Mark Curnutte

mcurnutte@enquirer.com

HAMILTON – The four young cousins landed in the Arizona desert, hungry, thirsty and exhausted after a three-day trek to cross the border. The youngest child, 6, couldn't take another step. The others kicked and screamed to fight off the attempted rape of the oldest girl, 17, by their Guatemalan guide.

When he finally fled, the children were left to fend for themselves for a day and a night in a new land they desperately longed to call home.

The ragtag group eventually arrived in Greater Cincinnati, four of the 62,000 unaccompanied children making up one of the largest immigration exoduses to reach U.S. borders in decades.

The wide-scale flight since October is unusual for its young demographic, driven partly by the false idea that immigrant children will be more welcome in the U.S. than adults. Because of its potential to change the makeup of the nation's schools, communities and cities, the flight also is igniting new debate over an old clash of values: the rights of a country to defend its borders versus an obligation to protect would-be newcomers from poverty or violence abroad.

The Enquirer found three of the children living today with their mother in a small Hamilton apartment; a family in Northern Kentucky is sheltering the fourth child, a niece.

They're typical of the flight of the border children from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico – about 30,000 of whom have been resettled with relatives across the country. Thousands more wait in border shelters and tent cities stretching from the southern tip of Texas to California.

While politicians from Washington to state capitals argue over policy, the tiny group that made its way here fights a more personal battle daily. Their mother works two jobs. The children prepare to return to school. None speaks English; an interpreter was required for this story.

And a bigger threat looms: Tuesday, the three siblings must appear in a courtroom in Cleveland, where an immigration judge could order them sent back to Guatemala in 30 days.

Family flees violence, Seeks means of support

The Escalante cousins left Cuilco, Guatemala, last December, fleeing a region in western Guatemala known for violence, drug smuggling and opium poppy farming.

Modesta Escalante, the 32-year-old mother of three of the children, told of a friend hit with a crude club by a machete-carrying member of a drug gang who then stole her purse. Modesta said robbers once knocked on her door and tried to force their way in. Her screams and those of her children brought neighbors to the rescue, who chased away the robbers.

When her husband left her in early 2012 to emigrate illegally to the U.S., Modesta had no money, food or a job. She soon asked her brother and his wife, parents of the 17-year-old who came North with her children, if they would care for her son and two daughters until she could reclaim them. They agreed, and Modesta set out for the United States.

"When I went through the desert, I suffered very much," she said in Spanish on a recent day at her home. "I walked for four days and four nights. I would faint but had to keep going."

She settled in a two-room apartment in Hamilton, drawn to the area because she knew other Guatemalans who lived here and because she thought her children's father had come here, too. She always intended to send for her children as soon as she could.

Today, Modesta attends San Carlos Borromeo Church in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Carthage. She works full-time as a janitor in a restaurant and another 18 hours a week planting flowers in a nursery. Like most working, undocumented immigrants, she has an IRS identification number and pays local, state and federal taxes on her earnings.

That amounts to about $600 a week. When her children were still in Guatemala, she sent her brother $300 a month. The rest paid for food, shelter and transportation here.

Back home, Modesta's children survived in a land of maras or marabuntas – gangs that originated in the U.S. but were sent back to Central America in a mass deportation of violent criminals. Marabuntas are the carnivorous ants of Central America that destroy all life in their path. In the Guatemalan villages, the mara gangs are feared by local government officials and act with impunity, going so far as to forcibly recruit boys. Modesta's concern: Gangs spreading out from Cuilco would ensnare her son and other boys.

She feared for her girls, too. Central American experts say many are either forced into gang-controlled prostitution rings or enter the street life voluntarily as their only means to help support their families.

"I was afraid for them to stay," Modesta said. "I was afraid for them to come here."

The fear is in the numbers. In 2009, only 1,115 unaccompanied children from Guatemala crossed the border. That number is now 14 times higher: From Oct. 1, 2013, through July 31, some 15,733 children left Guatemala for the U.S.

The spike is similar for border children from Honduras and El Salvador – all outnumbering the volume of Mexican children who have attempted to cross alone, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Ohio cities offer to shelter children

Ohio's response to the border children issue reflects the nation's.

Ohio's Republican governor, John Kasich, like many Republican and Democrat governors, is frustrated by what his spokesman says is the lack of information coming from the Obama Administration.

"We are powerless to accept (border children). We are powerless to reject them. Right now, we are not involved in the process," Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols told The Enquirer. "We don't know who is here or where they are or if they've been sent back."

Public debate has intensified as more border kids arrive.

Earlier this month, Cleveland Tea Party Patriots criticized Kasich in a press release for "supporting illegal aliens at the expense of Ohio citizens." The group said it was one of 40 "conservative and liberty groups" asking Kasich to "prevent any forced relocation of illegal immigrants in Ohio."

