Eyes Opened in El Salvador
8 days and many reasons why the Obama Administration’s ICE Raids on children and families can’t be right.
The streets in San Salvador are littered with trash, dusty from the heat, and make a simple task like walking more of careful calculation. Local retailers have their products laid out across the sidewalk — shoes, tires, you name it. The street we are on is the center of the city. This is where the brothels are.
Each woman who is working has a small room, just big enough for her bed, maybe a few pictures on the wall, and a big metal door with barricaded metal cross-hatch. Some doors are open, and the women are lounging on their beds, eating or resting — on break. When we talk to them, we try not to make too much eye contact, or you can see the fear, the emptiness, and the hopelessness dart across their faces. The doors that are closed, you try not to look at, because you really don’t want to think too hard about what’s going on behind them. Interspersed between the rooms are bars, with this music — that I still can’t get out of my head — that plays on repeat, this lazy carnival soundtrack. Both times we walk down the street it is in the middle of the morning, but there are men getting drunk in these bars. Other men just loitering on the street, eyeing, gawking. They are either potential clients, deciding which door to go in, or they belong to a gang, and are keeping an eye on their income, ensuring these women are working enough so the paycheck they collect at the end of the day is hefty.
This is El Salvador, one piece of it that I saw over the 8 days I spent there. The few glimpses I was able to get of this country were incredible, and incredibly eye-opening.
Beneath the things we read about in the news: the gang violence, corrupt government, prostitution and immense poverty (and all of these things are so very prevalent), there are people. People who are warm and loyal, who care about their families; and children who are joyful and energetic, who smile big and give tight hugs, who have been through so much and who deserve any chance we can give them.
In El Refujio, we visit a village wrecked with poverty, and tormented by gang violence. Driving through the streets you can see the gang-tagging on every blank surface. This village is territory of the 18th street gang, one of the two largest in El Salvador, and only a few months ago was a hot spot for activity — drugs, rape, the likes. The homes are cement squares, most of them built by USAID on a small strip of land, the only residential area saved between two farm fields — most likely owned by big corporations. The one road is barely large enough for our blue van, and scatters dust off our tire wheels. Everyone is home in the middle of the day, from young girls, fathers, and grandmothers. Any income they are earning will be supplemented to the gang members who “protect” their neighborhood. The only person exempt from extortion fees is the pastor and his wife who hold church in a small one-door garage. They can’t make money — which means many days they do not eat — the only solution to stay out of the control of the gangs. At the homes that we visit, the men have their shirts off, sweating in the 90 degree heat without anything to keep them cool, swatting at the mosquito-heavy air — we only hope the normal kind, not carrying Zika.
These are the people in El Salvador. The young girls traded as girlfriends to gang members, the 14 year old boys joining up to protect their families, the families in poverty, woman in prostitution with no other means to provide, all of them vulnerable to such violence. All of the warm and welcoming and joyful, perseverant in a way I have never seen.
And these are the people who are flowing over the U.S. border in skyrocketing numbers, trying to find sanctuary, trying to find the same hospitality and the same protection as was offered to us as we entered their churches, their schools, their homes. Some of these people have successfully fled this violence, fled this prostitution, fled this poverty and fled to the United States, and yet that may not mean anything for them soon.
Last week, the Obama administration planned to begin a new series of raids on families and children who have migrated to the United States from places like El Salvador in the Northern Triangle. If these raids resemble the raids which took place in early January, they will likely target new migrant families who are ‘ineligible to qualify as refugees’ for arrest and eventual deportation back to the countries that they fled from. In most cases, these are families that haven’t had any sort of chance to prove their case for protection, through a variety of due process violations.
El Salvador is today the most dangerous country in the Western Hemisphere — with approximately 6,650 homicides registered in 2015 alone, 100.8 people are killed for every 100,000. Killings like this are at a level not seen since the end of the country’s civil war in 1992. In March El Salvador overtook Honduras as the murder capital of the world. And the violence is only escalating. Violence that these ICE raids would be sending families and children back to.
In FY 2016, nearly 7, 914 children fled violence in El Salvador, and another 13,607 from Hondurus and Guatemala, the other two Northern Triangle countries. These children are to me vigorously brave, fearless and deserve the safety they have fled violence, drugs and extortion to get to. These ICE raids — and the message these raids are sending — targeting children, targeting woman they say something else however.
In Lolotique, a tiny town in St. Miguel on the east coast of El Salvador we visit a high school, in the dim-lit basement hallways of a building that could be falling apart. We receive hugs and questions and some pointed fingers as the many high school students all crowd into the cramped space between their classrooms. They wear the same uniforms as the elementary school we visited the day before, just barely older; but you can tell already dealing with so much more. Our translator, a native from San Salvador, points to the rowdy group of boys jostling in the back and unable to pay attention. “If I asked them all to lift up their shirts right now, I wonder how many would have gang tattoos on their chests,” A jarring comment, and yet what else are their options? Staying out is not an easy feat. The proof he knows what he is talking about is in the gang tagging sprawled across the bathroom stalls in the men’s room — graffiti-style. This territory is MS 13.
Overpowering youth gang involvement in the schools in Lolotique, and in every school, threatening boys all across the country — this is what we would be sending these children back to.
The prostitution we witnessed in San Salvador — the young woman, mothers struggling to feed their children, unable to find any other means to make money — this is what we would be sending them back to.
The community poverty, days without food, torment from neighboring gangs in El Refujio — this is what we would be sending them back to.
Just thinking about this makes my skin crawl. Because it makes me think about 12-year-old Michele, who I met at a tiny church in Cuscatasingo, who helped out the young mothers by playing with their babies, and who sat next to me during the service and helped me understand through the Spanish language preaching. It makes me think of Hazel at Ebenezer’s trade school, who smiled so big, and was blind to the older boys sitting in the row behind her, slyly rolling a joint between them, who probably already were tattooed with gang numbers. It’s not Michele or Hazel that we are targeting in these raids, but it is children just like them.
When it comes down to it, we have been pushing for smart immigration reform in this country for decades. These raids are a massive step backwards in that work.
My eyes have been opened, this is not just a policy issue, it’s so personal, and it affects so many people’s lives. My eyes have been opened and I hope yours will be too.
