While a crackdown on illegal minors attempting to enter the U.S. has reduced this year’s expected surge to 30,000, it’s also made the journey more treacherous for those who choose to ignore the warnings, according to immigration experts:
“Those that are fleeing and trying to get out of their countries are now using even more dangerous tactics with more criminal entities and costing them even more money to get through to safety,” said Kimberly Haynes, director of children’s services for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
Haynes has already heard several accounts where minors have lost siblings on the journey:
“There are several siblings that we know never made it. We don’t know what happened to them. One of their brothers made it, one sister made it, there’s something, but there’s no understanding, no knowledge. They left at the same time, smugglers separated them, nobody knows. So there’s a huge population of loss that’s happening out of these countries that can’t even try to immigrate back if things become stable enough because they’re just a lost generation,” she said.
“Nobody’s heard from them, nobody knows what’s happened, so whether they got exploited, killed, went into criminal entities or died in the process, it’s an unknown,” added Haynes.
Additionally, the crackdown on illegal immigration has caused smuggling prices to skyrocket, jumping from $1,000 to at least $1,600 per person.
Haynes added that the fact that children and families are still trying to escape countries like Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras speaks to “something bigger going on down there.”