To deal with the flood of illegal arrivals, the nation's 59 immigration courts set new priorities July 18 to speed the deportation of thousands of children. Unaccompanied border children are to receive a hearing within 21 days of their identification as illegal immigrants by the Department of Homeland Security.

Getting the children into court fast is the first priority of the Executive Office for Immigration, which oversees immigration courts. But the courts are swamped. The Cleveland court, for instance, has 584 pending juvenile cases.

When Modesta's three children go to court Tuesday, their Cleveland lawyers will ask the judge to delay a ruling to keep the kids here as long as possible. If the judge denies a continuance, the children – Yesser, now 14, and his sisters, Marialinda, 12, and Yury, now 7 – could be ordered to leave the country within 30 days.

"Their options are very limited," their attorney, Jennifer Peyton, said Thursday. Migrants who flee violence and high-crime countries are normally not eligible for asylum in the United States. People are eligible if they are victims of genocide or members of specific social groups who have been targets of violence or discrimination in their homelands.

Modesta's hearing has not been scheduled.

Cities also are struggling to come to grips with the immigration surge.

Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said he supports the efforts of Catholic Charities of Southwestern Ohio to shelter border children. The mayors of Dayton and Columbus also have offered to provide temporary housing in their cities.

Ohio state Rep. John Adams, a Republican from Sidney, has countered with legislation to prevent Ohio social service agencies and municipalities from receiving state money if they house immigrants living here illegally. Adams said some immigrant children may spread communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis, or pose a public safety issue because they're gang members.

All children in the border shelters receive a medical exam and receive updated inoculations. All four of the children in Modesta Escalante's family have vaccination records from the camps and were marked as "free of contagious disease."

Long journey ends with happy reunion

The children's three-day journey from Guatemala to the U.S. started with a two-hour walk to meet their "coyote," the term for the hired hand who would lead them across the border.

Modesta isn't sure who paid the man, but she thinks her brother did to rid himself of the responsibility of supporting his daughter and Modesta's three children. Smugglers charge from $4,000 to $10,000 a trip. They have to pay off government officials, gangs that control buses and trains, and drug cartels controlling the route through Mexico.

"I was really scared when we left," Yesser said.

The children's next leg was by bus, which stopped in Altar, Sonora, the northern Mexico town that's the jumping off point for most people crossing the Sonoran Desert toward Arizona. Once a sleepy agricultural town, Altar's main industry now is human smuggling.

After three days of walking, the children needed rest in the Arizona desert. That's when their guide tried to rape the 17-year-old girl.

The children said they fought off the attack and the coyote ran away, dropping his backpack in the process. The children found the smuggler's cellphone inside his back pack and used it to send a text to Modesta, who told them to call 911.

A day later, agents from the U.S. Border Patrol arrived and drove the children to what they described as a jail. Within an hour, other immigration officials took them to a shelter in the Phoenix suburb of Youngstown, where they would stay for 18 days.

"We didn't have any food left, nothing," said Yury, sitting on the green apartment carpet and playing with a pink plastic car and doll given to her at the shelter.

Yesser said children in the shelter were from several Central American counties: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico.

"Each one of us was given food and a bed," he said. "They let us take showers."

The two older girls were given pregnancy tests.

Beyond interviews with social workers and mandatory English classes, the children watched television indoors and played soccer outside.

"We felt safe there," Yesser said.

Family faces separation: Children have court date

Back in Hamilton, Modesta feared her children would be deported before she ever saw them again. On Dec. 28, she said she had a dream in which a woman appeared to her and said her children were coming soon to join her. Later that day, the social worker called and asked if she had enough money for four airline tickets from Phoenix to Cincinnati. She said yes and wired the money.

Before they left the detention shelter, the children received deportation documents, which listed their court dates. Many immigrant children and mothers in the shelters, however, confuse the documents for permisos, permits to stay in the United States.

On Dec. 29, Modesta saw her children for the first time in 15 months. "They were very, very skinny," she said.

Modesta has put the weight back on her children in the past eight months. And the family's two-bedroom apartment, though sparse, has become a safe and relatively happy home.

The walls are blank white stucco. The living room has a used couch, and a television sets on a stand. The kitchen table is two card tables arranged side by side. Eight folding chairs go with the tables.

Her children sit attentively on the couch beside their mother as she tells her family's story. Only Yury gets up during a two-hour conversation to get her toy car and doll from a bedroom. She brushes the doll's hair and begins to braid it.

Marialinda wears a Catholic rosary around her neck.

Modesta tries not to upset her children with worry about Tuesday's court date. The children are hoping to go back to school in and around Hamilton. Yesser wants to continue playing soccer.

