In the 1990s, America took thousands of immigrant orphans from LA and dumped them in Tijuana jails
The Youth Border Project was not nearly as helpful as the name sounds
At midnight in 1991, 14-year-old Jose Morales arrived at a parking lot in Orange County, California. The Mexican teenager only had 42 cents in his pocket, the clothes on his back, a dirty bedroll, and a piece of paper with his cousin’s address on it. When he realized his cousin was long gone, Jose sat down on the cracked pavement and sobbed.
According to reports in the Los Angeles Times by Susan Paterno, Jose was one of the thousands of children streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border alone in the early 1990s, who would become part of “a small army of street children” in Southern California. They were called “delinquents” and “enterprising youths,” which obscured the fact that often they were fleeing abuse and extreme poverty. They crossed from Tijuana, which Kevin Starr described in his book, Coast of Dreams, as a town of “Sisyphean squalor” where trash-pickers were drawn to San Diego, which they could see in the distance.
Once they crossed the border, malnourished children as young as 8 or 9 gathered in “Orphans’ Barrios” under freeways and in parking lots across San Diego, Orange County, and Los Angeles. The lucky ones crowded in nearby apartments. They gathered into “orphan gangs,” giving each other nicknames like “Squirrel,” “Little Dracula,” and “Karate Kid,” and huffed octane boosters from coke cans, momentarily drowning out out their sense of helplessness. As one director of an immigrant shelter in Los Angeles explained at the time, “For immigrant kids, there’s no hope.”
The Orphans’ Barrios were incredibly dangerous. Young and entirely without resources or adult protection, the children were targeted by gangs. According to Starr, pedophiles in BMWs rolled through the Orphans’ Barrios, where they paid the children between $20 and $40 for sex.
Jose Morales alternated between sleeping on the parking lot’s cracked pavement and in the gutter. One night, covered in trash and his own urine, a prostitute took pity on him and let him sleep under her bed.
The orphans resorted to petty crime to get by and this landed huge swaths of them in jail, which is where they caught the attention of taxpayers who lamented the cost of housing them. Orange County, the city of Los Angeles, and San Diego decided something had to be done.
A Mexican delegation was brought to Los Angeles to discuss the matter. In 1990, 3,000 of these unaccompanied minors who had been incarcerated for petty theft were sent to jails in Tijuana to serve the remainder of their sentences in a little-known and rarely discussed effort called the Border Youth Project. Originally described as an effort to help reunite the youth with their families, the program was basically a child-dumping project, in which American authorities could deport children without a formal hearing and transport them to Tijuana jails. In exchange for receiving the children, Los Angeles county paid Mexico $117,000 in 1991. Orange County agreed to pay $54,000.
When a reporter for the Los Angeles Times inquired how authorities knew the children were being reunited with their families, they told her that recordkeeping fell to the Mexican government. The next year, the Border Youth Project turned over nearly 5,000 children to Mexican officials.
A director of an immigrant shelter in Los Angeles who had originally been in favor of the program was horrified when she traveled to Tijuana and saw the jails for herself. “They have no humanity. There are hundreds of kids in very small rooms. After seeing the place, I really don’t want to send any kids there,” she said. The Orange County head of juvenile court services disagreed. “It’s a pleasant environment,” he countered, arguing that at least it was better than their former practice of dumping them on the streets of Tijuana, with no money or support. However, it’s hard to see how this was any different. What happened to the specific children after they were released from jail is unknown, though it seems unlikely they were given any means of support. They were from all over Mexico, so they wouldn’t have had communities in Tijuana. What is known is that during this time, roughly 5,000 homeless children were roaming the streets of Tijuana.
Once they were there, the children became untraceable, vanishing from the public record altogether. One public defender, when asked what had become of one of his teenage clients who had been sent to Tijuana, said, “Usually I don’t follow up because I don’t have reason to know…Nobody follows up on these cases.”
Later that year, when Susan Paterno circled back to see what had become of Jose Morales, the boy had disappeared from the Orphans’ Barrio. Paterno eventually found a video store owner who remembered the boy. But shouting over blaring salsa music, he said of the barrio orphans, “I don’t know where they are. There seem to be a lot of them. They come and go like that.”
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