RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Her father had traveled through Mexico with her by bus for 22 days and returned home after leaving her in the hands of a young man who was going to help her cross the Rio Grande and reach Texas, she told an Associated Press reporter.
“He told me to go on alone and to take care of myself,” the little girl recounted.
It is unclear what happened to the man who was to take care of her, but the girl joined a group heading for the border and went with them. They walked on a Sunday night through the Rio Grande Valley. Temperatures dropped to about 10 degrees Celsius (55 Fahrenheit) and the girl was wearing a yellow jacket with train patterns on it and a black face shield to protect her from COVID-19.
AP does not identify the girl following a practice whereby it does not use the names of minors without parental consent. It was not possible to get the identity of the father.
But her odyssey illustrates the lengths to which parents will go to get their children to the United States, even if it means leaving them alone on the most dangerous part of the journey.
These desperate decisions pose a serious dilemma for Joe Biden’s administration, which is trying to restore an orderly asylum system: In its efforts to act more humanely to protect minors traveling alone, it risks putting more children in dangerous situations.
Nearly 9,500 minors arrived at the border in February, up 60% from the previous month. The government is scrambling for new facilities to house them and to speed up processes to place them with relatives living in the United States. The municipality of San Diego said Monday it would use its convention center to house migrant children for an average of 30 to 35 days.
Adults traveling alone are almost always deported, while families are sometimes sent back to Mexico and others are allowed to remain in the country to apply for asylum.
The girl was able to reach the United States. Another Honduran migrant, Fernanda Solis, 25, said she found her crying on a dirt road north of the Rio Grande after midnight, as a helicopter flew overhead and border agents spoke to the migrants over a loudspeaker.
Solis tried to comfort the little girl, who was cold, hungry and thirsty. She told her they would walk together and turn themselves in to the Border Patrol agents, then ask for asylum.
The girl gained confidence as they walked along a route often used by Central American migrants. She answered questions with ease. She said she will be eight years old next month, that she should be in the third grade, but was unable to complete the second grade because of the pandemic.
She was marching resolutely toward a country where she knows no one, only a relative who lives in South Carolina.
“She’s a very brave little girl,” Solis said.
The little girl commented that the father did not have enough money to cross the border with her.
“He lost his job,” she said.
Solis said the girl told her that the father had recently tried to cross the border with her, but they were expelled and sent to Reynosa, Mexico, based on special powers invoked by the Donald Trump administration during the pandemic. Biden has not ruled out those powers.
“The girl told me they tried to cross together, but they were sent back. This time he sent her alone to turn herself in” to authorities, Solis said.
A federal judge suspended removals of unaccompanied minors in November. By then, the Trump administration had removed at least 8,800 minors. A three-judge appeals court appointed by Trump ruled in January that the removals could resume, but Biden decided to release the minors to relatives living in the United States, with appointments to appear in immigration court.
The Honduran girl was turned over to Customs and Border Protection. The agency did not respond to requests for information about what happened to her.
Her story became very popular at the border. On Sunday, a Salvadoran man approached a reporter and asked if his 13-year-old daughter could stay in the United States if she crossed the border alone.
“Parents say, ‘We can’t cross. We have to be realistic. But if we send the child to the bridge and they cross alone, they’ll have to take them in,'” said Jennifer Harbury, a Texas human rights activist.
Source: AP/EFE