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PHOTOS BY PHIL HUBER—BLACK STAR
Exiles from war and poverty: Brothers on a bus in Texas with Border Patrol agent (left)
Plight of the‘Border Orphans’
Young illegal aliens arrive in growing numbers
In his 17 years, Francisco has seen little but horror and poverty. After Sandinis-ta soldiers killed Francisco’s father, older brother, grandfather and uncle in Nicaragua 11 years ago, his mother sent the boy to Honduras to live with family friends. He later went back to his homeland to find his mother, but she had disappeared. Francisco became a child of the streets, scrounging for food and sleeping in alleys and under railroad trestles. "I have been a vagabond all my life,” he says. Last year Francisco led Central America; he now lives in a shelter for illegal juvenile aliens in Mission, Texas. A disturbed young man who keeps a scrapbook with photographs of assault weapons and the war dead from back home, Francisco wants to stay in the United States. "I can’t go back,” he says. "I don’t want the same thing that happened to my family to happen to me.”
"Border orphans,” mostly from Central America, have been arriving in the United States by the thousands over the past year. In California alone, 30 juveniles are detained daily, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimates that for every youngster who’s caught, two slip by.
One Texas INS office now processes papers for more than 20CL childrei^evgj^jnontl^ a dramatic jump from an average of 32 a year ago. Like adults, juveniles are allowed to stay if they have relatives in the United States, can find an employer
to sponsor them if they’re old enough to work or can prove that their lives are in danger in their native countries. As many as 90 percent of all illegal aliens can’t meet those criteria and are eventually deported. Duke Austin, an INS spokesman in Washington, says, "The law makes no distinction in illegal status, whether you’re 1 or 101.” But he says the border orphans "present a unique problem” and admits that judges find it "extremely difficult” to deport smaller children.
Like Francisco, many young aliens are true orphans, but others are fleeing conscription or looking for work. Nearly 90 percent of the detainees are teenage boys.
Immigration authorities believe many are avoiding military service in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras. In some countries, both government and opposition forces reportedly now draft boys as young as 14. Dodging the draft is usually not grounds for political asylum in the United States, and many of the young men are eventually sent back home. Authorities may make exceptions in cases where conscription tactics have been extreme: one boy from El Salvador claims a paramilitary group threatened to kill him if he didn’t sign on. An even uglier reality of war has driven some youngsters into exile. After watching his parents and three sisters shot down in a village square last spring, one Salvadoran teenager walked north to Texas along the railroad tracks.
Family reunions: Other youths head for the United States to improve their lives economically. Ruth, 16, a Honduran refugee in a shelter in Los Fresnos, Texas, wants to find a job. "I will work anywhere,” she says. If she persuades an American sponsor to hire her, she plans to send for Jesus, her 16-month-old baby now living with his grandmother. Following another familiar pattern, a few youngsters make the hard trek to join family members who have already made homes in the United States. "Usually the father comes up first to get established,” says the Rev. Bill Sanchez, a priest who works with juvenile detainees in Los Lunas, N.M. "Then [he] sends for the mother and smaller kids. The last part of reuniting the family is the arrival of the older kids.” On occasion, however, the older children arrive only to be deported with their families who have been denied asylum by the courts.
The journey to the border is hazardous. Making their way to the Rio Grande, many
Hazardous journeys, uncertain futures: Texas detainees at play, showing friendship at a shelter