The Children Are Watching
“I have the right to be protected by
adults…..” So asserts the United Nations
Convention of the Child, a convention signed by 196 nations and every member of
the United Nations except the United States of America.
Those 196 official ratifications are not mere
statements of agreement in principle, or even in sentiment. They commit the signatory nations to act on behalf of children: to change or create laws and develop practices
that will provide all children with the protections
they need to grow and thrive, to be safe, to be educated, to be healthy. To become active parts of their families and
communities and civic life. To develop
their fullest capacities.
So what is it like to be a child who comes to
a country that has not officially acknowledged the rights of the child? What is it like to make a desperate,
dangerous trip to get away from wars, from being kidnapped like your cousin or
raped like your sister? To keep from being captured and turned into a soldier
when you should be safe in your home or learning new things at school?
Valeria Luiselli knows what it’s like: she asks the children. She listens to their stories. Her book Tell Me How It Ends introduces us to the very vulnerable children who come
here fleeing poverty and violence, hoping for a safe and peaceful life. What they find – that Luiselli hears first-hand – is not the warm embrace of a caring nation, but cold, impersonal
questions asked by strangers (don’t our parents tell us not to talk to
strangers and not to talk about our family with people we don’t know?) in a
stark office in a big building in a strange city. The people who ask the questions don’t speak
the child’s language. That is where Luiselli comes in. A noted writer in Mexico, her home country,
she now lives in the US. While awaiting her own green card, she learns from her
lawyer that translators are needed for “processing” children in immigration
court. She translates the 40 seemingly innocuous questions and the children's answers on which so much depends.
Each child is questioned separated from
parents or other family members and without a lawyer: “Why did you come to the United States?” and
“Did anything happen to you on your trip to the US that scared you or hurt
you?” Many of the children rode “La
Bestia,” on top of the train from Central America through Mexico. Many have been kidnapped or tortured, the
majority of girls and women raped, and these are the ones who escaped death,
death that may have claimed members of their families along the way. “Do you like where you are living now?” What does such a question mean to a refugee
child – in comparison with what former, maybe peaceful time – or the perils of
the journey?
Some questions are tricky: answering “yes, my parents have been the
victim of a crime after coming to the US" could be dangerous, with “no, it
wasn’t reported to the police” seeming to ignore US law or “yes, the police
were called,” which like “yes, I have relatives in the US,” may expose parents without
legal immigration status to investigation and possible deportation.
As Luiselli recounts the stories of the
children to her own family, her daughter is caught up in one particular story
and asks her mom, “tell me how it ends.”
Today Luiselli would have to tell her that the current president and his attorney general who seems to hate all people who are not (in his estimation)
sufficiently “white,” how it ends for many children is dire: even potential immediate deportation without a hearing. She
says that a single Border Patrol agent can personally assess whether a child is being
“trafficked” or is at risk of being trafficked upon return to their home country, or
has a “credible fear” – and make the decision to deport a child without even having to
document the decision – or the deportation.
That standard, arbitrary practice harbingers
today’s even more cruel headlines: of refugee and migrant children being
separated from their parents even when the families present themselves at
the border seeking asylum. Luiselli
documents the inanely impersonal, uncaring questions that loom as barriers in
Immigration Court interrogations of very young children in a strange land. We can’t
yet know “how it ends” for these children, but in reading her book we
can better understand the institutional cruelty that makes a lie of our myth of
accepting “the huddled masses yearning to be free.” And those 40 questions the children struggle
to answer – or to even understand – presage the greater cruelty of the current
policies that risk “disappearing” children who come here to be safe, to exercise
that right of the child to be protected by adults.
What can we do for children who come to us as migrants? Buy Luiseli’s book. Send it to your member of
Congress. Vote this November for
candidates who will stop the official ways we harm children who come fleeing
danger. And contribute to one of these organizations that is working to assure
our youngest refugees have the protection of the law:
To share your thoughts on ways we can provide
a safe welcome to children migrants, click on the “comments” pencil.
