We Built the Wall Read online

  The judge gives Maria and her children a date in six months to appear in court, with a lawyer.

  It’s 9:20 in the morning when Mario Saavedra walks into the office building at 3550 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. Wearing dress pants and a crisp shirt, both neatly ironed, and newly shined black shoes, he goes up to the third floor and walks down the hallway until he finds a door displaying the national shield of Honduras. He has an appointment to speak with a functionary at the consulate at 9:30.

  An hour passes, and he has still not been seen by anyone. Mario tries to be patient, but he is growing desperate. Two weeks ago he got a call from U.S. immigration authorities. They told him that his daughter Fernanda, fourteen, had been detained while crossing the Texas border into the United States, undocumented. He was not given a number that he could call, or told where his daughter was.

  A few days later, his daughter called him. She was in a shelter, but she did not know where. She sobbed until the call was cut off. Calls from shelters are limited to three minutes, and the number is blocked. Mario was left staring at the phone in his hand, not knowing what to do.

  Fernanda is one of the 52,000 minors detained in 2014 and managed by an improvised system thrown together to address the large number of cases that year. It’s June 2014, and President Barack Obama has just declared the migrant crisis a state of emergency, calling for an inter-agency response involving immigration authorities, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and the Department of Justice. The government opened three shelters for 120 days at military bases in California, Oklahoma, and Texas, which housed 3,000 unaccompanied minors. The president also requested a budget of $1.5 billion in emergency funds to pay for the minors’ shelter, food, and transportation, on top of the $868 million already appropriated by Congress for fiscal year 2014. The expensive process of identifying and evaluating each minor, contacting their families, and verifying that the family member is qualified to receive them can take weeks. For parents waiting to be reunited with their children, this bureaucratic process is a nightmare.

  Mario lives in Bakersfield, two hours north of Los Angeles. This city has been his home for eleven years, since he arrived from Sonaguera, Honduras. He has worked in the fields and construction and currently installs wood floors.

  Mario was twenty-five when he and his wife left Honduras in 2003. His mother remained in Honduras with his daughter Fernanda, who was three years old at the time. After arriving in the United States, Mario and his wife separated, but he continued providing his daughter with financial and emotional support.

  “I had no idea she was going to come here,” he says, anguished, as he waits in the consulate. He clutches a large manila envelope stuffed with documents. During their weekly phone calls, his daughter had never mentioned what she was planning to do. “How could I let her do that when I know how dangerous it is?” he says. “But my mother is seventy years old, and my daughter didn’t listen to her anymore.”

  An hour and a half later, Interim Consul José María Tsai meets with Mario. Tsai has been in charge of the consul for five months, and he is unsure what to do. Sitting in front of a giant Honduran flag, with a neutral expression, he explains to Mario that the Department of Homeland Security has opened a hotline just for parents. If he calls the number, they will give him information, take his phone number, and try to get him in touch with his daughter. There is nothing more Tsai can do.

  As soon as young people are transferred to the shelters, members of civil organizations that support migrants assess their health and try to provide legal assistance. This stage is crucial for the child’s future. It is common for the minors to lie to the social workers or lawyers interviewing them at the shelters. The “coyotes” who were hired to guide them north often coach them to give false answers. Only after several days are the interviewers able to break the ice and identify signs of abuse, or indications that the child has been threatened by criminal gangs or abandoned. With proper legal representation, these children might gain legal status to stay in the United States through an application for asylum or a humanitarian visa.

  At the same time, a social worker tries to make contact with a family member in the United States. Since most of these children travel with false documents or with no documents at all, their identities need to be confirmed; then the closest family member needs to be identified as the child’s sponsor. This can be a delicate process. Many of the children are reunited with family members they have not seen in years. Joyce Capelle, president of Crittenton, a shelter in Southern California, tells me that some children have asked not to be sent away with fathers who have physically abused them. In that case, the shelter interrupts the process to perform detailed interviews with often far-flung relatives. “The last thing we want is to release the child to someone who could be a trafficker or will abuse him,” Capelle explains.

  According to the Department of Homeland Security, unaccompanied minors spend thirty-five days on average in these temporary shelters. But some children spend months in places like Crittenton before it is deemed safe to release them. The problem is that while the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has increased, resources for managing them have begun to diminish. In 2014 and 2015, many organizations serving migrants began soliciting donations online in order to continue doing their work.

  As soon as he left the Honduran Consulate, Mario called the DHS hotline for parents. He was told that Fernanda had been transferred from Texas to a shelter on a military base in Oklahoma. After demonstrating that he was Fernanda’s father and that he was financially able to support her, he was told he would be reunited with his daughter within a week. Then, he and Fernanda would receive a notice to appear in immigration court. With good legal representation, they may be able to prove that Fernanda was fleeing a life-threatening situation and apply for asylum or a humanitarian visa. Legal maneuvers may buy them a few years of time so Fernanda can stay in the country. And perhaps something better will come along: immigration or legal reform that will mean they won’t have to be separated again.

  13

  “We don’t want you here!”

