La Jornada: Elizabeth Velasco C.
Translated by Courtney Webster
Every year the percentage of minors who travel unaccompanied to cross the United States border increases: in 2010, Customs and Border Protection detained 29,624 minors, of whom 59% were traveling alone. In 2009, 40,398 minors were apprehended, of which 43% were unaccompanied.
Most, more than 15 thousand minors, are Mexican (82% and 88% for each year), and they are at risk of becoming victims of sex and labor trafficking, or of suffering physical harm including death from traveling hidden in buses or on trains, or even crossing the border on foot.
In the majority of cases, minors are recruited by criminal gangs and serve as guides for illegal immigrants or as drug "mules".
There are minors who have attempted to cross the border three or more times, and upon being detained and sent back to Mexico, they once again can become “trapped” by organized crime; some of them remain indebted due to the increased costs of crossing the border, as they have paid from $1,000 to $2,500.
This was raised in the investigative report: "Children at the Border: The Screening, Protection, and Repatriation of Unaccompanied Mexican Minors" by Maru Cortázar and Betsy Cavendish, which won a first place award from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF): “A look at childhood and adolescence in Mexico”.
The study was undertaken in order to determine to what extent the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) had improved the screening and protection of Mexican children at the United States border to repatriate them. It indicated that the majority of minors travel unaccompanied for several reasons: to reunite with their parents or a family member who works in the United States; because they are looking for better living conditions; or to escape unbearable circumstances at home, such as sexual or other kinds of abuse.
The majority of these young people or children have very little education, and they lack any means of protection. It is the same for adults, men and women, who are generally attracted by employers and “sex tourists” in the United States, who subjugate them to sexual slavery or forced labor with false expectations of steady jobs or future work.
Given increasing control of cross-border migration by Mexican drug cartels, this stands out because human trafficking has become an important source of business, and the majority of minors are easy prey and valuable for organized crime.
Many of these minors who have arrived at Mexico's northern border have already been victims of human trafficking or have been manipulated by criminal groups in Mexico: robbed or assaulted, sexually violated by individuals or criminal groups, or even by Mexican officials.
In accordance with researchers, two years after it was enacted, the TVPRA law continues not to have reached its goal of protecting minors. This law was put into force to change the “revolving door” policy in which US authorities return any unaccompanied minor with little or no evaluation of the dangers that they would face upon return. This policy continues to be in force and the attention has been centered on children from Central America and other places, despite the fact that the majority are Mexican. The study makes several recommendations to the United States and Mexican authorities. Spanish original