A Visit to the Youth Shelter

So far work has been a little slow, mostly because I don’t have any of my own clients yet. I spend my days translating letters into Spanish, making phone calls, and manning the copy machine. I sit in on client intakes, but even that gets repetitive and dull when I’m not the one in charge. That’s why when one of the lawyers asked me to tag-a-long on a visit to one of the youth shelters I was more than willing to go.

The shelter was one of 4 shelters run by Catholic Charities where youth under the age of 18 go instead of a detention center when officials at the border pick them up. The locations of these shelters are kept confidential in order to protect the children from immigration officials and smugglers. The building was non-descript, and I walked past it everyday, but just assumed it was a warehouse or some type of office building.

Inside there were about 10 girls who slept, ate, and went to school in the shelter. They were from all different countries and had been separated from their families while crossing the border. They would remain at the shelter until lawyers from Catholic Charities could reunite them with their families.

The girl I was to meet with was a 12 year old from Chalatenango, El Salvador. This immediately caught my attention since Chalatenango was where I lived with a family for a week while studying abroad. As the girl began to tell us her story, I couldn’t help but think about my Campo family. The girl’s aunt and mother were living in North Carolina without documents. They had been in the U.S. for a while and the little girl was raised by her grandmother and another aunt in El Salvador. Then the mother sent money to the girl and told her to come to the U.S. So the girl set off with her older cousin. They walked and bused from El Salvador to Mexico, then came into the U.S. by wading through a river. Since they didn’t have papers, the girl and her cousin were picked up by border control. The cousin was sent to a detention camp since she was over 18 years old. We don’t know where the cousin is now. She could have been deported back to El Salvador for all we know. The girl was sent to Catholic Charities where we are trying to help her find her family. She’s been in the shelter for 3 months. Just like the kids I knew in the Campo, her idea of America was so skewed. In their minds America is this paradise on Earth and then they arrive and it’s quite the opposite. The girl must have been so scared. Her cousin was gone, and she was now help up in a shelter in an unfamiliar country with lawyers talking at her in poor Spanish about legal matters she doesn’t understand. The goal of Catholic Charities is to reunite her with her family in North Carolina and get her a court date to get her some kind of status, but she will most likely be deported. So when she arrives in North Carolina she will probably never go to her court date for fear of deportation and continue living under the radar with her family until they eventually get picked up by immigration authorities and deported.

Would people keep crossing the border if they knew all the troubles that awaited them when the reached U.S. soil? Living in fear is a horrible way to live, but in these immigrants’ minds it’s better than the life they were living in their home country. And there’s still that American Dream, that maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance things will get better and they’ll make it in America after all.

Paz,
Stephanie