  “We don’t want you! Go home!” A man’s enraged scream rises above the crowd brandishing signs around three white buses. The buses, blazoned with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) logo, are transporting 140 undocumented immigrants, mostly children and adolescents. The immigrants were detained in Texas; now they are being transferred for processing at facilities run by immigration authorities in Murrieta, California. They never make it.

  The crowd of around 200 people brandishing signs with anti-immigrant slogans block the buses, forcing them to change their route and head toward San Diego. The protesters celebrate this victory in an ongoing effort to make sure that the over 50,000 children who have arrived in the United States that year will be returned to their home countries. These demonstrators do not understand that if their efforts succeed, the lives of most of these children will be in danger.

  The interviews in the 2014 report by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) clearly demonstrate this dark reality. Migrant children have suffered extreme poverty and violence at the hands of armed criminals, the state, and their caretakers. The report concluded that the governments of their countries of origin cannot safeguard the most basic rights of these individuals, and that the international community must therefore protect them. People fleeing from armed conflicts, serious internal disorder, massive human rights violations, generalized violence, and other forms of serious harm should be considered as candidates for legal protection.

  It is no coincidence that these children head to the United States. Although geographic proximity and family ties help determine the route of exodus, UNHCR data shows that in 2012, the United States, which has some of the most demanding asylum laws on the planet, nevertheless received over 85 percent of all asylum applications filed around the world.

  A row of American flags, motionless under the hundred-degree Ju
ly sun, welcomes visitors to Murrieta, where the stifling afternoon passes slowly. Time also seems to have come to a standstill on some of the street corners, where the antique shop, post office, small general stores, and repair shops conjure up a quintessential town of the Old West. A car pulls to a stop at an intersection, and its driver, a man with a long mustache, dark sunglasses, and a hat, gives me a perfunctory glance before going on his way.

  Murrieta is a typical small American city. Located in Southern California’s semi-desert Inland Empire region, Murrieta and its neighboring city, Temecula, lie in a valley where the arid landscape on the outskirts of the Sonora desert gives way to a green patch dotted with large shopping centers of red and orange bricks. Two major highways, Interstates 15 and 215, run alongside the city’s avenues, which are named after the founding fathers: Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Monroe. Seven of every ten residents are white, and one in four are Latino. Murrieta’s official motto is “the future of Southern California.”

  Murrieta rarely made the nightly news or appeared in the headlines before July 1, 2014, when an angry crowd gathered along the side of the road to wait for three ICE vehicles carrying migrant children detained at the border. Shouting slogans against illegal immigration, holding up signs accusing the children of carrying contagious diseases, and with occasional outbursts of uncontrollable anger and vitriol, a few dozen local residents stood across the road to block the path of the buses and force the immigration convoy to turn around. “We don’t want you, go home!” a woman overcome with hatred screamed, right in front of the face of a stunned boy inside one of the buses, peering through the window, his eyes open wide, before the buses drove away.

  “What the federal government is doing is wrong; it’s inhumane,” says Diana Serafin, one of the organizers of the Murrieta protest. “You can’t ship people from one place to another like they’re animals, not knowing if they’re diseased, without treating them, without making sure they’re okay after they crossed the border.” She hurls this accusation indignantly, her use of “ship” suggesting the movement of inanimate merchandise. Sixty-three years old and slender, with chestnut hair framing a face with small eyes and a broad smile, she talks with the energy of an impassioned twenty-something. The day we meet, a month after the incident with the buses, she is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the American flag.

  Diana got the word out about the arrival of the migrant children through her Twitter account, where she describes herself as “a Patriot defending Freedom, Liberty and the Constitution.” The information she distributed warned that the children carried scabies, tuberculosis and the ebola virus and that Islamic terrorists enter the United States through its southern border.

  “This isn’t about attacking immigrants,” Diana says. “It’s about protecting children. Our issue is about the conditions they were brought here under.” The Border Patrol facilities, she says, are like prisons: “cement beds, metal bars, a cell with a toilet right there. They were going to make them eat right next to the toilet! … The federal government is using these children politically, they don’t care about their well-being.” Without a family member to come get them, Diana says, the children would be dropped off at the nearest bus stop to fend for themselves.

  “Can you imagine what a teenager could do, desperate, not speaking English, with no money, not knowing the country?” Diana says vehemently. “Desperation can lead to terrible things. How could the government create a situation like that?”

  Diana’s Twitter bio links to her personal website, where she announces her intention to run for a seat on the Murrieta City Council and includes a list of people supporting her candidacy. These include California State Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, who founded California’s Minuteman Party; the goal of the Minuteman movement is to guard the border in order to ensure that no immigrants cross over illegally. In 2010, he courted the Tea Party vote to win the Republican party nomination and a seat in the state assembly.

  Diana identifies with Donnelly’s agenda and that of Alan Long, the young, conservative mayor of Murrieta. Long openly opposed the federal government’s decision to send migrant children to Murrieta, calling on city residents at a press conference on June 30 to contact their representatives in Congress and tell them to stop the children from coming. The violent roadside protest took place the following day. And on July 2, over 1,500 local residents attended a community meeting. Long sent a letter to President Obama on July 3, assuring him that Long’s administration had not provoked the events that had occurred between his press conference and the community meeting.

