The 2014 American immigration crisis was a surge in unaccompanied children and women from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) seeking entrance to the United States in 2014. According to U.S. law, an unaccompanied alien child refers to a person under 18 years of age, who has no lawful immigration status in the U.S., and who does not have a legal guardian to provide physical custody and care.
Between 2013 and 2014, the number of unaccompanied children apprehended at the border increased nearly 80%, from 38,759 in fiscal year 2013 to 68,541 in fiscal year 2014. This influx in unaccompanied minor children has been attributed to a number of factors including the high rates of gang-related violent crime in the Northern Triangle; the promulgation of false "permiso" rumors by smugglers; a growing awareness of H.R.7311 (110th), a 2008 law that granted substantial protections from removal to unaccompanied children from countries that do not share a border with the US; and a recovering U.S. economy and labor market following the Great Recession. Many of the children had no parent/legal guardian available to provide care or physical custody and quickly overwhelmed local border patrols.6 U.S.C. § 279(g)(2)
Background
From 1980 onwards, the number of immigrants from Central America arriving to the United States has grown substantially. However, most of the people fleeing Central America are those whose countries are plagued by corruption, poverty, and murder. The three countries from Central America with the highest numbers of migrants are Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Other immigrants from different countries in Central America have seen a moderate decrease from 2010 to 2013. For example, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, and Belize have not had as many immigrants as the other three leading countries in the time frame. The three leading countries are the bulk immigrants coming to the United States. Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala make up 85 percent of those who arrive to the United States since the 1980s. "In fiscal year (FY) 2016 alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) intercepted nearly 46,900 unaccompanied children and more than 70,400 family units from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border."
During the Cold War, the United States backed violent anti-Communist forces throughout Latin America. Academics claim that the violence and high murder rates in many of these countries is the direct legacy of the U.S. intervention on behalf of these anti-Communist forces stretching back into the 1950s with the Guatemalan coup d'état, which has shaped the contemporary refugee crisis.
In 2014, the reason this crisis was internationally covered by media outlets, was due to the fact that most of the immigrants were children. Most of these children cross through the Guatemala-Mexico border. Most of these children also ride with other migrants atop a train called "La Bestia" (The Beast), which begins near the Guatemalan border, in Chiapas state, and goes to Mexico City. However, La Bestia has drawn international attention. This train route is the epicenter of mass extortion, mutilation, murder, robberies, rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault of Central American and other immigrants. Immigrants do not report these crimes in fear of being deported back to their native countries. If these immigrant children managed to survive La Bestia and the cartels in Mexico, they now need to find "coyotes" to smuggle them across the Mexican-American border.
Most women and children from Central America simply crossed the Rio Grande and turned themselves in to the United States Border Patrol, relying on the belief, partly well founded, that United States immigration and refugee law made special provision for children. The large number of migrants entitled to hearings, counsel, and placement overwhelmed U.S. immigration courts and other government facilities.
Causes
Synopsis The 2014 uptick in immigration was largely due to a surge in arrivals of Unaccompanied Minor Children (UAC's), predominately from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (the Northern Triangle of Central America). Between 2013 and 2014, the number of unaccompanied children apprehended at the border increased nearly 80%, from 38,759 in fiscal year 2013 to 68,541 in fiscal year 2014. This influx in unaccompanied minor children has been attributed to a number of factors including the high rates of gang-related violent crime in the Northern Triangle; the promulgation of false "permiso" rumors by smugglers; the growing awareness of H.R.7311 (110th), a 2008 law that granted substantial protections from removal to unaccompanied children from countries that do not share a border with the US; and a recovering U.S. economy and labor market following the Great Recession.
Societal Causes In a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees study of approximately 400 unaccompanied children from Mexico and Central America, 58 percent of UAC's reported being motivated by safety concerns back home, a nearly 450% increase over the 13 percent of Mexican children that reported similar motivations in a 2006 study. Beginning in the early 2000s, the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador experienced an increase in violent crime that would continue for the next decade. Although the homicide rates in all three countries had been on the decline since 2011, the murder rates El Salvador and Honduras remained among the highest in the world. In early 2014, El Salvador experienced another uptick in violence after a gang truce between MS-13 and Barrio 18 began to collapse.
