Immigration

Influx of children at Arizona’s border shows immigration system on brink



YUMA, Ariz. — Central American parents and children started pouring into this desert border community faster than anyone had predicted. Out of desperation, the Salvation Army opened a shelter in a strip mall in March, thinking it would be temporary. At first, they had 50 people. Then 150. Then the numbers doubled by the week.

Churches issued urgent calls for diapers, baby formula, coloring books and crayons. Aid workers flew in from Washington. The mayor, who opposes illegal immigration, declared an emergency and implored the White House to help because the flow of people coming out of federal detention at the border was unlike anything Yuma had ever seen.

“I’m not interested in seeing homeless and hungry families walking around the city looking for resources and all the issues that come with that,” Republican Mayor Douglas Nicholls said in a recent interview at City Hall. “It’s a big issue.”

In the Border Patrol’s Yuma sector, which stretches from California deep into the Arizona desert, half of the apprehensions this year have been of children — the highest share on the U.S. southern border. The tally is rising fast in Yuma, a sparsely populated farming community in Arizona’s southwest corner, driven in part by migration patterns that shift frequently as people try to determine the path of least resistance to the United States.

Asylum-seeking migrants arriving dusty and exhausted here in recent days said it is easier than ever to enter the United States if they surrender with a child. Because minors generally cannot be held for long periods, most are released with their families or to a shelter.

Nearly 169,000 youths have surrendered at the southern border in the first seven months of this fiscal year, and more than half are ages 12 and under, according to federal records and officials familiar with Customs and Border Protection statistics. Minors now account for nearly 37 percent of crossings — far above previous eras, when most underage migrants were teenagers and accounted for 10 percent to 20 percent of crossings.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything near this,” said John Sandweg, an acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Obama administration.

The children have shattered a multibillion-dollar system that Congress and the White House built over the past two decades to quickly catch and deport adults, and border scenes involving children have been surreal: One boy recently surrendered in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume, a girl carried a pink-clad doll and border agents are feeding formula to newly apprehended babies.

Migrants say they are coming to the United States because droughts are frying Central American harvests, they can’t pay their bills and gangs are recruiting children.

“I want to study,” said Cesar Gonzalez, 13, of Guatemala, wearing a donated sweatshirt with “USA” emblazoned across his chest, soon after he was released from custody, as he and his family waited at the Yuma airport for a flight to Boston. “And then I can work to help my father.”

Families are increasingly heading to the desert dunes of Arizona’s southwest corner because they sense the U.S. government’s focus is on the Texas border along the Rio Grande and because Arizona has less space for detention beds, meaning they are more likely to be released quickly.



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