Thread: El Salvador struggles to accommodate deported nationals

Bleeding Heart Alert! Another immigration sob story:

Posted on Thu, Aug. 30, 2007
El Salvador struggles to accommodate deported nationals
BY NANCY SAN MARTIN
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/ ... 19766.html


While Washington grapples with the divisive issue of immigration reform, the Salvadoran government faces its own problems: accommodating those returned home on almost daily deportation flights, and watching out for children trying to start out on the risky journey north.

The 8-year-old boy with close-cropped hair and a missing front tooth stepped off the yellow bus, looking lost and clutching a coloring book against his chest.
A two-hour drive away, at the airport in the capital city of San Salvador, a man with shaggy hair and pursed lips walked off an unmarked white plane with his hands cuffed behind his back. Behind him came another 77 convicts -- most returning to their homeland for the first time in years.

The boy and the convicts had something in common: They were deportees, returned home on separate days last month.

The convicts had been booted out of the United States, and the boy, Marcos Antonio Arévalo, was the youngest of a dozen or so children -- mostly teenagers -- who had failed in their attempts to reach it.

Authorities said Marcos Antonio was caught in Mexico traveling with an unidentified adult who likely was paid to escort him to the U.S. border to join parents already settled somewhere in the United States.

While Washington grapples with the divisive issue of immigration reform, the Salvadoran government faces its own problems: accommodating those returned home on almost daily deportation flights, and watching out for children trying to start out on the risky journey north.

The overall number of deportees returned from the United States to El Salvador -- both convicts and undocumented migrants -- has almost doubled, from 7,239 in 2005 to 14,395 last year. The number includes 711 children during the two-year period.

Most of the children are caught traveling without parents or legal guardians.

Salvadoran law prohibits minors from leaving the country without a passport and notarized consent of their parents. But many are sent to join relatives in the United States with coyotes -- smugglers who escort and help sneak them across the U.S.-Mexico border for fees ranging from $3,500 to $6,500.

''When the children are that young, generally they are traveling with a relative or with a good coyote,'' said Carlos Isaac Escalón Alvarez, immigration chief in La Hachadura, on El Salvador's southwestern border with Guatemala.

Marcos Antonio had been on the road for two days before authorities in Mexico picked him up and made arrangements to return him home, authorities told The Miami Herald. The other children also had been interdicted in Mexico.

Marcos' grandfather, José Alberto Arévalo, met the bus to pick up his grandson. He declined to discuss the boy's travels, other than to say his parents had hoped to have him join them in the United States.

Large Salvadoran communities started settling in places such as California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and Washington, D.C. in the 1980s, during the bloody civil war in El Salvador. .

The overwhelming number of repatriations doesn't involve children but ''criminal aliens,'' who completed their sentence in U.S. jails for offenses that range from drugs to murder, as well as undocumented adult migrants caught in the United States.

Improved cooperation between U.S. and Salvadoran authorities is in large part responsible for the hike in deportations, officials on both sides say.

''We have been working with El Salvador to speed up the deportation process so people aren't languishing in [U.S.] detention centers,'' said Rebecca Thompson, a spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador.

BRIGHT FUTURE

Salvadoran authorities say some of the deportees could have bright futures, especially in the construction and tourism industries.

''My administration is trying to find a way for the noncriminals to find a job,'' said Rafael Alvarez, director of the country's immigration agency. ``They have a lot of skills, experience with construction, painting, restaurants -- and they know English, too.''

More difficult to assimilate are the convicts who arrive on special flights from the United States at least once a week. Authorities say many are members of U.S.-based street gangs -- and they blame them for adding to the high number of homicides and other violent crimes in El Salvador attributed to gangs.

On a scorching Friday last month, a planeload of inmates disembarked at the airport in San Salvador.

The man with the shaggy hair, who authorities said had lived in Stuart, Fla., was arrested on a Salvadoran warrant. The charge: killing his Salvadoran wife two years ago by stabbing her 56 times.

Those deportees not facing charges are greeted at the airport by immigration officials who offer them traditional cheese-filled corn patties known as pupusas and information about laws and overall life in El Salvador as part of a program called Bienvenido a Casa -- Welcome Home.

For many, it is like returning to a foreign land.

''I left very young,'' said VÃ*ctor Manuel BenÃ*tez, 37, who said he had lived in the United States for the past 22 years. He told authorities he worked in agriculture before sneaking across the U.S.-Mexico border as a teenager.

