorities and the general public in the summer of 2014: in the first nine months of the fiscal year beginning in October 2014, over 52,000 minors under the age of eighteen were detained along the Mexican border while trying to enter the country undocumented and unaccompanied by an adult. During the same period of the previous year, according to the Department of Homeland Security, 26,000 young people were detained. Three out of four were over the age of fourteen. These adolescents were leaving Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico to be reunited with their parents in the United States, to find work, and to escape violence.

  A report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published at the time found in interviews of hundreds of these young people that at least 58 percent had been “forcibly displaced because they faced harms that indicated a potential or actual need for international protection.” Half said they had been affected by a rise in violence in their communities perpetrated by organized crime, gangs, or the state itself. Twenty-two percent said they had been victims of physical abuse in their own homes, at the hands of the adult responsible for caring for them. Eleven percent said they had been victimized both in their own homes and in their communities. Thirty-eight percent of the children coming from Mexico said they had been the victims or potential victims of recruitment or exploitation by criminal gangs.

  These young people were candidates for political asylum or for humanitarian visas, according to international agreements and current U.S. asylum laws. But the U.S. government is not obligated to provide them with free legal counsel; therefore they must go before an immigration court judge without a lawyer representing them. It is up to the judge to explain to them their options for staying in the country.

  María is Rosario and José’s mother. She is thirty-three years old, and left her country, El Salvador, seven years ago, leaving her five children in her mother’s care. Since arriving in the United States, she has worked in the fields in California, planting and picking. She does not speak English and can barely read or write. Still, she found a way to save money and send some to El Salvador. When she had saved up $18,000, the fee a “trustworthy” coyote would charge for bringing over her two eldest children, she did not hesitate.

  “They told me it was so expensive because it was safe, and they wouldn’t suffer,” María told me, as we stood in a hallway in the courthouse. A short woman—her two children are already taller than her—her anguish shows on her face as she talks about the threats her family experienced. One night some men came to her mother’s house to demand an extortion payment. María’s mother handed over the money she had, but the men still threatened to return for more. That was when María decided to send for her children.

  “They promised me they would be comfortable, in a car, they would get here no problem,” she tells me. “But it wasn’t like that. They made them walk, and ride on the luggage rack of a bus, and in the end, look what happened, they were caught.”

  The migration of unaccompanied minors did not suddenly begin with the “surge” in 2014. This kind of migration was first reported in detail in 2002 by journalist Sonia Nazario, in a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times. Nazario wrote about Enrique, a boy traveling alone from Honduras to join his mother in the United States. The series included photos of Enrique riding on top of the freight train known as “The Beast,” which became iconic images of Central American migration. In 2006 Nazario won a Pulitzer Prize for the series; she adapted it into a book titled Enrique’s Journey, which became a best seller and was published in eight languages.

  In the last decade, hundreds of articles and books have been published about migration by adults and minors through Mexico featuring harrowing images of migrants riding on “The Beast,” even thoug
h only 18 percent of migrants traveling through Mexico take the train. Over that time, the demographics of the travelers have changed: between 2012 and 2014, the overall number of unaccompanied minors grew and the percentage of girls rose from 23 to 27 percent. The number of children younger than fourteen years old grew from 17 to 24 percent.

  When Rosario and José were detained by the authorities, María got a call. She was told that her children were being held in the immigration detention center in Los Angeles, and that she had to begin the process to have them released. According to the law, minors cannot remain in the custody of immigration authorities for more than seventy-two hours, after which they are transferred to temporary shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). On average, eight out of every ten unaccompanied minors will spend some time in one of these shelters. Some areas, especially in South Texas, were struggling to meet the seventy-two-hour requirement at the time, due to the government’s inability to process all of the minors coming in.

  After a few days, María’s children were transferred to a shelter, where they would remain until their mother could prove her identity and demonstrate that she could financially support them. María lived in a garage that had been converted into a living space. But in order to have her children live with her, the law required that she live in a home with at least one bedroom. María had to work overtime to save up enough money to put down a deposit on an apartment that met that requirement, so she could have her children released to her.

  Once María was reunited with her children, they received a notice that a process of deportation had been started, along with an order to appear before an immigration judge. With little money, no English, and no understanding of the U.S. legal system, María did not know what to do to ensure that her children would not be returned to El Salvador. All she knew was that they had to appear in court on the day and at the time indicated by the notice.

  When an official calls out her children’s names, María and her children go into the courtroom and sit down on a bench before a judge. On the wall behind her hangs an enormous seal of the United States Department of Justice. There is an interpreter with the judge. María and her children put on headphones to hear the proceedings in Spanish. Her eyes wide, María hesitates before answering the judge’s questions. At one point, she says she does not understand what is being said. The judge explains that the person sitting next to them is an attorney representing the U.S. government, which has accused them of being in the country without documentation. The judge asks if they have a lawyer. Rosario’s leg shakes nervously. José does not say a word.

  In discussions of the Central American exiles fleeing to the United States, one key factor in the equation is often omitted: that the violence in the region directly stems from its relationship with the United States. The U.S. military and Central Intelligence Agency supported and trained repressive military forces in Central America. Weapons from U.S. manufacturers wind up in the hands of criminal groups, many of which have ties to the government. Illicit drugs trafficked through Central America easily find consumers in the large U.S. market for them. The United States deports young gang members from its cities who harass and terrorize other young people back in their home countries. Their victims are forced to flee to the United States, where they are denied asylum. And the cycle repeats.

