It’s the summer of 2015, and the failed migrants disembark from the line of buses looking haggard. The driver tosses their belongings onto the sidewalk: backpacks, dusty duffel bags, plastic sacks secured with double knots. It’s early afternoon, and the day’s first five buses have arrived at the San Salvador reception center carrying more than 175 people from Siglo XXI, the massive detention center in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico. Buses from another detention center farther north will arrive later today. The authorities in Tapachula have phoned most of the migrants’ relatives to let them know when to expect their loved ones. The families congregate beneath tents in the front of the San Salvador compound, waiting.
“The migrants are very vulnerable,” says Ana Solorzano, director of the reception center run by the Salvadoran government. “What you see in some of their eyes when they get off the bus…”
The migrants walk into the center, bags slung over shoulders. All their shoelaces were removed in detention to prevent anyone from harming him- or herself, so the tongues of their sneakers flap free as they walk. Under a tent donated by Save the Children, reception center staff greet them with snacks and soda, then point them into an air-conditioned room. In the front row, a plump woman in a bright orange blouse opens snack boxes for her two young children. She takes a compact out of her purse while they eat and slowly powders the sheen off of her face.
The immigration officials explain the registration process, which must take place before they are released: We’ll fingerprint you, let you call home, ask you some questions, make sure you’re safe and healthy and have everything you need.
“Yeah, yeah, we know how it all works, we’ve done this a hundred times already!” a guy shouts, laughing.
The woman in orange laughs, too. She snaps the compact back into her purse. “Come on,” she says to her kids. They stand and join the line to be fingerprinted.
Children traveling alone are brought into a separate room to meet with a child-welfare worker. The twenty or so children today are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. If they’re caught farther north in Mexico, they’re sent home by plane. Those under twelve will come by plane regardless of where in Mexico they were caught.
The majority of deportations to El Salvador used to come from the United States, but now they come from Mexico: in June only 1,900 came from the United States but 3,000 from Mexico. The Mexican immigration crackdown is part of Mexico’s Programa Frontera Sur, an operation to secure its southern border from drugs and migrants. The United States encourages and has heavily funded these efforts, even more so since the migrant crisis last summer. If migrants can be stopped and deported from Mexico, they won’t become the United States’ problem.
This year the number of unaccompanied minors making it to the United States is already down; 57,496 were taken into federal ORR custody in 2014 whereas there were 33,726 by the end of 2015, largely because of the Mexican crackdown. It was a decrease of more than 40 percent, while Mexico’s apprehensions increased by 67 percent.
The group of children begin their interviews. Where were they from? Why did they leave? Would they feel safe going home? Were they being mistreated? Would they try to go north again?
“After my birthday,” one boy says, which is in a couple of weeks. He wants to spend his birthday at home.
“You see,” an immigration official says, referring to the almost-birthday boy. “He can’t be all that worried about whatever is going on at home if he can wait a few more weeks to spend his birthday with his mommy.”
Nearly all the children, according to officials, say they will try again: “We’ve seen children who’ve tried six, seven times.”
Returnees have been a part of El Salvador’s social fabric for decades, since even before the civil war days in the eighties. But not on this scale. Everyone—from bus drivers and immigration officials in El Salvador to the Salvadoran consul in Mexico to the migrants themselves—will tell you the migration “emergency” in El Salvador is not going to stop. In response to the crackdown in southern Mexico, people are simply changing their routes: moving on foot through the mountains, boarding too-packed boats in the middle of the night. These same buses will be back next week with more.