A record 34,000 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in 82 countries last year. Six-year-old Daniel made the journey to the US with two other children to escape a life of crime.
The river to me was like this,” says six-year-old Daniel, drawing a line high across his chest. “But for my cousin it was here,” he says, suggesting a waterline above his head.
Daniel made the journey across the Rio Grande, the river that forms part of the Mexico-US border, from San Rafael, his family’s village in El Salvador, with two cousins, a nine-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy.
The older boy had made the trip before - 2300 kilometres to the US border. He fished Daniel from the Rio Grande when the homemade raft they made the crossing on capsized. He waded onto American soil with a child on each hip, part of an exodus of unaccompanied minors fleeing gang violence in Central America for an unknown future in the US.
The surge of children crossing the US-Mexico border alone first began making news last northern summer. In 2014, 28,579 turned themselves in or were caught by border guards. This summer has seen another surge, though so far not to such extremes.
Daniel’s journey
The three children used buses to travel from San Rafael to the capital San Salvador and then into Guatemala and Mexico. Dodging local police, they hopped on and off buses until they reached northern Mexico where they were forced to continue on foot. After seven days they rafted then swam across the Rio Grande River to Texas where Daniel was detained before being flown to New York.
During El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, when the US backed a right-wing junta, thousands of Salvadorans made a temporary home in American cities including Los Angeles. There many of the young men formed street gangs to protect themselves.
When the war ended they took those gangs home with them. El Salvador has the highest murder rate of a nation not in war. In June alone, 700 people were killed by the gangs, which today are increasingly involved in people smuggling.
It is a neat business model, observes Armando Trull, a senior reporter with public radio station WAMU: extorting people until they want to leave, then smuggling them out. He says rumours that children were being given carte blanche once they crossed the US border were spread in part by the gangs themselves.
Daniel’s father left four years ago, planning to make a life in the US then send for his family. The gang that operated in San Rafael knew he was gone and increased their demands - known as a “war tax” - accordingly.
“The gang would send letters telling us we have days or weeks to give them money, from $500 to $1000,” says Reyna, Daniel’s mother.
She left Daniel with his grandmother and made the trip herself two-and-a-half years ago. Like Daniel, she was picked up at the border and held in a facility known to detainees as “the cooler”, near McAllen in Texas.
Six months ago, it was Daniel’s turn. The teenager and the two children left San Rafael with some money and a mobile phone so they could call Reyna each day.
She lived for those calls. But leaving Daniel in San Rafael was not an option. He would be a victim of the gangs until he was old enough to be press-ganged by them.
The trio caught a bus to San Salvador and another to the border with Guatemala. From there they caught a bus known as the Condor to the border with Mexico which - since the US exerted pressure on authorities there - has become the first serious hurdle on the route north.
The journey through Mexico consists of dodging local authorities on buses until they reach the northern states, which are more heavily policed and more jealously controlled by drug gangs.
In this area, the journey is on foot. Reyna remembers travelling with two others, sleeping in fields, each of them taking turns to stand guard.
It was here that another of her cousins was shot in the stomach running from gangsters. He is now in hospital in Mexico City, she says, and will be deported when he recovers.
After seven days on the road, the children reached Reynosa and made their crossing. I met Reyna and Daniel at a charity organisation helping with the children of “the surge”.
Reyna weeps when she tells of being reunited with Daniel at LaGuardia Airport after he was briefly detained. In a photo she took that day he has a huge gap-toothed grin.
By this stage Daniel has lost interest in our conversation and fled to the playground. Our translator tells me that when he arrived six months ago he was utterly silent.
Reyna and Daniel, and their father, join an estimated 11 million undocumented Latino immigrants in the US.
Under US law Daniel can stay with his family until his immigration case is heard. Reyna has been waiting for her own court dates.
Daniel is safe and happy now. He is enjoying school and his English is blossoming. But there is no knowing when all this might be swept away.
Reyna is adamant that this is better than the alternative: “Over there, the gangs, you can’t even look at them the wrong way. That would mean that you have one foot in the grave and one foot on the street.”
