For children, journey to the land of promise fraught with danger

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – On a warm day last spring, 16-year-old Hugo Pascual Tomas and his older brother Francisco left their home in Guatemala and set off on a 2,700-mile quest to find their mother.

The boys had been left in the care of their elderly grandparents in 2001, after their father and pregnant mother came to Florida and became undocumented workers.

In their Mayan village in Huehuetenango, near the Guatemala-Mexico border, Hugo and Francisco lived a hard life. They dropped out of school and began working in the fields harvesting corn.

In occasional telephone calls from their parents, who settled in Palm Beach County and sent them money to help with expenses, the boys began to learn about another life a world away. They also learned they had a brother and a sister born in the U.S.

This year, Hugo and his older brother decided to make their way to the Sunshine State. So did more than 5,500 children from Central America who illegally crossed the U.S. border and ended up with relatives or other sponsors in Florida in the past 15 months.

The unprecedented exodus of children fleeing violence, poverty and abandonment in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador has had a major impact on some local schools and on South Florida's immigration court. And it's often up to volunteers and nonprofit groups to help the boys and girls find lawyers and adapt to their new lives.

To get here many of these children walked for miles, forded rivers, even clung to the roofs of freight trains.

One day, three armed gang members arrived at their grandmother's home asking for impuestos, or taxes. The gangsters roughed up the brothers. That's when Hugo and Francisco decided to leave.

The brothers' arduous journey took them through Mexico, where they gave the last of their money to a man who would take them across the Rio Grande into Texas.

Once in the U.S., Hugo and Francisco wandered on foot along the scorching desert where hundreds of migrants die each year. After a few hours they were picked up by U.S. Border Patrol agents and sent to separate detention centers. It was the last time Hugo would see his 18-year-old brother, who was locked up with adults, for the remainder of the journey.

Hugo was detained with other minors for eight nights and then flown in shackles to a children's shelter in Maryland, where he spent nearly three weeks as the federal government processed paperwork.

His odyssey ended in June, a month after he left Guatemala, as he got off a plane in Fort Lauderdale. Crying, he fell into the arms of his mother for the first time since he was a toddler.

U.S. officials declared the mass migration of children an "urgent humanitarian crisis" in June, when President Obama told Central American parents: "Do not send your children to the borders." Since then, the number of child immigrants has dwindled.

But little has been done to address the plight of thousands who are already here.

One big hurdle is making sure they get an education. For teachers, that means dealing with students who speak no English and have had little or no schooling.

In many ways, Hugo is typical. He dropped out of school in the first grade to help feed the family. Now he's a ninth-grader at Lake Worth High School, struggling to adapt.

"If they come in with even a sixth-grade education, I'm happy," said Betsy Smith, a guidance counselor at Hugo's high school. "It's like starting from scratch."

Under law, unaccompanied children who come from countries that do not border the U.S. cannot immediately be deported. They have the right to appear before an immigration judge and make a case on why they should stay. The process can take more than a year.

In Florida's immigration courts, the cases of these children more than doubled since last year. The crush created a sense of urgency for advocates scrambling to find lawyers in time for their hearings.

A lawyer can be crucial: Out of the 400 children with attorneys, none was ordered to leave the country. By contrast, at least 114 of the 1,218 children without an attorney received deportation orders.

"It is a humanitarian crisis that we have not been responding to," said Sui Chung, chair of the South Florida pro bono committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "It's as if there were a lot of people bleeding, and we don't have enough doctors."

If deported, thousands of Central American children would have no one to return to, experts say.

Little agrees with critics who say the children should not be making the dangerous trips. They should not have to "risk their lives to save their lives," Little said. She also said they flee because they have no other choice. "It's literally life and death for some of these children," she said.