Children Fleeing Violence in Central America Often End Up in Mexican Detention Centers - or Deported Valeria Fernández - Global Nation
go to original January 3, 2017

Asylum in Mexico Is Elusive for Migrant Central American Children (HumanRightsWatch)

Carlos was so scared inside the Mexican immigration detention center that instead of telling officers he was fleeing El Salvador after gang threats, the 16-year-old asked to be deported back to his country.

He shouldn’t have had to make that choice. Because, according to Mexican laws, as a minor he shouldn’t have been in an immigration detention center in the first place.

In the US, immigration officials are facing increased scrutiny about the conditions in which they hold Central American minors. In Texas this month, immigration officials released 500 women and children from detention after a federal judge ruled their facilities couldn’t be licensed to provide childcare.

Mexico too is being criticized for the incarceration of thousands of children crossing the border to escape violence in Central America. Their National Human Rights Commission issued a 250-page report this October denouncing conditions and treatment of children in detention centers, like the one where Carlos was held.

“Unaccompanied children should not enter, much less be detained at any point at an immigration station,” says Edgar Corzo Sosa, general inspector for Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. They should, instead, be moved to a shelter that cares for children.

Carlos is afraid of being found by gangs, so he asked not to use his last name in this report. He is among more than 15,000 children who were detained after crossing the border into Mexico in the first 10 months of 2016. Many of those children have a right to apply for refugee status under Mexican law. According to government policy, when Carlos was apprehended seven months ago, he should have been transferred to a children’s shelter, where he could have received services and likely would have told authorities that he was seeking protection from violence. This would have allowed him to begin the process of seeking asylum.

Instead, he spent 14 days detained with adult men. The first four days, he was held in a humid and cramped cell in a temporary holding facility near Veracruz. He says they slept on dirty pads with bugs. The cell had a clogged toilet that smelled terrible.

Guards at the small station put him in a separate room when the human rights commission staff came to interview him on one of their regular monitoring visits. The guards told him not to say that he had been detained with adults. He told them anyway.

“Afterwards immigration officials came for me and told me, ‘Why did you tell them that?’” Carlos says in Spanish. “They started to admonish me and they said that since I like being with adults, they’ll put me back there. And they did.”

That experience solidified his distrust of Mexico’s immigration authorities. And his experience only got worse.

Read the rest at PRI's The World

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!