NOGALES, Mexico, Dec. 4 (Reuters) Slipping into the United States, 8-year-old Adrian Ramirez began a three-day trek across the cactus-studded wastes with just a small bag of tortillas and one large hope keeping him going.
“I wanted to spend Christmas with my father in New York, but they caught us,” he said, perching on a chair at a center for child migrants in this bustling city on the Arizona border.
Picked up and swiftly repatriated by the U.S. Border Patrol, the Triqui Indian from Mexico's poor Oaxaca state is one of a growing number of children trying to cross the border into the United States without their parents.
Since January, Mexican authorities say some 6,800 youngsters have been repatriated to northern Sonora state after crossing into southern Arizona, a rise of 20 percent over the same period last year.
They say most are seeking to join moms and dads who already live stateside but who are increasingly reluctant to head back to Mexico to pick up their children because of tighter security along the 2,000-mile line.
“The parents know that they can't come back because of increased security,” said Humberto Valdes, of Mexico's family welfare agency in the northern state of Sonora.
“Now they are sending for their children to come and join them … and they obviously don't know the risks they are exposing them to.”
The majority are taken north by professional guides or “coyotes,” in a booming child smuggling trade where parents pay hefty fees of $3,000 to $5,000 to be reunited with their children — twice the amount charged for adults — welfare workers say.
“They treat them like merchandise, and it's very profitable,” Valdes told Reuters.
For the children, many of whom have a limited sense of the world they are moving through, the journey to U.S. cities sometimes thousands of miles away is a frightening and bewildering experience.
“I don't know the name of the city my mother lives in in the United States, and I didn't know the men who came to my grandmother's house to collect me,” said Blanca Isela Tejada, a tiny 13-year-old from Sonora.
More than 400 people died crossing over the border last year, most of heat exhaustion or drowning. While no figures were available for children perishing on the journey, Mexican and U.S. officials say the hazards are great.
In California, U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspectors have found youngsters crammed into airless hideaways cut into car gas tanks they call “coffin compartments,” and have charged coyotes with endangerment. U.S. Border Patrol agents in Arizona have found children as young as a few months left out in the wilds by their guides.
“We have had a case of a baby left in the brush by a fleeing coyote … and of a 4-year-old child left to fend for himself in a canyon after a group was arrested,” said Gus Soto, a spokesman with the U.S. Border Patrol in Nogales, Arizona.
“It’s lamentable,” said Valdes. “But every indication is that the phenomenon is growing.”
