A panel of reporters and photographers from the Arizona Republic discussed personal experiences reporting on the recent influx of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors, many of whom have come from Central America into the U.S., at a forum held at the Walter Cronkite School Wednesday.
Republic editorial writer Linda Valdez moderated the panel that featured reporters Bob Ortega and Daniel Gonzalez, photographers David Wallace and Michael Chow and Cronkite Borderlands Initiative reporter Emilie Eaton.
The work of the reporting teams is featured in a special online report on the Republic website titled “Pipeline of children: A border crisis.”
The current situation at the Texas border, which started to see sharp increases of Central American immigrants in October, has grown into an issue involving multiple nations and states, including Arizona, in what many people are calling a humanitarian crisis.
Ortega and Chow traveled to El Salvador and Guatemala last month. Ortega said gangs controlled many of the neighborhoods in both countries with their violence. He said one boy he met stayed in his house for the last four months of his high-school education due to threats from gang members, while his teachers passed his homework along to him through other students.
Ortega said the same kind of fear kept everyone at home in the evening.
“It was like an apocalyptic scene. There was no one on the streets, no one walking in most of the city after dark,” he said.
Gonzalez said specific threats like those from gang members are one of the many “push factors” causing Central American parents to send their children to the U.S. Other factors, he said, include extreme poverty and the widespread idea that children who come to the U.S. now would have “permisos” — legal permissions — to stay.
Gonzalez and Wallace covered the Rio Grande Valley, an area that includes McAllen, Texas and Reynosa, Mexico. Gonzalez said Reynosa is controlled by two opposing drug cartels that have killed several local journalists in the past. He said they did not feel safe in the city unless their cameras were packed and out of sight.
“You kind of operate with this sense of paranoia,” Gonzalez said.
He said that paranoia was reinforced when the reporting team learned from local journalists that one of the men present at a shelter they visited was sent by a cartel specifically to watch them.
Wallace said Gonzalez and he would not have done the reporting that they did without the help of the local journalists.
“There was one point when I really wanted to take a certain picture and I think (the local journalist’s) response was, ‘Well, do you have your will set up?’” Wallace said.
The parents of the immigrant children are well aware of the dangers of the journey to the U.S., but they have made the calculation that it is safer to send their kids on that journey than it is to stay at home, Ortega said.
He said he asked a group of teenagers, who had been caught in Mexico and were waiting to be deported back to El Salvador or Honduras, how many of them would attempt to make the journey back to the U.S. again. He said all of the children raised their hands.
“Whatever uneasiness we experienced is absolutely nothing compared to what these kids are going through on a daily basis, just based on the conversations that we’ve had with them,” Wallace said.
Ortega said that the total number of people crossing the border has actually decreased in the past several years, despite the rise in the number of children from Central America.
Enrique Melendez, an honorary consul from El Salvador, attended the event. He said the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday in an attempt to solicit funding for prevention and education for the children in these countries.
Melendez said he met with the consul of Poland last week, who discussed Poland’s own increase in immigration due to the instability and violence in Ukraine this year.
“Immigration is a worldwide issue. It’s not just centralized to the state of Arizona,” he said.
Contact the reporter at sajarvis@asu.edu
