[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 120 (Tuesday, July 29, 2014)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1258-E1259]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    HUMAN TRAFFICKING PREVENTION ACT

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                           HON. BEN RAY LUJAN

                             of new mexico

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, July 23, 2014

  Mr. BEN RAY LUJAN of New Mexico. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following 
article:

                [From the New York Times, July 11, 2014]

  The Children of the Drug Wars: A Refugee Crisis, Not an Immigration 
                                 Crisis

                           (By Sonia Nazario)

       Cristian Omar Reyes, an 11-year-old sixth grader in the 
     neighborhood of Nueva Suyapa, on the outskirts of 
     Tegucigalpa, tells me he has to get out of Honduras soon--
     ``no matter what.''
       In March, his father was robbed and murdered by gangs while 
     working as a security guard protecting a pastry truck. His 
     mother used the life insurance payout to hire a smuggler to 
     take her to Florida. She promised to send for him quickly, 
     but she has not.
       Three people he knows were murdered this year. Four others 
     were gunned down on a nearby corner in the span of two weeks 
     at the beginning of this year. A girl his age resisted being 
     robbed of $5. She was clubbed over the head and dragged off 
     by two men who cut a hole in her throat, stuffed her panties 
     in it, and left her body in a ravine across the street from 
     Cristian's house.
       ``I'm going this year,'' he tells me.
       I last went to Nueva Suyapa in 2003, to write about another 
     boy, Luis Enrique Motino Pineda, who had grown up there and 
     left to find his mother in the United States. Children from 
     Central America have been making that journey, often without 
     their parents, for two decades. But lately something has 
     changed, and the predictable flow has turned into an exodus. 
     Three years ago, about 6,800 children were detained by United 
     States immigration authorities and placed in federal custody; 
     this year, as many as 90,000 children are expected to be 
     picked up. Around a quarter come from Honduras--more than 
     from anywhere else.
       Children still leave Honduras to reunite with a parent, or 
     for better educational and economic opportunities. But, as I 
     learned when I returned to Nueva Suyapa last month, a vast 
     majority of child migrants are fleeing not poverty, but 
     violence. As a result, what the United States is seeing on 
     its borders now is not an immigration crisis. It is a refugee 
     crisis.
       Gangs arrived in force in Honduras in the 1990s, as 18th 
     Street and Mara Salvatrucha members were deported in large 
     numbers from Los Angeles to Central America, joining 
     homegrown groups like Los Puchos. But the dominance in the 
     past few years of foreign drug cartels in Honduras, 
     especially ones from Mexico, has increased the reach and 
     viciousness of the violence. As the United States and 
     Colombia spent billions of dollars to disrupt the movement of 
     drugs up the Caribbean corridor, traffickers rerouted inland 
     through Honduras, and 79 percent of cocaine-smuggling flights 
     bound for the United States now pass through there.
       Narco groups and gangs are vying for control over this 
     turf, neighborhood by neighborhood, to gain more foot 
     soldiers for drug sales and distribution, expand their 
     customer base, and make money through extortion in a country 
     left with an especially weak, corrupt government following a 
     2009 coup.
       Enrique's 33-year-old sister, Belky, who still lives in 
     Nueva Suyapa, says children began leaving en masse for the 
     United States three years ago. That was around the time that 
     the narcos started putting serious pressure on kids to work 
     for them. At Cristian's school, older students working with 
     the cartels push drugs on the younger ones--some as young as 
     6. If they agree, children are recruited to serve as 
     lookouts, make deliveries in backpacks, rob people and extort 
     businesses. They are given food, shoes and money in return. 
     Later, they might work as traffickers or hit men.
       Teachers at Cristian's school described a 12-year-old who 