  While peace treaties signed in Central America—in Nicaragua in 1990, El Salvador in 1992, and Guatemala in 1996—were designed to improve conditions in the region, active and retired military personnel have since created their own centers of power outside of the government, fomenting organized crime. Military dependence on the United States gave way to economic dependence on foreign corporations and an unstable labor market.

  The illegal arms trade, including weapons from army arsenals which wind up in criminal hands, only exacerbates the situation. This illicit market was also “Made in the USA”: at gun shows along the border with Mexico, AK-47 assault rifles, also known as “cuernos de chivo” (goat horns), and other high-powered weapons are easy to find and purchase legally, after which they are transported by car southward, over the border.1

  It is estimated that approximately 2,000 weapons enter Mexico from the United States every day, many of which can then be traced to Guatemala. The Tepito crime cartel, headquartered in Mexico City, has at least thirty-five points of sale of weapons transported from the United States or stolen from Mexico’s secretary of national defense. Forty percent of the traced weapons introduced illegally in Mexico come from Houston, Dallas, and McAllen, Texas.2

  In public discourse, the “maras” (gangs) are portrayed as the main threat to public safety in the region, criminalizing young men and reinforcing stereotypes. These gangs absorbed the gangs that had already been operating in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, in what is called a “glocal” phenomenon: groups that comprise a network of gangs with transnational connections but operate with local autonomy. This phenomenon was fueled by massive deportations of gang members with criminal charges from the United States.

  Along with a rise in criminal gangs, large-scale migration from El Salvador to the United States surged in the 1990s even as peace treaties were being signed—although, like Mexico, El Salvador already had a long history of migration going back at least as far as the nineteenth century. Just as with most immigrants who arrive in the United States undocumented and from impoverished regions, young migrants from Central America settled in cities and towns across the country with Central American communities. Searching for a sense of belonging, some joined gangs whose members tended to be from immigrant families. Although gangs are active all over the country, they are most prevalent in New York, where the first gangs were made up of European immigrants in the late nineteenth century; Chicago, which had a dramatic surge in organized crime activity in the 1930s; and, most recently, Los Angeles.3

  Los Angeles has a large population of Salvadoran migrants and a long history of gangs, two of which have attracted particular notice recently: Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13 or MS) and Barrio 18. The former was started by Salvadoran men and women in Los Angeles who had fled the civil war and political violence in their country in the 1980s. They have a nationalist bent and incorporate symbols of Salvadoran culture into their style, in the Chicano fashion. Many members of Barrio 18 come from Mexico and other Central American countries.

  After immigration policies hardened in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, these gangs were seen as a threat to national security. As we have already seen, one consequence of stricter immigration measures has been an exponential increase in rates of detentions and deportations, compared with rates in the 1990s. In 1993, 2,117 Salvadorans were deported; ten years later, in 2003, that figure rose to 5,561, and in 2009, to over 20,000. In 2016, over 52,000 Salvadorans were deported.

  “If the right to asylum were based on some kind of moral responsibility within a historical context,” argues Mario Zúñiga, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Costa Rica and an expert in Central American migration, then the United States would be obligated to act as “an almost exclusive refuge.” Humanitarian organizations, he points out, have ignored U.S. culpability in the refugee crisis, and instead “have separated out asylum petitions from the historical context, and focused on the children, the segment of the population that can most effectively inspire compassion in the general public.”4 At the height of the migration of unaccompanied minors, in 2014, children represented only one quarter of the total number of migrants arriving from Central America. Adults flee their countries due to the same cycles of violence that children are escaping.

  “The problem is migration became something political,” Erick Midence says in a tone between reproachful and ironic. “The children are detained, they’re put into deportation proceedings because that’s the law, but they’re not deported … because that would have a political cost, and neither the president [nor] the Republicans want to pay it. They can say what they want, but in pract
ice, the kids stay here.”

  An activist for almost two decades and president of the Honduran Association of Oxnard, a small city north of Los Angeles, Erick found out about María’s case and offered to go to court with her. He is not a lawyer, but over the years he has learned how to handle deportation proceedings. In theory, Rosario and José have to go to court to listen to the charges of being in the country illegally. If they accept the charges, the judge issues an order of deportation and they are returned to El Salvador. If they do not accept the charges, they must present supporting evidence. The goal, however, is to try to buy more time in order to stay in the country for a few more years, even though they still may not win legal status. They can ask for up to two extensions. They then can appeal an unfavorable ruling, which will buy them more time. The judges know about this strategy but continue to grant extensions. Children who entered the country undocumented are still here two, three, four years later.

  Statistics from the Department of Homeland Security confirm this. In the fiscal years 2012 through 2015, over 171,000 minors under the age of eighteen were detained, but only 7,643 minors were deported.5 Those deported either signed an agreement to leave the country voluntarily or lost their cases in immigration court and decided not to appeal.

  The deportation process has become a sort of prolonged grace period because of the enormous backlog of cases pending in immigration courts. It could take two or three years to receive a final judgment in a case, with extensions, and then around three years more if an appeal is filed. During this time, the young people remain in the United States with family members. If they are fleeing danger in their home countries, that is a victory in itself. But many children are stuck in legal limbo without a qualified lawyer to ensure that they arrive in court with substantiating evidence that would allow them to legalize their status. Not surprisingly, these children and their families can be easy prey for unscrupulous lawyers who offer to evaluate their cases for huge fees, only to tell them later that there is nothing to be done.