This Is A Refugee Crisis, Ctd

A reader testifies to the truth of that statement:

I am a leader in my Catholic parish’s decades-old sister parish relationship with a church in San Salvador. I have been visiting regularly since 2009. In these five years, the level of violence and insecurity has increased dramatically. Our parish supports their parish school and our families sponsor about 45 kids there. We measure this crisis in the impact on these kids, not on partisan hyperbole. Here are some of the concrete situations we’ve encountered:

• A teenager’s mom is killed in front of her, because the mom can’t pay extortion money to the gang. The teenager has dropped out of school because she needs to support the rest of her family.

• Half of the older boys in the program can no longer attend the weekend enrichment programs because they have to cross a newly shifting gang boundary due to a split in the local Calle 18 “chapter”. Before, they knew how to navigate between MS-13 and Calle 18. Now, who knows? They stay in their one-room shacks in sweltering heat as adolescence passes them by.

• Kids from Calle 18 are sent to a neighborhood controlled by MS-13 on a mission to beat up someone (doesn’t matter who really). They choose a beloved social worker who is one of the few responsible father figures in the neighborhood.

• A young nun gives presentations on human trafficking and the reality of immigration. She tells adolescents that there is a really high risk of rape. They tell her, “I’ve already been raped by (my father; the police; the gangs). What do I have to lose?” She tells them about dying of thirst in the desert. They tell her about death in their neighborhood because of lack of clean water.

The boys and girls on the border are children fleeing for their lives. They are not economic migrants.