No parent, no adult relative or guardian was with them on the way: in 2014, not a few, not a thousand, but more than 50,0003 boys and girls like Karla and Freddy journeyed unaccompanied through deserts and forests, through mountains and valleys, along rivers and railroad tracks, through villages and cities, crossing one, or two, or more borders as they moved north from the three countries of the “northern triangle” of Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
This number is only of those caught and counted by US immigration officers—government authorities—who say the real number of children migrating unaccompanied that year could be significantly higher.
In 2015, even as Mexico stepped up enforcement along its southern border, US authorities apprehended almost 30,000 boys and girls from the Northern Triangle who had moved likewise, with no parent or relative or guardian alongside.4 Again, this is only the number caught and counted by the US government.
Notably, 2015 saw apprehensions of unaccompanied migrant children at US borders drop by half from the prior year, to 28,387 – simultaneous with a doubling of such apprehensions by Mexico: more than 20,000 children compared to about 10,000 in 2014.5
In 2016, 46,893 unaccompanied migrant children were apprehended at the US southern border,6 17,219 in Mexico.7
At the same time, some of these children were moving for the second, or third time, or more—no one has reported how many times—after having been returned by immigration agencies to the same situations they had decided to flee before.8
These are children. How is all this possible? What compels the children to move, and this way? How have these governments, and the Church, and non-governmental actors, responded in with policies and programs? And what is the impact of those responses?
With this study, the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC)9, is responding to the call of Pope Francis “to work towards protection, integration and long-term solutions related to migrant children and adolescents”10—to be an agent of change in the issue of unaccompanied child migration in the Central American region, with recommendations that can be concretely implemented, through existing and/or future programs. The study takes as a framework reference the significant migration spike, in 2014, of unaccompanied children who migrated from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras through Mexico to the United States to analyze the development of the phenomenon and responses from 2014 to the present11.
The study will be divided into five parts: (I) the general context and evolution of the phenomenon of unaccompanied migrant children in and from the region; (II) a look at responses to this phenomenon by states, (III) by the international community; (IV) by ICMC, and lastly, (V) key findings and recommendations.