Lauren Markham - The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life

I n the winter of 2013, I received an assignment from the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) to travel to South Texas and write about the recent uptick in immigration by unaccompanied minors and what happened to them once theyd made it into the United States. These were children, mostly from Central America, who had crossed the border without papers or parents. I spent that spring reporting the story, digging into the massive infrastructure of apprehending, detaining, caring for, and litigating the cases of these thousands of young migrants who, that year, more than tripled their historical annual average. The article, First the Fence, Then the System, came out that June.

Since 2006, Id been working with refugees and immigrants in Oakland, California, at various nonprofit agencies and then the Oakland school district. In 2011 I started working at Oakland International High School, a school for newly arrived English-language learners, where I coordinated programs for students and families, such as parent classes, after-school programs, and health and mental health services. Our school had enrolled a few unaccompanied minors over the years, but I understood little about their circumstances and even less about their experiences navigating the immigration system.

In the VQR story, I had focused on the children who were caught, but I soon found myself chasing another story: what happened to the children who werent caught? My article on the growing number of unaccompanied minors working in the California agricultural system, The Lost Boys of California, was published in VICE in March 2014.

Just as I was filing the first draft, Mr. David, a co-worker at Oakland International, came into my office to tell me that we really need to do something about all the kids with upcoming court dates.

What?

He explained that a number of our new ninth and tenth graders had been ordered to appear in immigration court in the coming months. The students, who were undocumented and had been apprehended by the authorities after crossing the U.S. border, were almost universally unaccompanied minors, or unaccompanied alien children. They had all been ordered deported and would have to fight in court for the right to stay. They were terrified of court; none of the students David had spoken to had a lawyer. Of the twenty-five or so students he advised, seven were unaccompanied minors.

While I had been away reporting on the issue outside Oakland, this population had been surging at my school, the place where I spent four days a week, right under my nose. By spring of 2014, more than sixty unaccompanied minors had enrolled at Oakland International High School, out of a student body of just under four hundred. By the following fall, the number surpassed ninety. Today, in 2018, when the number of minors crossing our border remains at historic highs and the issue of immigration has taken front and center on the polarized stage of American politics, unaccompanied minors make up over a quarter of Oakland Internationals student population.

After my conversation with David, I spent many an afternoon shepherding kids to pro bono legal agencies and court dates and setting up intake appointments and know your rights information sessions at the school. The students needed counseling and tutoring and doctors appointments; some of them needed help finding homeless shelters and access to food and clothing. Supporting unaccompanied minors quickly became one of my primary responsibilities.

In February 2014, I met the Flores twins.

They told me why they had come, but I had so many more questions. What were these children really riskingand enduringto come here, and what was the likelihood they would gain the right to stay? Would they really be better off if they did? Were the stories I was hearing overblown, and could I take their reasons for coming to the United States at face value? Answering these questions became a personal imperative, one that would help me better understand my students, my country, and the endless churn of southern migration into the United States.

To learn more about the Flores familys story, and that of the hundreds of thousands of migrants like them, I traveled to El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, and Texas, reporting from various fulcrums of violence in El Salvador as well as at stations along the migrant trail north. Parts of this book I witnessed myself, and other parts have been reconstructed through extensive reporting and interviews, all in service of investigating the changing dynamics of migration.

Since reporting that first article for VQR, I have heard countless stories from young people traveling alone to reach the United States. Every story is different, but there are also striking similarities, often having to do with mounting violence in the childrens home countries. These girls and boys are crossing into the United States in search of the fabled better life that has attracted migrants, authorized and unauthorized, since before the Mayflower landed. But in the Northern TriangleHonduras, Guatemala, and El Salvadora better life, for many, means a life where they are not afraid of being killed.

I began reporting this book during the Obama administration, a time rife with anxiety for undocumented migrants. It was completed after the election of Donald Trump, marking an era of unprecedented fear among immigrants and refugees past and present in ways that, at the time of the election, we as a country could have only imagined. In a time when immigration is in the daily headlines yet is too often reduced to a matter of sweeping rhetoric and binary politicskeep them out or let them in, wall or no wallthis book seeks to offer a complex understanding of why immigrants leave their country, what struggles they endure to get here, and the challenges they face setting roots in a foreign land.

The story of the Flores twins isnt the most harrowing, or the most unjust, or the most extraordinary Ive come across as an educator and a journalistfar from it. But something in their story illustrates, roundly and heartbreakingly, the wounds of war, the spirit of a new generation of immigrants, and the impact of migration on the United States as well as on the tiny, time-battered country of El Salvador.

The United States is still young and is ever reiterating itself as demanded by its people, both those who have lived here for a long time and those who have just arrived. Immigrants have always shaped our countrys future. Yet our country has not always done well in welcoming our newest immigrants or integrating them into society; this is particularly the case for newly arrived young men. Once it was young Irish and Italian men who, excluded from parts of the workforce and stereotyped as undeserving thugs, sought belonging, purpose, and livelihood in the tenements and organized crime rings of societys margins. The Trump administration credits the new wave of young Central American immigrants with gang activity in the United Statesfocusing in particular on MS-13, a gang born in Los Angeles and eventually deported back to El Salvador, and the very gang now causing many unaccompanied minors to flee home. Trump is vilifying these youths much like former generations of young immigrants and is signaling that they are not welcome here. Young Central Americans are coming here in unprecedented numbers, and how they are or are not received and supported will determine, in part, the next chapter in the American story.