Young Migrants Risk All to Reach U.S.

Santos gave a wry smile. "Yeah, but here there's no money."

The bus lurched forward and began winding through verdant mountains shrouded in misty clouds.

Santos stared out the window at a pickup truck packed with laborers heading toward Mexico. "I wish I could just jump into that pickup," he muttered. "As soon as I get home, I'm going to start saving up 3,000 quetzales [about $400] for another try."

Christian Villegas, a psychologist at a shelter for detained underage migrants in the Mexican border town of Tapachula, said almost all the minors he has encountered are determined to try again -- even when they've been caught multiple times. "It's this fixed idea that they have that you just can't get out of them," he said.

As the bus wended its way to the shelter, Gutierrez and Lopez asked for home phone numbers to call in to the shelter so staffers there could begin contacting parents.

The youngsters' responses offered a glimpse of how isolated some of the communities they had left behind were.

"But my mother doesn't speak Spanish," said an ebony-haired 17-year-old who belongs to one of the more than 20 indigenous Mayan groups in Guatemala that speak their own language.

"But my family doesn't have a phone," a boy sitting next to him interrupted.

Nonetheless, by the time the bus pulled in front of the shelter three hours later, several mothers and fathers were already waiting anxiously by the door.

Villegas, the psychologist in Mexico, said that even after handling dozens of cases, he finds it hard to fathom why parents who clearly love their children would permit them to make such a dangerous journey. "I ask them," he said. "But I've never really heard an answer that I can understand."

The parents waiting to pick up their youngsters from the Quetzaltenango shelter gave a variety of explanations.

"Yes, I know how dangerous it is for him. And I've felt such anguish since he left," Alfonsina Hernandez, a 39-year-old widow wearing a purple Mayan skirt, said of her 17-year-old son, Sergio Salalxot. "I can't keep him by force. If I had said no, he would have gone anyway without even telling me."

Perfecto Morales, 41, who spoke in halting Spanish, said that he had helped his 16-year-old son Miguel get across the border into Mexico to join a sister who is working in a poultry plant in Delaware.

"I have a sickness in my fingers," the elder Morales said, holding up hands that were bent like claws. "I can't work in the fields anymore. . . . When my son told me he wanted to help earn more money for us, I felt so proud, like I was being lifted up. . . . He is so young and he's already looking out for us."