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Border experiences surge in child smuggling
BY BRITTNEY BOOTH
The Monitor

REYNOSA — July 23, 2006 — Juana de Miguel Pasquel left her parents’ home in late April, headed to Arkansas, where an uncle promised her work.

The petite 12-year-old from the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, near the border of Belize, didn’t think much of her journey.

That is, until eight days after it began, when it ended somewhere in McAllen and she was suddenly abandoned by her smuggler.


"The driver left me alone in the car,” she said in Spanish during a recent stay at a children’s shelter in Reynosa, where she awaited her return home.

To many Mexican children like Juana, who are making their way north to find work or meet their family members, the Rio Grande is merely a river to pass.

“Nada mas,” Juana said.

But the highly polarized immigration debate on this side of Rio Grande has, in recent months, prompted a surge in children and teens illegally smuggled across the border.

It’s a particularly delicate situation for U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, who reported nearly 100 cases of child smuggling at the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge alone, between November and March.

“I would say the numbers (of children being smuggled) have increased,” said local Customs spokesman Felix Garza.

Smuggled minors are turned over to the Mexican immigration agency and the Mexican Consulate Office, which handles the repatriation process. Most are from the interior of Tamaulipas, the Mexican state bordering Hidalgo County, or the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Guerrero or Michoacan and San Luis Potosi, said Sandra Mendoza, spokeswoman for the Mexican Consulate’s office in McAllen.

In the first three months of 2006, the Mexican consulate’s office saw 464 cases of Mexican minors detained at the port of entry or inside the United States, in either Hidalgo, Starr or Brooks counties. The number reflects more than half of the 850 detained during the entire year of 2005, Mendoza said.

“It’s a little high,” she said.

Agents typically find an adult driver who claims the children in their car as their own and who can usually produce documents, such as an authentic birth certificate. But while the age and the sex on the birth certificate may match the child, it’s up to Customs agents to detect whether the child is who the adult says they are.

Guided by their law enforcement training, agents question the child to decide whether to refer the car for secondary questioning.

“It does require a lot of skill and focus,” Garza said. “We only have so many seconds to make quick decisions.”

Often, the smuggler is a relative of the children, bringing them over as “a favor,” Garza said. The children’s parents often have already illegally crossed, and the children are coming to meet them. Older teens come over to find work or to go to school here.

Rarely do smugglers hide children.

Most of the time, they pretend “to be one big happy family,” Garza said.

The adults responsible for smuggling the children are arrested and charged with federal smuggling charges.

After Juana, the young teen from Quintana Roo, was caught, she was turned over to the Desarollo Integral de Familia. The Mexican federal agency is comparable to the Department of Health and Human Services and is in charge of returning children caught illegally crossing the border to their homes.

Juana spent two weeks at the agency’s Centro de Atención a Menores Migrantes y Repatriados in Reynosa, a shelter for youth migrating through Mexico or who have been caught in the United States and returned to Mexico. From there, she was returned to her home state and by late May was back at home with her parents.

The shelter’s numbers echo the influx seen by U.S. and Mexican agencies.

In April and May, the center handled more than 200 cases of Mexican children either caught trying to illegally cross alone or with smugglers, while 823 children were repatriated to the center in 2005, said the center’s director, Fernando Javier Lopez Garcia.

And while Juana was not successful in her first attempt to cross, she said she plans to try again because she wants to see what the United States is like.

“I went to work for a few months,” said Juana, not even aware of the work she would be doing. “I was going to come back to my parents.”




Posted on Jul 23, 06 | 12:01 am