Littlest Immigrants, Left in Hands of Smugglers

Monday, November 3, 2003

By Ginger Thompson

New York Times Writer

Rigoberto Centeno had agreed to pay $10,000 to a smuggler to deliver his son Emmanuel, 11, and his 6-year-old granddaughter, María Ivania, to his home near Washington, where he has lived for most of the last 15 years. But near Monterrey, Mexico, authorities seized the children and a coyote from a commercial bus.

They spent five weeks in a Mexican shelter before being sent home. Mr. Centeno returned to El Salvador to receive them because he feared authorities there would not turn them over to anyone else.

But he was not swayed by the government campaign. Speaking defiantly to reporters, he said his only regret was that the children did not make it to the United States. He said depictions of smugglers as ruthless criminals were overblown.

He and his wife "saw other people, our neighbors hiring coyotes for their children," he said. "So we thought, why not us? We want the same things."

His main concern was to hold on to his American job, as a supervisor at an office cleaning company. "If I lose that," he said, "then the entire family loses."

He embraced the bewildered children. "They are probably going to be scared for a little while," he acknowledged. But he vowed to return alone to Washington and send for them soon, again with a coyote.

DOUGLAS, Ariz. -- NYT
They were barely old enough to cross a street by themselves, much less a border. But there they were, alone on a hot August evening at a United States immigration checkpoint, surrounded by law enforcement officers wearing badges and guns. Eight-year-old José Cruz Velázquez held the hand of his brother Sergio, who was 6.

The Mexican boys had been seized from a smuggler hired by their parents living without legal papers in Pennsylvania. They were two of a growing number of children traveling without families who have been snared in the net that American and Mexican agents cast to stop illegal immigrants from crossing the border.

Authorities attribute the trend to aggressive American law enforcement operations during the past decade that have effectively sealed long sections of the 2,000-mile border. The blockade was further reinforced after the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

The tightened security has made it much harder for illegal immigrants to move back and forth across the border, disrupting long-established migration patterns.

Immigrants who lack American documents have been forced to cross through remote desert. Smugglers who lead them, called coyotes, have tripled their fees in the last decade, experts said.

As a result, parents living in the United States illegally find increasingly that they can no longer afford the growing risks and expense of returning home to retrieve their children. They face a harsh choice: either they allow others to raise their children far away, or they hire strangers to smuggle their children into the United States.

"If my children stay in El Salvador, I will definitely lose them because of the distance that separates us," said Rigoberto Centeno, a Salvadoran immigrant who lives in the Washington suburbs and who recently hired a smuggler to help reunite his family. "If they come with a coyote to the United States, there is a chance that I will lose them in the desert.

"But there is also a very good chance that they will make it across. If we want to be with our children, there is no other way."

American officials warn that immigrant parents are leaving themselves and their children vulnerable to smugglers' abuses.

"These are not Robin Hoods who are interested in helping families," said Joseph Greene, deputy assistant director for smuggling and public safety at United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "They are cold-blooded capitalists. The smugglers have seen children as the next important exploitable population."

For generations, illegal immigrants from Latin America worked seasonally in the United States, returning home for part of each year. Others who settled more permanently north of the border made regular trips to visit loved ones back home.

Now military-style Border Patrol operations — complete with steel walls, helicopters, infrared cameras and motion detectors — have practically shut down the western stretch of the border near San Diego and the eastern region around El Paso. The scorching desert here, between Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora, has become the main gateway for illegal immigrants. An average of one immigrant a day died last summer trying to cross illegally in this area — a record number.

Despite the dangers, more and younger children are being detained during attempts to cross. This year, through the end of September, Mexican consular authorities had repatriated more than 9,800 unaccompanied Mexican minors under the age of 17 who were caught crossing illegally, according to Juan Miguel Gutiérrez Tinoco, director general of protection and consular affairs at the Mexican Foreign Ministry. In all of last year, Mexico repatriated about 9,900 unaccompanied minors.

The number of unaccompanied children under 13 who were repatriated rose from 1,300 in 2002 to more than 1,500 at the end of September.
(More of this 5-page story: NYTimes.com / International)
2003 © The New York Times Company.

Dan