     demanded that the school release three students one day to 
     help him distribute crack cocaine; he brandished a pistol and 
     threatened to kill a teacher when she tried to question him.
       At Nueva Suyapa's only public high school, narcos ``recruit 
     inside the school,'' says Yadira Sauceda, a counselor there. 
     Until he was killed a few weeks ago, a 23-year-old 
     ``student'' controlled the school. Each day, he was checked 
     by security at the door, then had someone sneak his gun to 
     him over the school wall. Five students, mostly 12- and 13-
     year-olds, tearfully told Ms. Sauceda that the man had 
     ordered them to use and distribute drugs or he would kill 
     their parents. By March, one month into the new school year, 
     67 of 450 students had left the school.
       Teachers must pay a ``war tax'' to teach in certain 
     neighborhoods, and students must pay to attend.
       Carlos Baquedano Sanchez, a slender 14-year-old with hair 
     sticking straight up, explained how hard it was to stay away 
     from the cartels. He lives in a shack made of corrugated tin 
     in a neighborhood in Nueva Suyapa called El Infiernito--
     Little Hell--and usually doesn't have anything to eat one out 
     of every three days. He started working in a dump when he was 
     7, picking out iron or copper to recycle, for $1 or $2 a day. 
     But bigger boys often beat him to steal his haul, and he quit 
     a year ago when an older man nearly killed him for a coveted 
     car-engine piston. Now he sells scrap wood.
       But all of this was nothing, he says, compared to the 
     relentless pressure to join narco gangs and the constant 
     danger they have brought to his life. When he was 9, he 
     barely escaped from two narcos who were trying to rape him, 
     while terrified neighbors looked on. When he was 10, he was 
     pressured to try marijuana and crack. ``You'll feel better. 
     Like you are in the clouds,'' a teenager working with a gang 
     told him. But he resisted.
       He has known eight people who were murdered and seen three 
     killed right in front of him. He saw a man shot three years 
     ago and still remembers the plums the man was holding rolling 
     down the street, coated in blood. Recently he witnessed two 
     teenage hit men shooting a pair of brothers for refusing to 
     hand over the keys and title to their motorcycle. Carlos hit 
     the dirt and prayed. The killers calmly walked down the 
     street. Carlos shrugs. ``Now seeing someone dead is 
     nothing.''
       He longs to be an engineer or mechanic, but he quit school 
     after sixth grade, too poor and too afraid to attend. ``A lot 
     of kids know what can happen in school. So they leave.''
       He wants to go to the United States, even though he knows 
     how dangerous the journey can be; a man in his neighborhood 
     lost both legs after falling off the top of a Mexican freight 
     train, and a family friend drowned in the Rio Grande. ``I 
     want to avoid drugs and death. The government can't pull up 
     its pants and help people,'' he says angrily. ``My country 
     has lost its way.''
       Girls face particular dangers--one reason around 40 percent 
     of children who arrived in the United States this year were 
     girls, compared with 27 percent in the past. Recently three 
     girls were raped and killed in Nueva Suyapa, one only 8 years 
     old. Two 15-year-olds were abducted and raped. The kidnappers 
     told them that if they didn't get in the car they would kill 
     their entire families. Some parents no longer let their girls 
     go to school for fear of their being kidnapped, says Luis 
     Lopez, an educator with Asociacion Compartir, a nonprofit in 
     Nueva Suyapa.
       Milagro Noemi Martinez, a petite 19-year-old with clear 
     green eyes, has been told repeatedly by narcos that she would 
     be theirs--or end up dead. Last summer, she made her first 
     attempt to reach the United States ``Here there is only 
     evil,'' she says. ``It's better to leave than have them kill 
     me here.'' She headed north with her 21-year-old sister, a 
     friend who had also been threatened, and $170 among them. But 
     she was stopped and deported from Mexico. Now back in Nueva 
     Suyapa, she stays locked inside her mother's house. ``I hope 
     God protects me. I am afraid to step outside.'' Last year, 
     she

