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More than 57,000 unaccompanied children have crossed America’s southern border this year, fleeing violence in search of a new home. This is the story of one of them.
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<span>BY ALEX ALTMAN/NEW ORLEANS | TIME AUG 7, 2014</span></div>
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<p>Michael looks scared. He’s been sitting in the corner of the auditorium for an hour, his shoulders hunched, eyes down, right arm occasionally hooking around his father’s. Slender and good looking, he wears the uniform of a global 13-year-old: aqua polo, blue jeans, Nikes. When it’s time to speak, he walks to the front of a room crammed with more than 100 Americans. On a hot August night, they have come to a Catholic school in New Orleans’ Mid-City district to learn about their new neighbors and hear a few give testimony.</p>
<p>“I’m here because my uncle was threatened by the gangs,” Michael begins, speaking through an interpreter. Then he stops and wipes his eyes as the tears start to flow.</p>
<p>Michael’s journey to New Orleans began last August, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. It is of one of the world’s most violent cities, a place where 13-year-old boys are recruiting targets for the maras, the murderous thugs who control the streets, traffic drugs and collect “war taxes” from businesses and families. Visiting a relative after dark in the city’s forbidding barrios often requires the use of ritualistic signals—a honk of the car’s horn, or a flash of its headlights—lest you be confused for a turf-encroaching rival and shot.</p>
<p>Michael’s parents fled this menacing scene nearly a decade ago, leaving him and his older sister in the care of an uncle while they sought greater economic opportunity. When bullets pierced the walls of his uncle’s house last summer, Michael and his sister Yerlin, 17, set out for the U.S. in the back of a truck. Over the course of several grueling weeks, they evaded military checkpoints in Guatemala, floated into Mexico aboard a raft, then endured a clattering five-day bus ride north toward the U.S. border. They swam across the Rio Grande into South Texas and scampered up the riverbank, where they joined fellow unaccompanied children and a mother shepherding two kids. Together they trudged hours through the desert, until they came upon a U.S. Border Patrol agent. He drove them to a detention center.</p>
<p>“Welcome to the icebox,” the agent said.</p>
<p>From there, Michael and Yerlin—whose last name is being withheld because they are undocumented minors—were sent to a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children in El Paso. There Michael came down with appendicitis, says Jolene Elberth of the Congress of Day Laborers, who works with the family as part of her role at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. Michael’s mother, an undocumented immigrant, couldn’t get on a plane to join him for fear of being detained and deported. Once the surgery was done, Michael and Yerlin finally flew to New Orleans, arriving more than a month after leaving San Pedro Sula.</p>
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<img alt="Michael's Journey - Immigration in New Orleans" data-loaded="true" src="http://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/widmer_immigration_lowres-39.jpg?w=760" /><figcaption class="image-caption"></figcaption></figure>
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<p>As harrowing as it sounds, their story is hardly unique. More than 57,000 children have crossed the southern border unaccompanied this year, the vast majority from the war-torn Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The situation at the southwest border has become, according to President Obama, a “humanitarian crisis.”</p>
<p>Like all crises, the public perception has been warped by the attendant politics. The news is awash in stories about local communities rising up to reject the children or the histrionics of elected officials posturing for some future job. These controversies are just a tiny piece of a complex picture. Unaccompanied children detained in the U.S. are cycled relatively quickly through the balky U.S. immigration system. From there they scatter into cities and towns throughout the country. In nearly all cases, they are reunited with family members already here as they await a court’s determination of whether they can stay.</p>
<p>During the first six months of 2014, according to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, unaccompanied children have been placed in all 50 states, from the lone kid shipped to Montana to the more than 3,000 sent to Texas, California and Florida. They are everywhere, often thousands of miles from besieged border towns. Some kids will melt away into the shadows. But the majority will become at least temporary fixtures in their adopted hometowns—heading to school, playing sports, wending their way through the legal system as they seek asylum.</p>
<p>According to a government tally through July 7, so far 1,071 children have been relocated to Louisiana this year. The vast majority of them have come to New Orleans and its surrounding suburbs. This is the story of one of those families and the people who have welcomed them.</p>
<p><img alt="" class="size-special_medium_2x wp-image-3043780" data-loaded="true" height="35" src="https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/half10pxrule.png?w=760&h=35" width="760" /></p>
<p><span><span>STRAINS AND STRESSES</span></span></p>
<p>Michael’s parents, Ivan and Maria, arrived in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As Hondurans, the Crescent City was a natural destination. South Louisiana has had a strong Central American community since around the turn of the 20th century, dating back to this port city’s role as a hub in the banana trade. The Honduran contingent swelled further after Hurricane Mitch battered Honduras in 1998, devastating some 70% of the nation’s transportation infrastructure and a similar fraction of its agricultural economy.</p>
<p>“After Katrina, they welcomed us to help reconstruct the city. They needed us,” says Ivan. He found work as a mechanic; Maria got jobs cleaning houses. By the time the unaccompanied children began arriving in ever greater numbers, there were already perhaps 50,000 undocumented immigrants in the area, local advocates estimate.</p>
<p>“We have this whole hidden Latino community,” says Salvador Longoria, the president of the board of directors at Puentes New Orleans, a nonprofit that promotes civic engagement for Latinos. “Everybody is ready to receive these children.”</p>
<p>That includes a robust network of faith-based charities, who are working to educate churchgoers about the geopolitics driving the immigrant surge, helping their new neighbors acquire legal representation and easing their transition into the community. “I think a lot of people are confused about the issues, and the legal processes involved and the principles at stake,” says Susan Weishar, a migration specialist at Loyola University’s Jesuit Social Research Institute, who organized a “teach-in” on the crisis for locals.</p>
