Mexico opens shelter for deported children
Mexico opens shelter for deported children
Nearly 2,000 released in Tijuana without parents in 2010
Por: Omar Millán 11 Febrero 2011 @ 12:15 pm
Tijuana.- Without a parent to hold their hands or calm the butterflies in their stomachs, 1,858 children were deported to this city in the last 13 months, federal authorities said.
They had traveled to the United States mainly to reunite with their parents or, secondly, to find work. But in the course of pursuing their dream many had endured ordeals they won’t easily forget.
Experts from various public and private agencies painted a profile of deported minors during the opening Thursday of a shelter for children expelled from the United States without a parent or guardian, the first of its type in Mexico. The shelter, a yellow house with blue trim located in the city’s east side, was inaugurated by Mexico’s First Lady, Margarita Zavala.
Antonio Valladolid, from the National Institute of Immigration, said that 186,000 people were deported to Baja California last year, 133,000 of them to Tijuana, which receives the most deported migrants in Mexico. Of that number, 3,649 were children up to 17 years old, 1,594 of them traveling without a parent or guardian.
In January alone, he added, 11,000 Mexicans were deported to Tijuana, 264 of them children who arrived alone.
More than half of the minors had crossed alone into the United States or with other minors, said Mexico’s Consul in San Diego, Remedios Gómez Arnau. Three-fourths of them were boys, more than half had studied at least through middle school and 16 percent had attended high school. They came from practically the entire country: 85 percent from Mexico’s interior and 15 per cent from border states.
Since its opening in 1997, the consulate’s unit at the San Ysidro port of entry has processed 47,385 Mexican minors deported without a parent or guardian, she said.
To the First Lady, who heads Mexico’s family welfare agency known as Desarrollo Integral Familiar, the story of deported children is not reduced to a relative turning them over to a smuggler to be crossed into the United States.
It’s more complicated than that, she said. It involves children raised by their grandparents after their children left for the United States. The grandparents are then pressured to send the children north to be reunited with their parents. They are contacted by someone who promises to deliver the youngsters to their parents north of the border.
“What can the grandparents do? The parents tell them to send their kids no matter what, and the child grows up with the idea that they will immigrate because their parents and uncles have also done so,â€
