On Saturday, President Obama said that the surge of immigrant children entering the U.S. illegally this summer had changed the politics surrounding the issue of immigration, and led him to put off a pledge to use executive action that could shield millions of people from deportation, angering parts of the Latino community.
Although the number of minors caught alone crossing the Mexican border has been declining since the high-water mark this past June, that surge led to even more partisan fighting about the issue, with Republicans blasting the idea that Obama would take any executive action on the issue.
Journalist Sonia Nazario says that the administration has handled the influx of thousands of immigrant Central American children "poorly." She'll talk about that and a lot more when she visits Eckerd College later this week.
Nazario is the award winning author of 2006's Enrique's Journey, which tells the story of a Honduran boy looking for his mother, 11 years after she left her starving family to find work in the U.S. Originally written as a series of stories in the L.A. Times in 2003 that ultimately captured the Pulitzer Prize, it's been adapted into eight languages, been chosen as a common read at 71 universities across the country, and a new version is now being adapted for young readers.
But Nazario wanted to talk about the current situation in Central America when talking to CL on Monday afternoon. "They're fleeing violence," she says she learned when she visited the Honduran neighborhood where Enrique was from earlier this year. "They're fleeing for their lives... When I interviewed the kids — 11-year-old children who had been threatened multiple times from the narcos who now control their neighborhoods."
Nazario returned to Honduras after a ten-year absence to write an op-ed for the New York Times Sunday Review section called "A refugee crisis, not an immigration crisis." In addition to being a journalist, she's also an advocate, working for various nonprofit groups such as Kids in Need of Defense, which is working to recruit pro bono attorneys to represent Central American youth now going before immigration judges.
"If you're a murderer in this country you're entitled to a public defender," she says. "But if you're an immigrant child, you're not entitled to any legal representation. Most kids can't afford an attorney, so what you see in between 70-90 percent of these kids now are going to court expected to present complex immigration cases with no attorneys to help them."
Nazario says the Obama administration has been tougher than any previous White House on border security, but that narrative was disrupted with the onslaught of Central American children fleeing violence who willingly were apprehended after making the journey into Texas this summer.
She says that the U.S. has put a lot of energy and expense into stopping drugs coming up through the Carribbean, so the narcos are now moving drugs up through Honduras and El Salvador, and they're fighting for control over turf and ruthlessly recruiting children to be their "foot soldiers."
She says that while the debate overall about whether comprehensive immigration reform is intense, and has many sides — pro and con — the mass migration of children into the U.S. to escape the violence is real and should be separated from that bigger discussion.
"If you're a seven-year-old, or a nine-year-old, or a 12-year-old who is fleeing for your life, that is a refugee. If your government can't protect you, that's what a refugee means. And we demand that other governments take in refugees, then we have to give these kids a full, fair immigration hearing."
Nazario says the money flushing through Honduras from drugs from the cartels is greater than the GDP of the entire country, and it can't be effectively shut down by law enforcement because the drug runners can buy off the police and members of the judiciary and the government. "You have a country where more than 90 percent of the murders are not investigated. Much less prosecuted. You can literally get away with murder in Honduras." She says the law enforcement emphasis has been on a "strong fisted" approach, vs. the type of community policing that has become the way of local law enforcement agencies in the U.S. that has proven to be more successful.
You can Nazario talk about all this Thursday evening, Sept. 11 at 7:30 p.m. at Fox Hall on the Eckerd College campus in St. Petersburg.
