Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

by Valeria Luiselli

from Spanish to English. But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear.

problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.

reunification with a parent or another close relative who migrated to the U.S. years earlier. Other times, the answers point to push factors—the unthinkable circumstances the children are fleeing: extreme violence, prosecution and coercion by gangs, mental and physical abuse, forced labor, neglect, abandonment. It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration

And if they are allowed to stay here they will—eventually—reproduce!

We wonder if the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color: of better, purer breeds and nationalities. Would they be treated more like

Free.” When we run out of stories to tell our children, we fall silent and look out at the unbroken line of the highway, perhaps trying to put together the many pieces of the story—the unimaginable story—unfolding just outside the small and protected world of our rented car. Though

We try to answer our own children’s questions about the situation as best we can. But we don’t do very well. How do you explain any of this to your own children?

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.

Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken. And

Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.

Before we hung up, I asked if there was a need for translators or interpreters in court, even if they weren’t lawyers, and she said of course there was. I still had questions as we hung up, but not the right words to articulate them at that moment: What was the priority juvenile docket? Who was defending these children, and who was accusing them? And of what crime, exactly?

The priority juvenile docket, in sum, was the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children. Ethically, that answer was more than questionable. In legal terms, it was a kind of backdoor escape route to avoid dealing with an impending reality suddenly knocking at the country’s front doors.

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.

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

The subtext of this is somewhat cynical and the terms of the barter a little unequal: We’ll give you a visa for the “substantial mental and physical abuse” that you may have suffered as a result of a crime committed against you . . . but. Before we do, you have to agree to assisting law enforcement and government officials in the investigation and prosecution of the crime.

The next questions open a window into how the migration of children is reorganizing and redefining the traditional family structure.

But in many answers, it can be inferred that “the people with whom you lived” are precisely the reason the child was driven out of his or her home and community in the first place.

finally, question number twenty-two addresses the very nucleus of a family unit: “Did you stay in touch with your parents?” Most children give the same answer: No. No, they say, they did not keep in touch and have no idea where their parents are. Others didn’t keep in touch for years but then were, suddenly, living with them again: familial reunification of absolute strangers.

Mexican children detained by Border Patrol can be deported back immediately.

If a Border Patrol officer, upon detaining and screening a Mexican child, determines that this child (1) is not a victim of a severe form of trafficking in persons, (2) is not at risk of trafficking upon return, (3) does not have a “credible fear” of prosecution, and (4) is able to make an independent decision about returning, then the officer is entitled to deport the child.

“voluntary return.”

Often, my daughter asks me: So, how does the story of those children end? I don’t know how it ends yet, I usually say.

We go back to question one, and the mother responds for the girls, filling holes, explaining things, and also telling her own version of the story.

That’s it? my daughter asks. That’s it, I tell her. That’s how it ends? Yes, that’s how it ends. But of course it doesn’t end there. That’s just where it begins, with a court summons: a first Notice to Appear.

Once children receive a Notice to Appear, they have to present themselves in immigration court.

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.”

The most common forms of immigration relief are asylum and special immigrant juvenile (SIJ) status.

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.

But we cannot make up the answers in their favor, nor can we lead the children to tell us what is best for their cases, as much as we would like to. It can be confusing and bewildering, and I find myself not knowing where translation ends and interpretation starts.

If the children are very young, in addition to translating from one language to another, the interpreters have to reconfigure the questions, shift them from the language of adults to the language of children. When I interviewed the girls with the dresses, for example, I had to break many of the intake questions up into simpler, shorter phrasings, until I was finally able to find a bridge to communicate with them. Question twenty-two, for example—“Did you stay in touch with your parents”—went through various iterations:

Because immigration court is a civil court, these child “aliens” are not entitled to the free legal counsel that American law guarantees to persons accused of crimes. In other words, that fourth sentence in the well-known Miranda rights—“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you”—does not apply to them. Therefore, volunteer organizations have stepped in to do the job. Either pro bono or at very low cost, nonprofit organizations find attorneys to represent “alien” children.

The story that obsesses me is the first one I had to translate.

Mexicans are far too lax and self-indulgent when it comes to evaluating our own country’s immigration policies, especially where Central Americans are concerned.

the State Department has paid the Mexican government tens of millions of dollars to filter the migration of Central Americans. In other words, following the old tradition of Latin America–U.S. governmental relations, the Mexican government is getting paid to do the dirty work.

Manu says he’ll have some of everything if it’s free. I translate: Just a cookie please, thanks, that’s very kind of you.

He looks down at his clasped hands now and again as he talks. Hempstead High School, he tells us, is a hub for MS-13 and Barrio 18. I go cold at hearing this statement,

Another question read, “Where are the child migrants coming from?” The answer: “More than three-quarters of the children are from mostly poor and violent towns in three countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.” The italics are mine, of course, but they underscore the less-than-subtle bias in the portrait of the children: children caught while crossing illegally, laws that permit their deportation, children who come from the poor and violent towns. In short: barbarians who deserve subhuman treatment.

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

It would surely be a step forward for our governments to officially acknowledge the hemispheric dimensions of the problem, acknowledge the connection between such phenomena as the drug wars, gangs in Central America and the United States, the trafficking of arms from the United States, the consumption of drugs, and the massive migration of children from the Northern Triangle

No one, or almost no one, from producers to consumers, is willing to accept their role in the great theater of devastation of these children’s lives.