From then on, Wander was a marked man with a powerful gang on his tail. He shuttled northward, arriving in New York in October 2009. “I couldn’t live in Honduras anymore,” he said one day this winter, a sparse mustache above his lips, his cheeks freckled lightly with acne. “These people are consuming my country.”

Wander is part of a new surge of immigrants crossing into the United States: young Central Americans fleeing swelling violence in countries where the state is too weak or too corrupt to protect them. In fiscal year 2009, just over 6,000 immigrants under the age of 18 were taken into custody by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, which provides services for unaccompanied immigrant youth after their apprehension. In 2014, the government is planning for 60,000.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

The surge has prompted the Obama administration to declare a humanitarian crisis and establish emergency shelters for young migrants in California, Oklahoma, and Texas. It has also forced U.S. officials to face a new round of immigration-related questions: Who should receive safe haven in the country and who should be sent back? And how will courts, hospitals, and other institutions deal with the influx?

Most of the young migrants in government custody come from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Seventy percent are between the ages of 15 and 17. And three-quarters of them are male. Over the past decade, massive efforts to root out the drug trade in Colombia and Mexico have transformed Central American countries into critical and hotly contested slices of territory for cartels funneling narcotics into the United States. The wave of child and teen émigrés, experts say, is related to the ascension of these gangs, who feed on the money and manpower that youths provide, and pursue them with an almost-religious persistence.

In 2012, the Women’s Refugee Commission, a research and advocacy group, conducted field studies to examine the causes of this unprecedented influx. Of the 151 young immigrants interviewed, nearly 80 percent said that violence was the main reason young people were fleeing their countries.

“It’s push factors, not pull factors,” said Jennifer Podkul, a senior program officer at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “These countries are losing a generation.”

Those interviewed by WRC described gangs with “join or die” policies. They spoke of limbs left on doorsteps, and of gang members who used rape to coerce girls into selling drugs. “They said that staying in their country would guarantee death, and that making the dangerous journey would at least give them a chance to survive,” reads a report summarizing the commission’s findings.

Wander, for one, never wanted to leave Honduras. He was comfortable there. In New York, he works 13-hour days for minimum wage at a supermarket, and lives in a partitioned section of a living room. He has two young children back home. (After he fled, they moved with their mother to another Honduran city where they can live more anonymously.) They coo to him over the cell phone he keeps strapped to his waist. Papi, papi, te amo.