Report
MRS Report on Mission Trip to Central America (2013)
MRS Report on Mission Trip to Central America: The Flight of Unaccompanied Children to the United States, November 2013
From November 16-23, 2013, a delegation from Migration and Refugee Services of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (MRS/USCCB) traveled to southern Mexico and Central America to examine and understand the flight of unaccompanied migrating children and youth from the region. Bishop Mark Seitz, bishop of El Paso, Texas, led the delegation, and was accompanied by Jeanne Atkinson, Executive Director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), Reverend Daniel Groody, Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame, and consultant to the USCCB Committee on Migration; Jane Bloom, Director, Washington Office of the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC); Kristyn Peck, Associate Director of Children’s Services, MRS/USCCB; Ashley Feasley, Immigration Policy Advisor, MRS/ USCCB; and Kevin Appleby, Director of Migration Policy and Public Affairs, MRS/USCCB.
Currently, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico have the highest numbers of unaccompanied youth arriving at the U.S./Mexico border where they are apprehended by federal immigration enforcement due to their lack of immigration status and placed into the custody and care of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (HHS/ORR). According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in fiscal year 2012, 24,120 out of a total of 24,481 unaccompanied children apprehended at the U.S./Mexico border or in the interior were from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
With these figures in mind, the delegation travelled to the Northern Triangle of Central America to hear the stories of child migrants and meet with high-level government officials. The delegation first visited Tapachula, a city in the state of Chiapas Mexico which is the epicenter of the migration flow North and also is the location of one of the children’s shelters run by the Mexican government’s child welfare agency, DIF (el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia). Subsequently the delegation travelled to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to collect information and assess the plight of child migrants on the ground. The following report details the delegation’s findings and policy recommendations.