Where will they go next? And why, why did they come to the United States?
“Why did you come to the United States?” I ask children in immigration court.
Their answers vary, but they often point to a single pull factor: reunification with a parent or another close relative who migrated to the U.S. years earlier. Other times, the answers point to push factors—the unthinkable circumstances the children are fleeing: extreme violence, persecution and coercion by gangs, mental and physical abuse, forced labor, neglect, abandonment. It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.
Then comes question number two in the intake questionnaire: “When did you enter the United States?” Most children don’t know the exact date. They smile and say “last year” or “a few months ago” or simply “I don’t know.” They’ve fled their towns and cities; they’ve walked and swum and hidden and run and mounted freight trains and trucks. They’ve turned themselves in to Border Patrol officers. They’ve come all this way looking for—for what, exactly? The questionnaire doesn’t make these other inquiries. But it does ask for precise details: “When did you enter the United States?”
As we drive deeper into the country, following the enormous map I take from the glove box and study from time to time, the summer heat becomes drier, the light thinner and whiter, the roads more solitary. We start hunting down any available information about the undocumented children and the situation at the border. We collect local newspapers, which pile on the floor of our car, in front of my copilot seat. We do constant, quick online searches and tune in to the radio every time we can catch a signal.
More questions, speculations, and opinions flood media coverage of the crisis: some sources elaborate lucid and complex conjectures on the origin and possible causes of the sudden surge of arrivals of unaccompanied minors, others denounce the inhumane conditions and systematic maltreatment the children must endure in detention facilities near the border, and a few others endorse the spontaneous civilian protests against them.
A caption in a web publication explains an unsettling photograph of men and women waving flags, banners, and rifles in the air: “Protesters, some exercising their open-carry rights, assemble outside of the Wolverine Center in Vassar [Michigan] that would house illegal juveniles to show their dismay for the situation.” In another photograph that we find on the web, an elderly couple holds signs saying “Illegal Is a Crime” and “Return to Senders.” They are sitting on beach chairs, wearing sunglasses. A caption explains, “Thelma and Don Christie (C) of Tucson demonstrate against the arrival of undocumented immigrants in Oracle, Arizona. July 15, 2014.” I zoom in on their faces and wonder. What passed through the minds of Thelma and Don Christie when they prepared their protest signs? Did they pencil in “protest against illegal immigrants” on their calendars, right next to “mass” and just before “bingo”? What were they thinking when they put their beach chairs inside their trunk? And what did they talk about as they drove the forty miles or so north, toward the protest in Oracle?
In varying degrees, some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts! They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen—these menacing, coffee-colored boys and girls, with their obsidian hair and slant eyes. They will fall from the skies, on our cars, on our green lawns, on our heads, on our schools, on our Sundays. They will make a racket, they will bring their chaos, their sickness, their dirt, their brownness. They will cloud the pretty views, they will fill the future with bad omens, they will fill our tongues with barbarisms. And if they are allowed to stay here they will—eventually—reproduce!
We wonder if the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color: of better, purer breeds and nationalities. Would they be treated more like people? More like children? We read the papers, listen to the radio, see photographs, and wonder.
In a diner near Roswell, New Mexico, we overhear a conversation between a waitress and a customer. As she refills his coffee, she tells him that hundreds of migrant kids will be put on private planes—rumored to have been funded by a patriotic millionaire—and deported that same day back to Honduras, or Mexico, or somewhere. The planes full of “alien” children will leave from an airport not far from the famous UFO museum, the one our children have been set on visiting. The term “alien,” which only a few weeks ago made us laugh and speculate, which we had been passing around the car as an inside family joke, is suddenly shown to us under a bleaker light. It’s strange how concepts can erode so easily, how words we once used lightly can alchemize abruptly into something toxic.
The next day, driving out of Roswell, we look for news on what happened with those deportees. We find no details of the exact circumstances under which they were deported, or how many there were, and if it’s true that a local millionaire financed their removal. We do, however, come across these lines in a Reuters report that read like the beginning of a cruel, absurdist story by Mikhail Bulgakov or Daniil Kharms: “Looking happy, the deported children exited the airport on an overcast and sweltering afternoon. One by one, they filed into a bus, playing with balloons they had been given.” We dwell for a while on the adjective “happy” and the strangely meticulous description of the local weather in San Pedro Sula, Honduras: “an overcast and sweltering afternoon.” But what we really cannot stop reproducing, somewhere in the dark back of our minds, is the uncanny image of the children holding those balloons.
In our long daily drives, to fill in the empty hours, we sometimes tell our children stories about the old American Southwest, back when it used to be part of Mexico. I tell them about Saint Patrick’s Battalion, the group of Irish Catholic soldiers who joined the U.S. Army as cannon fodder during the Mexican-American War, but later changed sides to fight along with the Mexicans. I tell them about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed after that war, in which Mexico lost half its territory to the United States. Their father tells them about President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, approved by Congress in 1830, and explains how it brutally exiled Native Americans to reservations. He tells them about Geronimo, Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, and the other Chiricahua Apaches: the last inhabitants of a continent to surrender to the white-eyes, after years of battle against both the U.S. Bluecoats and the Mexican Army. Those last Chiricahua resisted for many more years after the Indian Removal Act was passed. They finally surrendered in 1886 and were “removed” to the San Carlos Reservation—in southern Arizona, toward which we are now driving. It’s curious, or perhaps just sinister, that the word “removal” is still used to refer to the deportation of “illegal” immigrants—those bronzed barbarians who threaten the white peace and superior values of the “Land of the Free.”
When we run out of stories to tell our children, we fall silent and look out at the unbroken line of the highway, perhaps trying to put together the many pieces of the story—the unimaginable story—unfolding just outside the small and protected world of our rented car. Though all of it resists a rational explanation, we talk it over and consider its many angles. We try to answer our own children’s questions about the situation as best we can. But we don’t do very well. How do you explain any of this to your own children?
The third and fourth questions on the intake questionnaire are ones that our children, too, ask many times, though in their own words: “With whom did you travel to this country?” and “Did you travel with anyone you knew?” All children travel with a paid coyote. Some of them travel also with siblings, cousins, and friends.
Sometimes, when our children fall asleep again, I look back at them, or hear them breathe, and wonder if they would survive in the hands of coyotes and what would happen to them if they were deposited at the U.S. border, left either on their own or in the custody of Border Patrol officers. Were they to find themselves alone, crossing borders and countries, would my own children survive?
The fifth and sixth questions are: “What countries did you pass through?” and “How did you travel here?” To the first one, almost everyone immediately answers “Mexico,” and some also list Guatemala, El Salvador,