U.S. Border Swamped with Child Migrants

In WEARING I documented Amilcar’s journey.  Amilcar, a former garment worker and father of three in Honduras, decided that his job didn’t provide his family with the life he wanted to provide them. So Amilcar crossed illegally into Mexico and rode atop trains and dodged police and bandits for three months.  In some places in Mexico the locals threw bread at the migrants because the they knew why they were making the journey – their families. In other places the Mexican people were sick of desperate migrants traveling through their backyards and threw rocks at them. 

While this journey is a very dangerous and a remarkable feat of endurance, love, luck, and survival, it is not rare. It’s also one not just undertaken by adults.

Recently OnPoint with Tom Ashbrook dedicated an hour of conversation to the migration.  If you read WEARING and are interested in this migration or if you never heard of it, I highly recommend listening to the episode U.S. Border Swamped with Child Migrants.

In the past, this journey was primarily undertaken by children fleeing a lack of opportunity in their home countries and trying to reunite with their parents in the United States.  Times have changed.  Now nearly half of the children have had their lives threatened  directly or a life of their family member threatened by the increasing gang and drug violence.

To learn more about this issue:

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Brian Duran, 14, of Comayagua, Honduras collects his line-dried laundry at the Senda de Vida migrant shelter in Reynosa, Mexico, June 3, 2014. Duran traveled alone to the U.S.-Mexico border and hopes to soon become one of the more than 47,000 unaccompanied children to enter the United States since Oct. 1, 2013. (AP)