Paola Quiñones, a Honduran migrant, has become an advocate for Central American migrants in Mexico who suffer brutal conditions in their passage through the country. She is part of a group of migrants in Mexico who have taken the struggle for “Free Transit” and dignity for migrants into their own hands, based on lived experience.
Susana (name changed to protect her identity) will have try again to make the journey to the United States with her son Daniel, 16. Both left everything they had in El Salvador to escape because a gang threatened to kill the boy for refusing to be a gang member.
Officials at the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry do not have accurate data on the number of children who are traveling to the United States illegally at the hands of smugglers. The Vice Minister for Salvadorans Abroad, Liduvina Magarín, recently visited 12 sites that function as shelters, detention centers, and migrant processing centers located in the southern U.S. border. In a single day, these places received 310 Salvadoran children. Given the traffic and movement of people in recent months, it is speculated that the daily number of children passing through that border is between 500 and 600 Salvadoran children who have been sent with coyotes to the United States.
There’s been a blitz of stories over the past couple of weeks on child migrants arriving on the U.S.’s southern border. It’s important that these children do not remain invisible. But most of these mainstream press stories are telling half-truths about child victims, while muddling or downright manipulating the question of who and what is responsible.
What was planned as an 80-mile protest march in southern Mexico became a mass demonstration that traversed Mexico from south to north as hundreds of migrants demanded their rights and raised international awareness.
Increasingly, children are found among the thousands of Central American migrants traversing Mexico in hopes of making it into the United States. Although shelters take them in, current immigration policy and practices are not equipped to protect their rights.
As supply chains are integrated, families are fractured. Governments herald the economic integration while dismissing as irrelevant the human impact. One industry – poultry production – demonstrates the social costs of “free trade”.
As immigrant communities and supporters of common-sense and justice-driven immigration policy reform, we are inspired by a commitment to respect and dignity into our national debate about immigrant communities and immigration policy reform. But we also recognize a moral imperative to bring to denounce aggressive enforcement practices that have devastated nearly 2 million immigrant households.
Migrant groups have slammed the bill approved in the Senate and vowed to keep organizing for migrant rights and fair reform.
A recent report analyzing the deaths of undocumented border crossers along the Arizona-Mexico border finds that the death rate has soared.
