Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

by Valeria Luiselli

It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.

By law, the maximum time a person can remain in the icebox is seventy-two hours, but children are often kept for longer, subject not only to the inhumane conditions and frigid temperatures but also to verbal and physical mistreatment.

Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.

Rapes: eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north.

Deaths and disappearances: though it’s impossible to establish an actual number, some sources estimate that, since 2006, around 120,000 migrants have disappeared in their transit through Mexico.

The building’s labyrinthine architecture is, in a way, a replica of the U.S. immigration system. And, as in any labyrinth, some find their way out and some don’t. Those who don’t might remain there forever, invisible specters who go up and down elevators and wander the hallways, imprisoned in circular nightmares.

Most children came from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—the three countries that make up the Northern Triangle—and practically all of them were fleeing gang violence. Although the flow of youths migrating alone to the United States from these territories had been observed for years, there had been a considerable and sudden increase in the numbers. From October 2013 to the moment the crisis was declared in June 2014, the total number of child migrants detained at the border approached 80,000.

(Later, in the summer of 2015, it became known that between April 2014 and August 2015, more than 102,000 unaccompanied children had been detained at the border.)

Not the emergency at the border, detonated with the surge of arrivals, but the quieter, more bureaucratic, legal emergency created by the federal government’s decision to create a priority juvenile docket in response to that surge.

In real and practical terms, what the creation of that priority docket meant was that the cases involving unaccompanied minors from Central America were grouped together and moved to the top of the list of pending cases in immigration court. Being moved to the top of a list, in this context, was the least desirable thing—at least from the point of view of the children involved. Basically, the priority juvenile docket implied that deportation proceedings against them were accelerated by 94 percent, and that both they and the organizations that normally provided legal representation now had much less time to build a defense.

Immigrant Children Advocates’ Relief Effort (ICARE). There were seven organizations in that coalition—the Legal Aid Society, The Door, Catholic Charities, Central American Legal Assistance, Make the Road New York, Safe Passage, and Kids in Need of Defense—

Many children, though they should be given an equal right to due process, are being deported before they can even find lawyers who will take on their cases. What child can find a lawyer in twenty-one days?

She didn’t say, but in some way, we understood that the words scribbled on the board were also a kind of scaffolding holding all of those broken stories together.

But the children usually respond yes to those three questions.

Hispanics who grew up in L.A. gang culture. The MS-13 was originally a small coalition of immigrants from El Salvador who had sought exile in the U.S. during the long and ruthless Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), in which the military-led government relentlessly massacred left-wing opposition groups. We looked more deeply into the war and the struggle between the left-wing guerilla group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front and the military government. The primary ally of that government, we discover (and should have predicted), was the United States. The Carter administration and, perhaps more actively, the Reagan administration funded and provided military resources to the government that massacred so many and led many others to exile. Around one-fifth of the population of El Salvador fled.

But this much is clear: until all the governments involved—the American, Mexican, Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan governments, at least—acknowledge their shared accountability in the roots and causes of the children’s exodus, solutions to the crisis will be impossible.

Victims of certain crimes committed in the United States, as immigration law has it, may be eligible for a form of relief known as the U visa. If granted, the U visa is a path to lawful permanent residency for both the victims and their families (i.e., the highly coveted family green card). Eligibility, however, hinges on the victim’s successful cooperation with the government in the prosecution of the crime in question.

The states with the highest number of children released to sponsors since the crisis was declared are Texas (over 10,000 children), California (almost 9,000 children), and New York (over 8,000 children).

The exception is: being Mexican. Mexican children detained by Border Patrol can be deported back immediately. They don’t have to be given temporary shelter, are not allowed to attempt contact with parents or relatives in the U.S., and are certainly not granted a right to a formal hearing in court where they could defend themselves, legally, against a deportation order.

A Border Patrol officer can base a decision to deport a Mexican child on any evidence—no matter how substantial or insubstantial—and is not required to document a rationale behind it. The procedure by which Mexican children are deported in this way is called “voluntary return.” And, as unbelievable as it may seem, voluntary return is the most common verdict. Other than a handful of lucky exceptions, all Mexican children are deported under this procedure. This—irrational, if not completely absurd—practice is legally backed by an amendment to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by President G. W. Bush in 2008. The amendment states that children from countries that share borders with the U.S. can be deported without formal immigration proceedings.

An immigration judge, assisted by a translator, informs the ones who do show up that they have the right to an attorney, but at no expense to the U.S. government. In other words, it is the children’s responsibility to find and pay for a lawyer, or find a free lawyer, who can help them defend their case against the U.S. government attorney seeking to deport them.

And what is the charge? Fundamentally, that the child came to the United States without lawful permission and is therefore “removable.” Admitting this charge alone leads to deportation unless the child’s attorney can find those potential avenues of relief that form a defense against it. The admission of guilt, then, is a kind of door that the law holds half open. It is the only way for the accused to begin defending themselves against a categorical sentence and seek legal avenues to immigration relief.

The main problem with asylum—the reason lawyers often consider it a secondary choice—is that if it’s granted, the children can never return to their home country, where they fear being persecuted, without jeopardizing their immigration status in the United States.

When children don’t have enough battle wounds to show, they may not have any way to successfully defend their cases and will most likely be “removed” back to their home country, often without a trial.

to. It can be confusing and bewildering, and I find myself not knowing where translation ends and interpretation starts.

What I needed to hear, though I didn’t want to hear it, was that they had been doing hard labor, labor that put their safety and integrity in danger; that they were being exploited, abused, punished, maybe threatened with death by gangs. If their answers didn’t align with what the law considers reason enough for the right to protection, the only possible ending to their story was going to be a deportation order.

According to a comprehensive report issued in October 2015 by the Migration Policy Institute, the majority of children who find a lawyer do appear in court and are granted some form of relief. All the others are deported, either in absentia or in person. What is needed in particular, and urgently, are lawyers who are willing to work pro bono.

Telling stories doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t reassemble broken lives. But perhaps it is a way of understanding the unthinkable. If a story haunts us, we keep telling it to ourselves, replaying it in silence while we shower, while we walk alone down streets, or in our moments of insomnia.

In 2016, for example, Mexico registered the largest number of applications for asylum in recent history. That same year saw a radical increase in deportation rates of Central Americans. This of course begs the question of whether migrants’ right to due process is being honored.

Under Programa Frontera Sur, the focus of border control for the Central American exodus is shifting from the Río Grande on the U.S.-Mexico border to the Suchiate and Usumacinta Rivers on the Mexico-Guatemala border.

No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact a trans national problem that includes the United States—not as a distant observer or passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem.

There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.

In the summer of 2015 the New York State Education Department held a compliance review and in the end determined that no public school was allowed to ask students for immigration documents of any type.

She insisted that the most important thing was to know how to transform emotional capital—the rage, sadness, and frustration produced by certain social circumstances—into political capital.