Kat Gale’s Reviews > Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions > Status Update

According to a comprehensive report issued in October 2015 by the Migration Policy Institute, the majority of children who find a lawyer do appear in court and are granted some form of relief. All the others are deported, either In absentia or in person. What is needed in particular, and urgently, are lawyers who are willing to work pro bono.

It's very difficult to be granted asylum because it's not enough that these children have suffered unspeakable harm, that they will continue to fall victim to the systematic & targeted violence of criminal groups. The harm or prosecution must be proved to be because of at least one of those four classifications. The main problem with asylum is that if it's granted, the children can never return to their home country.

An amendment to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by President Bush in 2008 states that children from countries that share borders with the US can be deported without formal immigration proceedings. If a child comes from Mexico or Canada, he or she is immediately "deportable"– a "removable alien". This was Bush's last gift to immigration law in his vast legacy of chingaderas.

Mexican children detained by Border Patrol can be deported back immediately. They don't have to be given temporary shelter, are not allowed to attempt contact with parents or relatives in the US, and are certainly not granted a right to a formal hearing in court where they could defend themselves, legally, against a deportation order.

The Reagan administration funded and provided military resources to the government that massacred so many and led many others to exile. Around 1/5 of the population of El Salvador fled. Many of those who sought exile ended up as political refugees are in the United States-around 300,000 of them in Los Angeles. The whole story is an absurd, circular nightmare.

The priority juvenile docket was the government's coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children. Ethically, that answer was more than questionable. In legal terms, it was a kind of back door escape route to avoid dealing with an impending reality suddenly knocking at the country's front doors.

Many children, though they should be given an equal right to due process, are being deported before they can even find lawyers who will take on their cases. What child can find a lawyer in 21 days?

Being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don't dare even look.

"Why did you come to the United States?" I ask children in immigration court.Their answers point to push factors-the unthinkable circumstances the children are fleeing: extreme violence, prosecution and coercion by gangs, mental and physical abuse, forced labor, neglect, abandonment. It's not even the American Dream they pursue, but rather the modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.