Week Three: The Good Fight
As I thought about this post during my third week at GAIN, I thought I would delve into the many things I learned at the human trafficking presentations I attended.
Georgia ranks among the top ten states with the highest reported cases of human trafficking. This week, I attended a meeting held by the Georgia Statewide Human Trafficking Task Force, as well as a presentation on Human Trafficking from the State Department and DOJ perspective held by KIND. Both sessions were incredibly insightful and inspiring and could fill up this entire blog post. But as my third week drew to a close, I met a face I’ll never forget.
For confidentiality purposes, I’ll change the name to Daniel and alter some details. Daniel is a young boy, barely in his teens. Bright-eyed and smiling, he looked at me confused when I asked for his signature. He had never signed anything. Now I was asking him to scribble his John Hancock on a document that would make or break his plea for asylum.
Daniel is among thousands of youth who have escaped what has come to be known as the Northern Triangle of Central America. Comprised of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, these regions are plagued by the violent control held by the “maras,” the MS-13 and Barrio 18 regional gangs, as well as the “pandillas,” the local street gangs. Gang members stalk and threaten young boys like Daniel into joining. Young girls aren’t left out, though. They're forced into sexual relationships with the gang members. Refusal to join leads to death – for the child and often for their family.
Daniel told me his story as if he was telling me about any other day in his life, which I guess he was. The maras waited outside of school for him everyday. He dropped out, but that only made the threats worse and brought violence. On his journey to escape to the U.S., he was kidnapped multiple times by the Mexican cartels, held until a family member could send ransom money. When he finally made it to the U.S., he was held in a boys detention center for months before he was released to his father.
Daniel’s story is not unique. In fact, it’s so common that stories like his are unlikely to qualify for asylum, especially down here. The number of unaccompanied children entering the U.S. is currently at an unprecedented level, increasing from 131.7% just from October 2018 to May 2019.
The headlines on young migrants fleeing Central America have become repetitive over the past several years. As always, digging into research reveals missing parts of the narrative, and Daniel made me want to dig into all the research. Known as the “surge,” the U.S. began to see a dramatic rise in the number of unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle beginning in 2011. These three countries made up 43% of the asylum application the United States received in 2017, with 49,500 claims from Salvadorians, 35,300 from Guatemalans and 28,800 from Hondurans, according to the UNHCR. The highest percentage of children migrating to the U.S. also came in from these countries.
It’s easy to get bogged down in the numbers and forget about the individuals they represent. It’s also often forgotten that the deadly gang violence in these areas is not new. The North Central American regions have struggled to recover since their civil wars in the '80s – a period of turmoil that was inescapable after the U.S. deported thousands of MS-13 members to El Salvador.
Despite the fact that only a fraction of unaccompanied minors apprehended at the border have confirmed gang ties – and that a federal judge last year struck down a policy by former AG Sessions to reject asylum claims based on fear of gang violence – Daniel’s case will more likely than not be rejected. In the three weeks here, I’d already spoken to many asylum seekers but this was the first child I’d encountered. I could come out of this week feeling jaded but I remember Daniel's smile and his giggle when I asked him a question he didn't understand. I remember his father thanking us profusely even though we explained to him the slim odds in his son’s favor. And, I remember that some fights are worth fighting even if you won’t win.