</div>
<p><a href="http://time.com/michaels-journey/">MORE>></a></p>
<span>BY ALEX ALTMAN/NEW ORLEANS | TIME AUG 7, 2014</span></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<p>Michael looks scared. He’s been sitting in the corner of the auditorium for an hour, his shoulders hunched, eyes down, right arm occasionally hooking around his father’s. Slender and good looking, he wears the uniform of a global 13-year-old: aqua polo, blue jeans, Nikes. When it’s time to speak, he walks to the front of a room crammed with more than 100 Americans. On a hot August night, they have come to a Catholic school in New Orleans’ Mid-City district to learn about their new neighbors and hear a few give testimony.</p>
<p>“I’m here because my uncle was threatened by the gangs,” Michael begins, speaking through an interpreter. Then he stops and wipes his eyes as the tears start to flow.</p>
<p>Michael’s journey to New Orleans began last August, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. It is of one of the world’s most violent cities, a place where 13-year-old boys are recruiting targets for the maras, the murderous thugs who control the streets, traffic drugs and collect “war taxes” from businesses and families. Visiting a relative after dark in the city’s forbidding barrios often requires the use of ritualistic signals—a honk of the car’s horn, or a flash of its headlights—lest you be confused for a turf-encroaching rival and shot.</p>
<p>Michael’s parents fled this menacing scene nearly a decade ago, leaving him and his older sister in the care of an uncle while they sought greater economic opportunity. When bullets pierced the walls of his uncle’s house last summer, Michael and his sister Yerlin, 17, set out for the U.S. in the back of a truck. Over the course of several grueling weeks, they evaded military checkpoints in Guatemala, floated into Mexico aboard a raft, then endured a clattering five-day bus ride north toward the U.S. border. They swam across the Rio Grande into South Texas and scampered up the riverbank, where they joined fellow unaccompanied children and a mother shepherding two kids. Together they trudged hours through the desert, until they came upon a U.S. Border Patrol agent. He drove them to a detention center.</p>
<p>“Welcome to the icebox,” the agent said.</p>
<p>From there, Michael and Yerlin—whose last name is being withheld because they are undocumented minors—were sent to a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children in El Paso. There Michael came down with appendicitis, says Jolene Elberth of the Congress of Day Laborers, who works with the family as part of her role at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. Michael’s mother, an undocumented immigrant, couldn’t get on a plane to join him for fear of being detained and deported. Once the surgery was done, Michael and Yerlin finally flew to New Orleans, arriving more than a month after leaving San Pedro Sula.</p>
<div class="image-wrapper special-medium-2x special-medium alignleft">
<figure class="inline-special_medium_2x">
<img alt="Michael's Journey - Immigration in New Orleans" data-loaded="true" src="http://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/widmer_immigration_lowres-39.jpg?w=760" /><figcaption class="image-caption"></figcaption></figure>
</div>
<p>As harrowing as it sounds, their story is hardly unique. More than 57,000 children have crossed the southern border unaccompanied this year, the vast majority from the war-torn Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The situation at the southwest border has become, according to President Obama, a “humanitarian crisis.”</p>
<p>Like all crises, the public perception has been warped by the attendant politics. The news is awash in stories about local communities rising up to reject the children or the histrionics of elected officials posturing for some future job. These controversies are just a tiny piece of a complex picture. Unaccompanied children detained in the U.S. are cycled relatively quickly through the balky U.S. immigration system. From there they scatter into cities and towns throughout the country. In nearly all cases, they are reunited with family members already here as they await a court’s determination of whether they can stay.</p>
<p>During the first six months of 2014, according to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, unaccompanied children have been placed in all 50 states, from the lone kid shipped to Montana to the more than 3,000 sent to Texas, California and Florida. They are everywhere, often thousands of miles from besieged border towns. Some kids will melt away into the shadows. But the majority will become at least temporary fixtures in their adopted hometowns—heading to school, playing sports, wending their way through the legal system as they seek asylum.</p>
<p>According to a government tally through July 7, so far 1,071 children have been relocated to Louisiana this year. The vast majority of them have come to New Orleans and its surrounding suburbs. This is the story of one of those families and the people who have welcomed them.</p>
<p><img alt="" class="size-special_medium_2x wp-image-3043780" data-loaded="true" height="35" src="https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/half10pxrule.png?w=760&h=35" width="760" /></p>
<p><span><span>STRAINS AND STRESSES</span></span></p>
<p>Michael’s parents, Ivan and Maria, arrived in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As Hondurans, the Crescent City was a natural destination. South Louisiana has had a strong Central American community since around the turn of the 20th century, dating back to this port city’s role as a hub in the banana trade. The Honduran contingent swelled further after Hurricane Mitch battered Honduras in 1998, devastating some 70% of the nation’s transportation infrastructure and a similar fraction of its agricultural economy.</p>
<p>“After Katrina, they welcomed us to help reconstruct the city. They needed us,” says Ivan. He found work as a mechanic; Maria got jobs cleaning houses. By the time the unaccompanied children began arriving in ever greater numbers, there were already perhaps 50,000 undocumented immigrants in the area, local advocates estimate.</p>
<p>“We have this whole hidden Latino community,” says Salvador Longoria, the president of the board of directors at Puentes New Orleans, a nonprofit that promotes civic engagement for Latinos. “Everybody is ready to receive these children.”</p>
<p>That includes a robust network of faith-based charities, who are working to educate churchgoers about the geopolitics driving the immigrant surge, helping their new neighbors acquire legal representation and easing their transition into the community. “I think a lot of people are confused about the issues, and the legal processes involved and the principles at stake,” says Susan Weishar, a migration specialist at Loyola University’s Jesuit Social Research Institute, who organized a “teach-in” on the crisis for locals.</p>
</div>
<p><a href="http://time.com/michaels-journey/">MORE>></a></p>