How One Unaccompanied Minor Made Her Way To Massachusetts
Photo by Ken Lund/Flickr
Recent news reports about the U.S. government losing track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children in its care has prompted outrage and confusion. These are children who came here as unaccompanied minors and were placed with sponsors. Their sponsors are often parents or close relatives already living in the country.
Lili, now 18, was one such unaccompanied minor. She left Honduras in 2016 to search for her mother in Everett, Massachusetts. Her story really begins when she was just 16, though, traveling north with her baby son.
“There is a couple of reasons that I came here,” Lili said, “but the main reason is because there is a lot of violence in Honduras.”
We agreed to refer to Lili by her middle name because she fears for her family’s safety and because she’s a survivor of rape. Her son, she said, is a product of that sexual assault.
When Lili and her son left Honduras in 2016, the country had one of the highest rates of violent deaths among women in the world.
“I left in the morning one day, took my kid and a couple of money and took a bus to the Guatemala border,” she said.
From there, Lili made her way up to Mexico, where she worked for a few weeks. She then found a smuggler to help her cross the border into the U.S.