For a Honduran mom, deportation means a child vanishes
EL PROGRESO, Honduras — Late at night, folding clothes on the couch when she couldn’t sleep, Maby Caceres would replay the moment she lost Cindy.
The family had awoken before dawn in a small room outside the southern Mexican city of Palenque. They had hailed a van for the short ride to the bus station, another milestone on their secret journey to the United States. Because the vehicle was crowded, Caceres decided that her eldest daughter should board with their neighbors, who also were fleeing Honduras. She, her husband and their three younger children would follow in a second van.
On the shoulder of the road, she handed the girl her birth certificate. Cindy Noemi Rodriguez Caceres. Date of Birth: July 28, 2003. Republic of Honduras. She pulled the slender 10-year-old into her arms.
“We’ll see you in the terminal,” she remembered saying.
“Okay, Mama.”
The police stopped Caceres’s van minutes later. Cindy kept heading north. Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants risk robbery, kidnapping and death in pursuit of a different future in the United States. Some fall off trains or perish in the desert. In recent weeks, migrants have encountered new obstacles from the U.S., Mexican and Central American governments. More patrols, more checkpoints and more deportation, to discourage a surge of people, thousands of them children, from arriving at the U.S. border.
Losing her first-born was one risk Caceres hadn’t foreseen.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/for-a-honduran-family-deportation-means-a-child-vanishes/2014/08/19/f1bd99e1-6705-4c14-97a0-53968d96bf99_story.html?hpid=z5
