The U.S. Deported 90,000 Mexican Children This Year

In the first seven months of 2008, at least ninety thousand Mexican children were deported by the government of the United States, in the frame of its anti-immigration policy, with the consequent separation of thousands of families.

A report of the Task Force on Immigration Matters of the PRI in the Chamber of Deputies estimates that 15 percent of these minors, that is to say 13,500, live in the Mexican border strip, without any government protection.

The coordinator of that working group and federal deputy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, said that during the first seven months of 2008, three hundred thousand Mexican adults were also deported.

The document indicates that in addition to the abandonment of thousands of children on the Mexican side of the border, it is estimated that for every three adults that are deported from the United States, a child of Mexican origin remains homeless in that nation.

“The minors are encharged to coyotes or to human traffickers to be brought to the United States with their parents and in this attempt are practically abandoned at the Mexican border since their family, in fear of deportation, doesn’t reclaim them,” he stated.

Only from January to July, he estimated, ninety thousand minors born in Mexico, but who accompanied their parents in search of better opportunities in the United States, were thrown out by the United States government as a result of the massive deportation.

He stressed that of the 13,500 children stationed on the northern border, some stay in shelters of the DIF, or civil or religious organizations, but another percentage is abandoned and devotes itself to begging in order to survive and try to return to that country.

[Martinez], who is also secretary of the Commission on Population, Borders and Migration Affairs, explained that the said deportation of children has greater impact on entities with high migration flow such as Michoacán, Jalisco, Zacatecas and Guanajuato.