A Set of Borders to Cross

The boy's father, a field laborer, borrowed money last year from an acquaintance to tide the family over while he was ill and unable to work. Lara worked the fields, too, having left school after fifth grade to help his father support the family. But this year, with both of them working, they made enough to cover only the interest payments and none of the loan principal. The lender began threatening the family with eviction.

"I want to help my father, and I don't want my family to end up on the street," said the doe-eyed boy. "For me, it's no problem to be out on the street. But not for my parents or my brothers."

Lara left Honduras in early May, walking for six days through Guatemala and traveling through Mexico atop freight trains. He swam the Rio Grande into Texas one night in late May and was promptly apprehended by the Border Patrol. He was transferred to Nixon on June 6.

Lara gave his caseworker at Texas Sheltered Care the names of cousins and other distant relatives in the United States who were called to see if they would sponsor his release from the shelter. Undocumented also, they did not want to step forward for fear of being deported.

In mid-September, an immigration judge in San Antonio issued a deportation order for Lara, and the teenager cried and cried. "I don't know what we're going to do," he said later. "I've talked to Papi and he still fears that they will be evicted. I couldn't realize what I came to do. I guess that's it."

After the order, his clothing was restricted: Like other children with deportation orders, he had to wear red shorts, a white T-shirt, white socks and brown slippers at all times so the shelter could keep track of him and make sure he didn't try to run away.

Earlier this month, Lara was put on a plane by ICE agents and sent back to Honduras.

But not all stories end that way.

A Bittersweet First Meeting

Last December, after years of telephone conversations, Yeni Patricia Castillo Medrano, a tall, soft-spoken 17-year-old from El Salvador, met her father for the first time. Having obtained legal papers to live in the United States and travel back home, her father, who lives in Northern Virginia, visited El Salvador for the first time in 17 years.

She was thrilled to meet him, yet Castillo admitted the visit didn't go well. "I treated him badly; I spoke to him badly," she said. This is a normal reaction, immigration experts say, from children whose parents leave home to make a better life for their families. But in late August, Castillo told her father in a telephone conversation that she wanted to join him. He paid almost $7,000 to a smuggling ring to bring her to him.

Castillo and four other teenagers from her village illegally entered Mexico from Guatemala aboard a makeshift raft, traveled in the baggage compartment of a bus through Mexico and floated on inner tubes across the Rio Grande.

By the time the Border Patrol apprehended Castillo in south Texas, the girl had been walking through desert and brush for almost four days. Dehydrated and ill from heat exhaustion, she was taken to a hospital for an overnight stay.

Twenty days after arriving at the Nixon shelter, Castillo flew from Houston to Reagan National Airport, where she was reunited with her father, Mardoqueo Castillo.

The girl and her father hugged tightly upon meeting, and she cried. She was sad, she said, to leave the girlfriends she had made at the Nixon shelter, but glad to be with her father.

"How would I not be happy to be here with my loved ones?" she said, before walking out of the airport terminal, her head on her father's shoulder, her hand in his.