[[Page E1259]]

     says, six minors, as young as 15, were killed in her 
     neighborhood. Some were hacked apart. She plans to try the 
     journey again soon. Asking for help from the police or the 
     government is not an option in what some consider a failed 
     state. The drugs that pass through Honduras each year are 
     worth more than the country's entire gross domestic product. 
     Narcos have bought off police officers, politicians and 
     judges. In recent years, four out of five homicides were 
     never investigated. No one is immune to the carnage. Several 
     Honduran mayors have been killed. The sons of both the former 
     head of the police department and the head of the national 
     university were murdered, the latter, an investigation 
     showed, by the police.
       ``You never call the cops. The cops themselves will 
     retaliate and kill you,'' says Henry Carias Aguilar, a pastor 
     in Nueva Suyapa. A majority of small businesses in Nueva 
     Suyapa have shuttered because of extortion demands, while 
     churches have doubled in number in the past decade, as people 
     pray for salvation from what they see as the plague predicted 
     in the Bible. Taxis and homes have signs on them asking God 
     for mercy.
       The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently 
     interviewed 404 children who had arrived in the United States 
     from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico; 58 percent 
     said their primary reason for leaving was violence. (A 
     similar survey in 2006, of Central American children coming 
     into Mexico, found that only 13 percent were fleeing 
     violence.) They aren't just going to the United States: Less 
     conflicted countries in Central America had a 712 percent 
     increase in asylum claims between 2008 and 2013.
       ``If a house is burning, people will jump out the window,'' 
     says Michelle Brane, director of the migrant rights and 
     justice program at the Women's Refugee Commission.
       To permanently stem this flow of children, we must address 
     the complex root causes of violence in Honduras, as well as 
     the demand for illegal drugs in the United States that is 
     fueling that violence.
       In the meantime, however, we must recognize this as a 
     refugee crisis, as the United Nations just recommended. These 
     children are facing threats similar to the forceful 
     conscription of child soldiers by warlords in Sudan or during 
     the civil war in Bosnia. Being forced to sell drugs by narcos 
     is no different from being forced into military service.
       Many Americans, myself included, believe in deporting 
     unlawful immigrants, but see a different imperative with 
     refugees.
       The United States should immediately create emergency 
     refugee centers inside our borders, tent cities--operated by 
     the United Nations and other relief groups like the 
     International Rescue Committee--where immigrant children 
     could be held for 60 to 90 days instead of being released. 
     The government would post immigration judges at these centers 
     and adjudicate children's cases there.
       To ensure this isn't a sham process, asylum officers and 
     judges must be trained in child-sensitive interviewing 
     techniques to help elicit information from fearful, 
     traumatized youngsters. All children must also be represented 
     by a volunteer or government-funded lawyer. Kids in Need of 
     Defense, a nonprofit that recruits pro bono lawyers to 
     represent immigrant children and whose board I serve on, 
     estimates that 40 percent to 60 percent of these children 
     potentially qualify to stay under current immigration laws--
     and do, if they have a lawyer by their side. The vast 
     majority do not. The only way to ensure we are not hurtling 
     children back to circumstances that could cost them their 
     lives is by providing them with real due process.
       Judges, who currently deny seven in 10 applications for 
     asylum by people who are in deportation proceedings, must 
     better understand the conditions these children are facing. 
     They should be more open to considering relief for those 
     fleeing gang recruitment or threats by criminal organizations 
     when they come from countries like Honduras that are clearly 
     unwilling or unable to protect them.
       If many children don't meet strict asylum criteria but face 
     significant dangers if they return, the United States should 
     consider allowing them to stay using humanitarian parole 
     procedures we have employed in the past, for Cambodians and 
     Haitians. It may be possible to transfer children and 
     resettle them in other safe countries willing to share the 
     burden. We should also make it easier for children to apply 
     as refugees when they are still in Central America, as we 
     have done for people in Iraq, Cuba, countries in the former 
     Soviet Union, Vietnam and Haiti. Those who showed a well-
     founded fear of persecution wouldn't have to make the 
     perilous journey north alone.
       Of course, many migrant children come for economic reasons, 
     and not because they fear for their lives. In those cases, 
     they should quickly be deported if they have at least one 
     parent in their country of origin. By deporting them directly 
     from the refugee centers, the United States would discourage 
     future non-refugees by showing that immigrants cannot be 
     caught and released, and then avoid deportation by ignoring 
     court orders to attend immigration hearings.
       Instead of advocating such a humane, practical approach, 
     the Obama administration wants to intercept and return 
     children en route. On Tuesday the president asked for $3.7 
     billion in emergency funding. Some money would be spent on 
     new detention facilities and more immigration judges, but the 
     main goal seems to be to strengthen border control and speed 
     up deportations. He also asked Congress to grant powers that 
     could eliminate legal protections for children from Central 
     America in order to expedite removals, a change that 
     Republicans in Congress have also advocated.
       This would allow life-or-death decisions to be made within 
     hours by Homeland Security officials, even though studies 
     have shown that border patrol agents fail to adequately 
     screen Mexican children to see if they are being sexually 
     exploited by traffickers or fear persecution, as the agents 
     are supposed to do. Why would they start asking Central 
     American children key questions needed to prove refugee 
     status?
       The United States expects other countries to take in 
     hundreds of thousands of refugees on humanitarian grounds. 
     Countries neighboring Syria have absorbed nearly 3 million 
     people. Jordan has accepted in two days what the United 
     States has received in an entire month during the height of 
     this immigration flow--more than 9,000 children in May. The 
     United States should also increase to pre-9/11 levels the 
     number of refugees we accept to 90,000 from the current 
     70,000 per year and, unlike in recent years, actually admit 
     that many.
       By sending these children away, ``you are handing them a 
     death sentence,'' says Jose Arnulfo Ochoa Ochoa, an expert in 
     Honduras with World Vision International, a Christian 
     humanitarian aid group. This abrogates international 
     conventions we have signed and undermines our credibility as 
     a humane country. It would be a disgrace if this wealthy 
     nation turned its back on the 52,000 children who have 
     arrived since October, many of them legitimate refugees.
       This is not how a great nation treats children.

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