Young Migrants Risk All to Reach U.S.

For all their grown-up dreams and responsibilities, youngsters like Santos often lack the maturity and experience vital to surviving an overland journey fraught with danger -- including not just the risk of death from heat exhaustion on the final trek across the desert into the United States, but also robbery, rape, or murder by bandits and corrupt authorities all the way through Mexico, immigrant advocates say.

Santos said he was beaten and robbed of all his clothes by uniformed police just a few miles into Mexico. He turned himself in to immigration authorities the next day.

Betsy Wier of Catholic Relief Services in Honduras said it could have been worse.

"There are so many ways that migrating as a vulnerable kid can go wrong," said Wier, who is overseeing a year-long, multi-nation survey of child migrants for the aid group. "There are trafficking gangs that prey on people who've lost all their money -- especially kids who are too ashamed to go home. They may use them as forced labor or for prostitution."

Also of concern, Wier added, is the haphazard manner in which children are received by their home countries after being deported from Mexico.

Mexican buses carrying Honduran deportees frequently drop them off at the border town of Agua Caliente, 18 miles from the nearest shelter.

"There's nobody there to greet them, no Honduran official checking off any list, no security watching," Wier said. "And it's such a porous border that oftentimes the kids just scramble back over the mountain towards Mexico."

Workers in the Quetzaltenango shelter are so pressured by the need to free up bed space that they barely have time to check parents' identification, let alone assess why a child left home and whether it is safe to turn him back over to the parent.

Still, at least Guatemala has a structured system for receiving children deported from Mexico: Twice a week a large purple coach carrying the minors pulls into the hot, bustling border crossing of El Carmen. Two staff members from the Quetzaltenango shelter, Edgar Gutierrez and Enrique Lopez, are always there to greet it.

Upon boarding the bus carrying Santos and Barrientos on a recent afternoon, Gutierrez made a point of reassuring the 29 youngsters aboard.

"Don't worry. Because you are minors, we have to take you to the shelter to wait for your parents," Gutierrez said. "But you're in Guatemala now. You are welcome here."

"Woo-hoo! We're home. Here they can't do anything to us!" shouted Adan Mejia, a tall 17-year-old sitting next to Santos.