Tell Me How It Ends

The children who cross Mexico and arrive at the U.S. border are not “​​​​​​immigrants,”​​​​​​ not “​​​​​​illegals,”​​​​​​ not merely “​​​​​​undocumented minors.”​​​​​​ Those children are refugees of a war, and, as such, they should all have the right to asylum. But not all of them have it.

There are things that can only be understood retrospectively, when many years have passed and the story has ended. In the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it
develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds.

Hundreds of thousands of kids have made the journey, tens of thousands have made it to the border, thousands to cities like Hempstead. Why did you come to the United States? we ask. They might ask a similar question: Why did we risk our lives to come to this country? Why did they come when, as if in some circular nightmare, they arrive at new schools, in their new neighborhoods, and find there the very things they were running from?

To refer to the situation as a hemispheric war would be a step forward because it would oblige us to rethink the very language surrounding the problem and, in doing so, imagine potential

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. A handful of nonprofit organizations are responsible for all the work being done to help undocumented child migrants, and what they have accomplished is impressive. But they can provide only patchwork support, and cannot cover all the gaps

In short: barbarians who deserve subhuman treatment

answer is “correct” if it strengthens the child’s case and provides a potential avenue of relief. So, in the warped world of immigration, a correct answer is when, for example, a girl reveals that her father is an alcoholic who physically or sexually abused her, or when a boy reports that he received death threats or that he was beaten repeatedly by several gang members after refusing to acquiesce to recruitment at school and has the physical injuries to prove it

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

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. That is, if a child comes from either Mexico or Canada, he or she is immediately “deportable”—a “removable alien.” This amendment was Bush’s last gift to American immigration law in his vast legacy of chingaderas, in urban Mexican slang, or nasty-shitty policies, in approximate English translation.

younger who traveled in the arms of slightly older siblings or cousins, have shown up in court. The ones who leave are usually the oldest children and the teenagers, following the adult relatives who went before