Alone In America

Javier is 15 years old and deeply in debt to his smuggler. "I came here because I am poor and I want to buy some land for my parents" he says, rubbing his hands together nervously as he sits in the library of a detention facility for immigrant youth in California. "They are old and cannot work ... I am paying debt. It is rising every day. But what can I do? Nothing. I am here."

Two months ago, Javier and his parents promised a smuggler from their hometown in Guatemala that they would pay him $4000, with interest, if he would transport Javier to North Carolina, where the boy's brother lives. There, he planned to work for a few years to and save enough money to buy his parents a little piece of land. That dream ended in Arizona ten weeks after he left home, when Javier was arrested in an immigration raid on a house where he was staying.

Every year, thousands of youth like Javier risk their lives to come to the United States alone. Our nation's most vulnerable immigrants, when they are arrested, find themselves thrown into a confusing immigration system that simultaneously embraces and rejects the idea of child welfare, a system that treats them as something between child and adult, victim and criminal.

Across the country, the number of youth in detention is rising, and the vast majority never has access to legal representation. Many are housed in facilities hours from legal service providers, and states like Texas and Arizona have only one full-time staff attorney for the hundreds of minors detained there. There is also growing evidence that some children who have been labeled as unaccompanied in actuality have been forcibly separated from their parents by Border Patrol, a practice that has alarmed some lawmakers and calls into question whether funds are being used improperly by the two federal agencies charged with the protection of these children.

A Growing Phenomenon

In the past four years, the number of unaccompanied children taken into custody by immigration officials has increased by nearly 30 percent, from 4,600 in 2000 to 6,200 in 2004, and is expected to surpass 7,000 this year.

While the increase in apprehensions of children can partially be attributed to the new emphasis on border security and immigration enforcement after 9/11, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a federal agency charged with the care, custody and placement of unaccompanied children through its Unaccompanied Children's Services, also points to deteriorating socioeconomic conditions in the children's countries of origin. Over three quarters of the unaccompanied children arrested last year came from Central America, a region where children are often mired in a cycle of crushing poverty, violent homes, and forced conscription into street gangs.

According to the ORR, most unaccompanied youth in their custody are Central American males between the ages of 15 and 17, although children of all ages and from most regions of the world can be found in the agency's care.

Alex is from Honduras, the poorest country in Central America according to the Economic Commission on Latin America, with 79 percent of its population living in poverty. The Office of Refugee Resettlement granted interviews with Alex and other youth for this article under the condition that their names be changed and their locations not be revealed.

At 18 years old, Alex is soft-spoken yet direct, with carefully coiffed hair and a hint of a mustache. He wears two gold chains around his neck, one with a dolphin charm, another with a heart that says, "I love mom."

When he was 10 years old, his father was stabbed to death by two of Alex's uncles. Alex found the body.

"They killed my father to rob him of the money he had made from selling a cow. For this reason they killed him," he said softly.