The \u201cunaccompanied minors\u201d who walked out of the brush on the banks of the Rio Grande and turned themselves into Border Patrol officers last month were not, technically, unaccompanied. In the group of 15 people that we watched that night, about half of them appeared to be adults, including men and a woman carrying a baby, in addition to several children.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the most potent image in the current immigration crisis: Tens of thousands of Central American children on a dangerous solo exodus out of their countries. But from what I\u2019ve seen reporting on this issue from the U.S. border and in Honduras, it is also somewhat misleading.<\/p>\n
The term \u201cUnaccompanied Alien Children,\u201d or UACs, as used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, refers to people up to age 17 who are traveling without a parent or legal guardian. It does not mean they are traveling alone.<\/p>\n
In migrant shelters in Mexico and Honduras, talking to both children and adults who are making these journeys, or have been deported after failing to reach the United States, the most common scenario seems to be children who are traveling in groups that include adult relatives, neighbors, smugglers or others. Often the children migrating already have one or more parents living in the United States, and they are considered \u201cunaccompanied,\u201d even if traveling with other adult relatives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In his article, Partlow concludes that children actually traveling alone “seems to be the exception.” So, the term “unaccompanied” is mostly a legal term, meaning that the child’s actual parent or guardian is not with them. <\/p>\n
While the whole situation is sad, and one can’t help but feel for the children who are no longer with their parents, this certainly puts things in a different context then how it is being portrayed. The media and political narrative conjures up images of children making a gut-wrenching and harrowing journey, that would have surely been more dangerous then staying put with their families would have been, no matter how bad the economic crisis or violence in their home countries was, to enter into the sanctuary of the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
#111516597 \/ gettyimages.com When one thinks about the border crisis we are currently facing, with thousands of children coming across the border from Mexico into the United States, images come to mind of little ones traveling through hostile territory all alone. Mexican territory that...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15,16,55,56,57],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":526,"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions\/526"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/itsateapartyyall.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}