At night, even after some work days that stretch to 14 hours, Modesta prays in bed that her family will be allowed to stay and become Americans.

"I trust God that things will work out well," Modesta said. "I do not want to go backwards. There is nothing for us in Guatemala except danger and poverty. I have lived through a lot of sadness and suffering in my life. So have my children. We want to stay here and be good people and help our new country."

At issue: Border children

From last October through September, 90,000 unaccompanied children from Central America will have illegally crossed the U.S. Southwest border, fleeing escalating violence and poverty caused by drug gangs and the lack of work. Parents are sending their children north in a last-ditch effort to save their lives amid a widespread false perception they'll be more welcomed here than adults.

U.S. anti-drug policies in the Caribbean and Colombia have shifted drug-smuggling routes overland through Central America, leading to unprecedented violence. The homicide rate in Guatemala is 39.9 people per 100,000, compared to 4.7 in the United States. Honduras' murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000 is the world's highest.

The mass exodus has ignited an already contentious debate about U.S. immigration policy and ongoing efforts to make it either more lenient or stricter.

Two U.S. senators, one each from Ohio and Kentucky, have opposing views.

Sen. Mitchell McConnell, R-Ky.:

Return children to their home countries

"Some are suggesting that these children should be taken in and housed indefinitely within our borders at taxpayer expense – but I believe that would be a mistake. These minors should be treated humanely and returned to their home country immediately, not shipped and housed throughout the nation. That's why I recently introduced an amendment to the U.S. Senate to address the crisis at the border.

"My amendment would require the Obama administration to consult with the governor of a state and satisfy specific criteria before being allowed to transport unaccompanied alien minors into Kentucky or any other state.... We must enforce our nation's immigration laws and secure our border now. Securing the border is the most compassionate response to stopping these unaccompanied children from making such dangerous attempts to cross the border in the first place."

From an exclusive Aug. 3 opinion piece McConnell wrote for The Enquirer

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio:

Create a pathway for U.S. citizenship

"The recent wave of unaccompanied minors underscores the need for comprehensive immigration reform. Families fleeing extreme poverty and violence turn to the United States – as generations of immigrants have – for a new opportunity and a chance for a better life. We can't continue to address our nation's broken immigration system by lurching from one crisis to another.

"The Senate has passed a bipartisan bill that would secure our borders, boost the economy and create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are willing to meet strict but fair requirements. The House should act on the bill, which would create an estimated 3.22 million jobs by 2024. We also need to ensure that children fleeing violence and extreme poverty are treated humanely while their claims of asylum are reviewed. The House should act on the president's request for emergency funding to address this crisis."

From Brown's office

One local response: The Catholic Church

Pope Francis and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have called for the United States to care for the children. The Roman Catholic Church nationally has led the effort to accommodate children while they await their court hearings.

Cincinnati Archbishop Dennis Schnurr said Catholic missionaries are well-educated on conditions in Central America, where they have served for centuries. Contemporary issues, the archbishop wrote in a July 28 statement on unaccompanied children, include "innocent boys and girls victimized, sold into sex trafficking and brutally killed. Under such circumstances, children and their parents face a stark choice: Stay and become a likely victim of violence or make a dangerous journey of thousands of miles to a place of possible safety.

"Despite all of the messy, political aspects of this situation, our response as Christians is fairly straightforward. While the children are here, even if temporarily, we must care for and protect them."

Catholic Charities of Southwestern Ohio, part of the Cincinnati Archdiocese, applied last week for a grant from the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Ted Bergh, the agency's chief executive, said he expects an answer within 90 days and that Catholic Charities is capable of accommodating up to 150 children.

Terms of the grant require applicants to provide children with "counseling, recreation and education," even if their stays are temporary. Foster parents will get $86 a day, the same paid by the public foster care system. Foster parents caring for children with special needs will receive $108 a day.

Bergh said the archdiocese's network of elementary and high schools could serve children while they are here.

About 40 people have called to volunteer as foster parents, some of whom don't want to be paid, Bergh said. They all would be required to undergo the same training as foster parents with the Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services. Some diocesan congregations have inquired about being hosts for children, and arrangements have been made with two local Catholic orphanages – St. Joseph in Colerain Township and St. Aloysius in Bond Hill – to care for up to a total 54 children until foster homes can be found. The orphanages are equipped, Bergh said, to care for children who could harm themselves or other people.

"We serve the vulnerable," Bergh said, "and you couldn't be more vulnerable than these children."

The Diocese of Covington has a Catholic Charities agency, but is not getting involved in the border children issue.

Want to get involved?

People who want to volunteer or donate to help border children can call Ted Bergh at Catholic Charities of Southwestern Ohio, at 513-241-7745.

By the numbers: New immigrant children

360 In Ohio

237 In Kentucky

245 In Indiana