Many of the unaccompanied children reported being under the false impression that the Obama Administration was granting permits ("permisos") to children with family members in the US, as long as they arrived by June 2014. It was later determined that these rumors, along with similar rumors about permisos for women who arrived with children, were being promulgated by human smugglers. While the rumors were false, there were in fact a number of policies in place that offered protection from removal to unaccompanied children from Central America.
For women, as crime increased in the last decade, sexual assault and rape have become a prevalent issue in the Northern Triangle as well. In 2014, 40 percent of the people fleeing were women compared to a low 27 percent in recent times. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women showed that in July 2014, the violent death of women in Honduras shot up at an alarming rate of 263% from 2005 to 2013, fueling the migration of women. In 2013, 95% of the cases of these women go unsolved and women leaving Honduras also face the same risks on their journey.
Organized crime and drug-related violence in these countries have also increased danger for their citizens. Since the 1980s, Colombian smugglers have used Central America, specifically Honduras, as a corridor to the United States. Children in schools are forced to smuggle drugs. Drug trafficking has taken over these countries! as waves of gangsters were deported from the United States in the 90s. Gangs like MS-13 have grown in size and power. Young children are the most vulnerable as gangsters will offer the choice of working for them or leaving. The presence of Mexican cartels has been a feature of illegal drug trade in Guatemala, where law enforcement presence is sparse and there is plenty of open land where planes smuggling cocaine can easily land. In the Northern Triangle (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador), studies have shown that 19 out of 20 murders will not result in prosecution.
In addition to violence and crime, food shortages and malnutrition continue to plague the region. It is estimated that half of Guatemalan children are chronically malnourished, resulting in stunted growth and eventually death. While these countries have some of the greatest potential for economic growth, inequality and general incompetency by the government has left these issues either underserved or unaddressed completely.
Governmental Causes To start the asylum process, an immigrant child must fill out and apply at their consulate with a N-400 form to apply for naturalization, which includes a processing fee and civics test. After completing processing interviews to determine priority designation, a child undergoing American naturalization must complete form DS-260 in order to apply for an immigrant visa and/or alien registration. By the time the naturalization process has been completed it will have taken on average 18–24 months, though in the last 5 years this has been brought down to an average of 10.2 months.
The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a 2008 law intended to protect victims of human trafficking, prevented the immediate deportation of unaccompanied children from Central America. In addition to requiring that the government provide each child with legal representation and hold hearings on their case, the law also requires that children be released to family members or cared for by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the "least restrictive" accommodations possible while their case winds through the courts. The large backlog of cases meant many children would wait several years before receiving their first hearing, and many more before their cases were fully adjudicated, during which they would be allowed to remain in the United States. The understanding that they would be allowed to remain in the U.S. indefinitely prompted more children to follow. It has also been suggested that some of the new arrivals incorrectly believed that they would be allowed to apply for DACA, a 2012 policy that offers protection from deportation for certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.
Response
From the government On June 26, 2014, Obama said that parents from Central America shouldn't send their children, with his reasoning being that they could be victims of human trafficking or injure themselves while making the journey. On July 9, 2014, a hearing on the crisis was held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Craig Fugate, the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, testified, "We are talking about large numbers of children, without their parents, who have arrived at our border—hungry, thirsty, exhausted, scared and vulnerable". Senator Dianne Feinstein compared the crisis to the American refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany aboard the MS St. Louis. President Obama's request for additional funds was met in both houses of Congress by proposals to modify or eliminate the rights granted by the 2008 reauthorization of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000.
As most unaccompanied children from Central America do not attempt to avoid capture but turn themselves into the Border Patrol after entering the United States, they usually cross the Rio Grande into Texas. The large number of children overwhelmed facilities in Texas in summer 2014 and some of the women and children were transferred to INS facilities in California. In most instances this occurred without incident, but in Murrieta, California, on July 1, 2014, buses carrying immigrants to a Border Patrol facility were blocked by flag-waving protesters. On July 15, 2014, in Oracle, Arizona, pro and con demonstrators faced off regarding possible use of a local facility to house immigrant children. The location of the shelters being used is confidential, but a local law enforcement officer had informed the community of the planned use of the facility.