Tell Me How it Ends

An Essay in Forty Questions

Valeria Luiselli

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780008271930
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A powerful polemic about the US-Mexico border and what is happening to the tens of thousands of children arriving in the US without papersA powerful polemic about the US-Mexico border and what is happening to the tens of thousands of children arriving in the US without papers'We are driving across Oklahoma in early June when we first hear about the waves of children arriving, alone and undocumented, from Mexico and Central America. Tens of thousands have been detained at the border. What will happen to them? Where are the parents? And why have they undertaken a terrifying, life-threatening journey to enter the United States? '' We are driving across Oklahoma in early June when we first hear about the waves of children arriving, alone and undocumented, from Mexico and Central America. Tens of thousands have been detained at the border. What will happen to them? Where are the parents? And why have they undertaken a terrifying, life-threatening journey to enter the United States? 'Valeria Luiselli works as a volunteer at the federal immigration court in New York City, translating for unaccompanied migrant children. Out of her work has come this book – a search for answers and an urgent appeal for humanity and compassion in response to mass migration, the most significant global phenomenon of our time. Valeria Luiselli works as a volunteer at the federal immigration court in New York City, translating for unaccompanied migrant children. Out of her work has come this book – a search for answers and an urgent appeal for humanity and compassion in response to mass migration, the most significant global phenomenon of our time.

III

HOME

Often, my daughter asks me:

So, how does the story of those children end?

I don’t know how it ends yet, I usually say.

My daughter often follows up on the stories she half-hears. There is one story that obsesses her, a story I only tell her in pieces and for which I have not yet been able to offer a real ending. It begins with two girls in the courtroom. They’re five and seven years old, and they’re from a small village in Guatemala. Spanish is their second language, but the older girl speaks it well. We sit around the mahogany table in the room where the interviews take place, and their mother observes from one of the benches in the back. The little girl concentrates on her coloring book, a crayon in her right hand. The older one has her hands crossed as an adult might, and she answers my questions one by one. She is a little shy but tries to be clear and precise in her answers, delivering all of them with a big smile, toothless here and there.

Why did you come to the United States?

I don’t know.

How did you travel here?

A man brought us.

A coyote?

No, a man.

Was he nice to you?

Yes, he was nice, I think.

And where did you cross the border?

I don’t know.

Texas? Arizona?

Yes! Texas Arizona.

I realize it’s impossible to go on with the interview, so I ask the lawyers to make an exception and allow the mother to meet with us, at least for a while. We go back to question one, and the mother responds for the girls, filling holes, explaining things, and also telling her own version of the story.

When the younger of her daughters turned two, she decided to migrate north and left them in the care of their grandmother. She crossed two national borders with no documents. She wasn’t detained by Border Patrol and managed to cross the desert with a group of people. After a few weeks she arrived in Long Island, where she had a cousin. That’s where she settled. Years passed, and the girls grew up. Years passed, and she remarried. She had another child.

One day she called her mother—the grandmother of the girls—and told her that the time had come: she had saved enough money to bring the girls over. I don’t know how the grandmother responded to the news of her granddaughters’ imminent departure, but she noted the instructions down carefully and later explained them to the girls: in a few days, a man was going to come for them, a man who would help them get back to their mother. She told them that it would be a long trip, but that he would keep them safe. The man had taken many other girls from their village safely across the two borders to their mothers, and everything had gone well. So everything would go well this time, too.

The day before they left, their grandmother sewed a ten-digit telephone number on the collars of the dress each girl would wear throughout the entire trip. It was a ten-digit number the girls had not been able to memorize, as hard as she tried to get them to, so she had decided to embroider it on their dresses and repeat, over and over, a single instruction: they should never take this dress off, not even to sleep, and as soon as they reached America, as soon as they met the first American policeman, they were to show the inside of the dress’s collar to him. He would then dial the number and let them speak to their mother. The rest would follow.

The rest did follow: they made it to the border, were kept in custody, in the hielera, for an indefinite time period (they didn’t remember how many days, but they said that they were colder there than they had ever been). After that they went to a shelter, and a few weeks later they were put on a plane and flown to JFK, where their mother, baby brother, and stepfather were waiting for them.

That’s it? my daughter asks.

That’s it, I tell her.

That’s how it ends?

Yes, that’s how it ends.

But of course it doesn’t end there. That’s just where it begins, with a court summons: a first Notice to Appear.

Once children receive a Notice to Appear, they have to present themselves in immigration court. If they don’t show up (because they fear going to court, or perhaps because they have since moved, or because they simply didn’t get the notice) they are usually “removed in absentia.” An immigration judge, assisted by a translator, informs the ones who do show up that they have the right to an attorney, but at no expense to the U.S. government. In other words, it is the children’s responsibility to find and pay for a lawyer, or find a free lawyer, who can help them defend their case against the U.S. government attorney seeking to deport them.

A typical immigration hearing begins with the judge stating the basic facts:

This is September 15, 2014, New York, state of New York. This is Immigration Judge [name of judge].

This is in the matter of [name of the child respondent].

Then come questions directed at the respondent (the child), such as if he or she responds to Spanish, if he or she is enrolled in school, and whether he or she lives at the given address. Then the judge states that he or she will be speaking to the attorney and asks:

How do you plead?

We admit the allegations and concede the charge.

And what is the charge? Fundamentally, that the child came to the United States without lawful permission and is therefore “removable.” Admitting this charge alone leads to deportation unless the child’s attorney can find those potential avenues of relief that form a defense against it. The admission of guilt, then, is a kind of door that the law holds half open. It is the only way for the accused to begin defending themselves against a categorical sentence and seek legal avenues to immigration relief.

