Who Are the Migrant Children? Who Hears Their Stories?

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:

ICARE - Immigrant Children Advocates Relief Effort
KIND - Kids in Need of Defense 

To share your thoughts on ways we can provide a safe welcome to children migrants, click on the “comments” pencil.