  Maria Carrillo, originally from Mexico, has lived in the United States since she was three years old and in Murrieta and Temecula for thirteen years. She asserts that Long uses the issue of migration for his own political purposes. We meet at a Starbucks a few blocks from where I spoke with Diana. She tells me that in all her years in Murrieta, she had never experienced a racist incident. Then, a few days before the roadside protest, her eighteen-year-old daughter, Carissa, encountered a confrontation between pro- and anti-immigrant activists at a Walmart. “She was really surprised by the level of verbal violence,” Maria says. “When one of the protesters saw that she was Latina, he started yelling at her. He told her to get the hell out of there, and told her to go wash his car.”

  When Maria attended the community meeting on July 2, which she thought would be focused on “doing something for the children,” her feelings of being in the minority intensified. The mayor, she says, “congratulated everyone there for what they had done the day before, for defending the city.” Attendees emphasized that the children were carrying diseases. And of all the attendees, “only three or four or us were Latinos,” she says. Since the meeting, her feelings of vulnerability have increased. “I know there are a lot of people who sympathize with the children, but they don’t say it in public because they don’t want to get attacked.”

  William Young found out about the actions to “support the Border Patrol” and keep the children from arriving through Diana Serafin’s Twitter campaign. Young is around sixty years old and married with two children. A Cardinals fan who served in the U.S. Marines for twenty-four years, he describes himself as a “conservative Christian,” not affiliated with any organization but sympathetic to the views of those demonstrating against the migrants’ arrival. “I’m not racist,” he maintains. “How could I be, since I’m African American?”

  William is upset with the media’s portrayals of the roadside protest. He maintains that the most aggressive acts were committed by outsiders, not residents of Murrieta. Those outsiders received the most media attention, William says, because they were the most scandalous—including the demonstrator who spat in the face of Lupillo Rivera, a popular singer of the genre known as “regional Mexican,” who was there to welcome the migrant children.

  The children and women who cross the border, William says, are “being exploited on several levels. They’re used by their own governments, by narcotrafficking cartels, by the coyotes, and our government.” The immigrants arriving without documentation have other ways of entering the country, he and Diana argue, as do many others who oppose the arrival of the migrant children. But they would rather take “the fast track.” “These people have come looking for options in the United States instead of staying in their countries and fighting for their governments to improve the situation,” William says. “If they come here, they should do it the right way.”

  Then I ask William if he is aware that citizens of countries including El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico cannot enter the visa lottery. If they are not sponsored by an employer, or if a family member does not petition for them, these people have no other way to come to the United States legally.

  “Is that true?” William asks, genuinely surprised. “You mean they can’t go to the consulate and apply for a visa to come here and work?”

  The former marine mulls it over, then takes up his position again.

  “See? That’s what I’m talki
ng about. Obama’s making this happen. They should talk to the governments of those countries to change the law. My issue is not with the people, I’m mad at a government that’s not doing its job.”

  At the end of our conversation, William asks me one last question.

  “And since you seem to know about this, tell me, if they’re leaving Guatemala or El Salvador, why do they come to the United States? Why don’t they stay in Mexico? Why doesn’t Mexico do anything to help them?”

  Murrieta is an hour away from San Diego, the home of Border Angels director Enrique Morones. The area is also home to a small but entrenched network of activist organizations working against illegal immigration. I had been in sporadic contact with Enrique ever since we traveled together in the Migrant Caravan along the Mexican border in 2007. When the issue of child migrants intensified, our conversations resumed.

  Enrique has two telephone numbers. One number, which he never answers, gets voicemails from anti-immigrant groups who constantly threaten and harass him. At first these calls disturbed him, but he has learned to live with it. His other number, a private one, gets calls from people seeking his organization’s help. The last time I saw him, he got a call from someone asking if he could help transport two children, ages four and nine, who had entered the country unaccompanied and were going to be reunited with their mother.

  Although his day-to-day contact with anti-immigrant groups is usually limited to voicemails, Enrique came face to face with them in Murrieta during the roadside protest. “It’s our obligation as a country” to receive these children, Enrique argues, “but Americans don’t want to hear it.”

  The Convention of the Rights of the Child maintains that the best interests of a child must be a primary consideration in all administrative and legal proceedings. But a report titled “A Treacherous Journey: Child Migrants Navigating the U.S. Immigration System” from the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings, in cooperation with the organization Kids in Need of Defense, found that the U.S. government does not use this standard in its treatment of migrant children, rarely providing assistance or counseling to minors who have been victims of human trafficking and other abuses. The report states that “some immigration judges have rejected social groups in children’s cases based on size, fearing that approving broadly defined groups will open the proverbial floodgates while not recognizing that establishing social group membership fulfills only one element of an asylum claim.” Immigration courts have refused to recognize as vulnerable social groups some of the most exposed who ask for protection, including “girls who report their rape to the police,” “youth who oppose gang activity and have reported it to the police,” and “young girls who resisted gang recruitment and witnessed gang crime,” among others.