The most common forms of immigration relief are asylum and special immigrant juvenile (SIJ) status. If the child is eligible for either of these, he or she may remain in the United States legally and can later apply for lawful permanent residency and even citizenship.

Usually, the kind of harm the children are fleeing makes them eligible for asylum or SIJ status. This status can be obtained in two steps. First, a family court must determine that they are impeded from reunification with at least one of their parents because of abuse, abandonment, neglect, or a similar basis under state law, and that reunification or return to their home country is not in their best interest. Once the family court makes this ruling, the minor can request SIJ status in the immigration court.

Asylum, on the other hand, is granted to people who are fleeing persecution (or who have a fear of future persecution) based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and/or association with a particular social group. It is very difficult to be granted asylum because it is not enough that these children have suffered unspeakable harm, that they will continue to fall victim to the systematic and targeted violence of criminal groups. The harm or persecution must be proved to be because of at least one of those four classifications. The main problem with asylum—the reason lawyers often consider it a secondary choice—is that if it’s granted, the children can never return to their home country, where they fear being persecuted, without jeopardizing their immigration status in the United States. Less common are the U visa, which can only be granted to victims of certain crimes, and the T visa, for victims of human trafficking.

If the child answers the questionnaire “correctly,” he or she is more likely to have a case strong enough to increase its chances of being placed with a pro bono attorney. An answer is “correct” if it strengthens the child’s case and provides a potential avenue of relief. So, in the warped world of immigration, a correct answer is when, for example, a girl reveals that her father is an alcoholic who physically or sexually abused her, or when a boy reports that he received death threats or that he was beaten repeatedly by several gang members after refusing to acquiesce to recruitment at school and has the physical injuries to prove it. Such answers—more common than exceptional—may open doors to potential immigration relief and, eventually, legal status in the United States. When children don’t have enough battle wounds to show, they may not have any way to successfully defend their cases and will most likely be “removed” back to their home country, often without a trial.

The interpreters have no control over the type of legal assistance a child receives. We listen to their stories in Spanish and note key points in English. We must simultaneously pay close attention to the details and find ways to distribute them into categories. On the one hand, it’s important to record even the most minor details from each story because a good lawyer can use them to strengthen a case in ways that might not have been evident to an interpreter. On the other, although it’s not in the protocol, we often look for more general categories for each story that may tip the legal scale in favor of the future client in a future trial—categories such as “abandonment,” “prostitution,” “sex trafficking,” “gang violence,” and “death threats.” But we cannot make up the answers in their favor, nor can we lead the children to tell us what is best for their cases, as much as we would like to. It can be confusing and bewildering, and I find myself not knowing where translation ends and interpretation starts.

During the interviews, I sometimes note the children’s answers in the first person and sometimes in the third:

I crossed the border by foot.

She swam across the river.

He comes from San Pedro Sula.

She comes from Tegucigalpa.

She comes from Guatemala City.

He has not ever met his father.

Yes I have met my mother.

But she doesn’t remember the last time she saw her.

He doesn’t know if she abandoned him.

She sent money every month.

No, my father didn’t send money at all.

I worked in the fields, ten or maybe fifteen hours a day.

The MS-13 shot my sister. She died.

Yes, my uncle hit me often.

No, my grandmother never hit us.

As predictable as the answers start to become after months of conducting the interviews, no one is ever prepared for hearing them.

If the children are very young, in addition to translating from one language to another, the interpreters have to reconfigure the questions, shift them from the language of adults to the language of children. When I interviewed the girls with the dresses, for example, I had to break many of the intake questions up into simpler, shorter phrasings, until I was finally able to find a bridge to communicate with them. Question twenty-two, for example—“Did you stay in touch with your parents”—went through various iterations:

When you were there, how did you contact your mother?

What?

Did you talk to your mother when she was here and you were there?

Back where?

Did you mother call you on the phone?

Finally, she nodded, looking at me in silence. Then she searched for her mother’s eyes, found them, and smiled. She relaxed a little and began to speak.

Yes, she told me. She had talked to her mother on the phone, and her mother had told them stories about snowstorms, and big avenues, and traffic jams, and later, stories about her new husband and their new baby brother. After that, we asked her mother to return to the area reserved for relatives of the children.

Questions twenty-three through twenty-six are a little less complicated, though redundant, and the girl was able to respond to them less hesitantly:

Twenty-three: Did you go to school in your country of origin?

Did you go to school in Guatemala?

No.

Twenty-four: How old were you when you started going to school?

I didn’t go to school.

Twenty-five: When did you stop going to school?

I already told you, I never went!

Twenty-six: Why not?

I don’t know.

I didn’t know how to ask questions twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and twenty-nine: “Did you work in your home country?”; “What sort of work did you do?”; “How many hours did you work each day?” But I knew that I had to find a way to do it. We were already halfway through the questionnaire, and I still didn’t feel sure that a lawyer would take on the case. I reworded, translated, interpreted:

What kinds of things did you do when you lived with your grandmother?

We played.

But besides playing?

Nothing.

Did you work?

Yes.

What did you do?

I don’t remember.

I went on to questions thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, and thirty-three. The older girl answered them while the little one undressed a crayon and scratched its trunk with her fingernail.

Did you ever get in trouble at home when you lived in your home country?

No.

Were you punished if you did something wrong?

No.

How often were you punished?

Never.

Did you or anyone in your family have an illness that required special attention?

What?

The girl’s answers weren’t really working. They weren’t working in their favor, that is. What I needed to hear, though I didn’t want to hear it, was that they had been doing hard labor, labor that put their safety and integrity in danger; that they were being exploited, abused, punished, maybe threatened with ...