BenÃ*tez, who told authorities he served seven months in a Fort Worth penitentiary for drug possession -- a charge he denied -- said he hoped to return to field work.

''I'm glad to be in my country -- free,'' said BenÃ*tez, who has several tattoos, from tiny teardrops etched just below his right eye to two hands in prayer on his chest and a woman's name across his stomach. Tattoos are often signs of gang membership.

''Are those gang tattoos?,'' asked a police officer typing BenÃ*tez's information into a computer.

''No, I just like tattoos,'' BenÃ*tez said.

MarÃ*a Antonia Guevara, 40, another deportee on the unmarked white plane, said she had been caught by U.S. authorities in 2001, ignored an order to appear at a deportation hearing and then was caught again in Dallas in April as she tried to obtain a U.S. passport for her daughter.

This time, Guevara said, she was jailed and agreed to be deported.

''I didn't want to stay in jail,'' said Guevara, who is married to a U.S. citizen and left two daughters in Dallas. She also has a 15-year-old son in El Salvador.

''My plan now is for my husband to petition for me,'' she said, meaning he will file a request for a U.S. visa for her. ``God willing, in a year and a half, if the paperwork goes through, I'll be back with them.''

Back in La Hachadura, members of El Salvador's small and unarmed Patrulla Migratoria were on the lookout for smugglers' vehicles or gathering places for people heading out to illegally enter the United States. Salvadoran law makes it illegal to violate another nation's migration laws.

But the 2-year-old force of about 50 officers is more focused on watching out for minors heading north without the required parental consent. Many children get past them.

STOPPED IN MEXICO

José Javier Alfaro, 28, was intercepted in Mexico with his three nephews, aged 16, 14 and 12. They were trying to get to New York to join Alfaro's sister, who left six years ago.

''I'm living with my grandfather, but I wanted to be with my mother,'' said the eldest nephew, Jorge Alberto. ``I want to see her again.''

''We are searching for happiness,'' Alfaro said. ``This country is no good. You work hard and never get ahead. Over there, I know I could do better. I'm not going to steal. I'm going to work.''

Alfaro said he would not attempt the trip again with the boys but vowed to head north again alone as soon as he could.

''With the poverty here, you can't live,'' said Alfaro, who earns $3 a day in field work that barely supports a wife and two children. ``How am I supposed to live on that?''

Thompson, the U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, said the long-term solution to illegal migration lies in improving economic conditions in El Salvador.

''People have to start believing that their future is here, in El Salvador,'' she said. ``That they have opportunities here and that going illegally to the United States is not really the answer.''

I hear sob in this story...

I like the last paragraph.

I also cracked up at the line, "No, I just like tattoos."

Thompson, the U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, said the long-term solution to illegal migration lies in improving economic conditions in El Salvador.

Precisely!
The sooner countries to our south take care of their people and rid out corruption the better off everyone will be.
If our country continues to be the release valve for their problems eventually people here will want to go down there.

Seems like these folks don't understand they have NO right to come here.

The mother of the 3 children has not seen them for 6 yrs. ?? Again they complain about deporting teenagers but don't seem to mind bringing them into the USA,a country which is foreign to them.

El Salvador struggles to accommodate deported nationals

STRUGGLING TO ACCOMODATE THEM? THEY CAME FROM THERE SO WHAT IS THE STRUGGLE?

The parents that came to America without their children, should be charged with child abandonment and charged with a felony, to leave this country for good and if they should return to be placed into the U.S. military doing the jobs that we Americans are told that we don't like to do like, looking for mines in an unmarked mine field or patrolling a village in a Hum V that has no armor. Oh, yah, what was you're SOB story again?

YA THEY COME TO AMERICA AND LEAVE CHILDREN BEHIND IN THEIR COUNTRY OF ORIGIN. THEN, WHEN IN USA, THEY HAVE MORE KIDS. IF THEY GET DEPORTED THEY LEAVE THEIR KIDS BEHIND AND SAY WE ARE TEARING FAMILIES APART. BUT THESE ARE THE SAME PEOPLE WHO LEFT KIDS BEHIND TO COME TO USA IN THE FIRST PLACE.

More difficult to assimilate are the convicts who arrive on special flights from the United States at least once a week. Authorities say many are members of U.S.-based street gangs -- and they blame them for adding to the high number of homicides and other violent crimes in El Salvador attributed to gangs.

No you bleepin' ingrate! It's the other way around! Your bleepin' scum broke into our country and added a hgh number of homicides and other violent crimes to OUR country.

Don't blame the U.S. for corrupting your people.