Rare Interviews with the Children Caught at America's Borders (351 hits)
I met Mirabel in 2011, four years after she had left her home in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, a city reputed to be the murder capital of the world. She, her sisters and mother were terrorized by an alcoholic father who abused them and stole the earnings from her mother’s struggling grocery store to spend on liquor and women.
The tipping point came when Mirabel, then 16, confronted her father after a drunken rampage, and he nearly killed her with a machete. When an uncle offered to pay for a smuggler to take Mirabel to the United States, her mother begged her not to go. “We all know the stories of women who get raped or die in the desert,” Mirabel told me. “But I couldn’t stay. I had no life there.” She told her mother she loved her, boarded a bus with her teenage cousin and headed north, hoping for a better education and a better life in “El Norte.
But Mirabel’s safe passage across the U.S. border 15 days later was just the beginning of another ordeal that came with its own terrors. Immediately after entering the United States, she was apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. “They were questioning me, and I was crying,” she recalled to me. “I said, ‘I can’t go back.’ I was 16, the only under-aged girl a back.’ I was 16, the only under-aged girl and little, but those officers put handcuffs on me just like I was a criminal.”
After spending a few days in jail, she was taken into federal custody at a shelter in Los Fresnos, Texas, for unaccompanied minors. It was clean, Mirabel says, and had a nice enough living room, but she soon realized she couldn’t leave. “There was no life—life ended there,” she says. “The shelter was near the main road and I could see cars going by, and I wanted to be in that car.” It would be six months before an immigration judge in Texas granted her asylum petition and released her from federal custody to a foster family in Virginia.
