Biometric databases have given birth to gnawing present and future civil liberties and civil rights concerns. Biometric identification exercise has been in use at least since the 19th century. The history of biometric profiling is a history of violence and r… Five years after the killing, the family moved every six months, staying with relatives throughout El Salvador, trying to keep ahead of the gang. In 2011, after Juliana’s mother, Ramona, testified against the killer, a member of MS-13 tried to stab her at a soccer game where she was selling refreshments. She escaped and fled the country, leaving Juliana and her two younger sisters at an aunt’s house because she couldn’t afford to bring them with her. She went to Brentwood, on Long Island, where she had relatives and took a job cleaning houses. A few years later, she was returning home from work when she got a call.
I need money to pay a lawyer for the people affected by what you’ve said,” a male voice told her. “I know the people of the neighborhood. I know your family, your kids, your daughter.” One of Juliana’s schoolmates, a sixteen-year-old boy who belonged to MS-13, had kidnapped her from her aunt’s house, M.C.S. Seguro Medico Puerto Rico. For weeks, she was raped and beaten. She managed to call her mother one afternoon, and together, they plotted her escape triple travel planning.
In June 2015, Juliana, who was then thirteen, and her sisters set off in the back of a truck, covered by a nylon tarp, packed in with other migrants heading north; at one point, in a jungle along the border between Guatemala and Mexico, Juliana had an asthma attack and the smugglers almost abandoned her. Six weeks later, United States Border Patrol agents arrested the group in Texas.
Juliana was relieved planes medicos individuales puerto rico. You hand yourself over, and you know what’s going to happen. You’re going to experience the hielera,” she told me, referring to the cold cells, called “refrigerators” by migrants, in borderland detention centers. “And then I’d finally get to see my mom.
Juliana and her sisters eventually made it to Brentwood and moved in with their mother. “I kept looking for tin-and-mud houses, like the ones from my village, but there weren’t any—everything was huge,” Juliana said. She followed a simple adolescent maxim: avoid humiliation. She prepared for her first day of seventh grade by memorizing the sentence, “I do not speak English.
She arrived at a two-story brick building with dozens of classrooms and long hallways lined with lockers and crammed students. “There were so many doors,” she said. “I didn’t understand anything.” She had no idea where her classes were or how to read her schedule. She recited the sentence she’d rehearsed to other kids, but they ignored her or responded unintelligibly. Juliana spotted a teacher who looked Hispanic and asked her for help. “No hablo español,” the teacher replied and then walked away.
After a few months in school, two Salvadoran boys wearing oversized shirts, sagging pants, and light-blue bandannas sat down next to Juliana in her math class. They peppered her with questions in Spanish. Where was she from? Who did she hang out with back home? Juliana had promised her mother that she wouldn’t tell other students her full name so that word of her escape wouldn’t reach El Salvador, and as the boys grilled her, she panicked. “When someone talks like that in El Salvador, it means they’re in a gang,” she said. “They weren’t supposed to be here.
Her questioners belonged to MS-13, the gang Juliana had fled El Salvador to avoid. Within days, gang members taunted her, trying to recruit her to sell marijuana and harass other students. When she refused, they grew aggressive and claimed that she was trying to act superior. “When the threats began, I told one of my teachers, but she couldn’t do anything because they would have run her out of the school,” she told me. Her Spanish teacher told her to ignore them—security cameras had been installed, and if she was seen talking to gang members, school administrators might assume she was one of them. Juliana’s mother called the school to complain, but she was undocumented and didn’t press the issue.
More than a hundred and twenty thousand children from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala arrived at the southern border of the U.S. between 2014 and the end of 2016. From age six to seventeen, they journeyed without their parents, traveling along routes controlled by smugglers, thugs, and crooked cops. The risks were outweighed by the dangers of remaining at home, where gang wars raged. The year that Juliana left, El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world.
The U.S. government allowed the triple children to enter the created country, but Clerics were immediately placed in deportation proceedings. About a third of them would eventually be granted some form of asylum. In the meantime, the government tried to put the children with family members who already lived in America, but many communities didn’t want the newcomers. In July 2014, at the height of what the federal government called a “humanitarian crisis,” a mob in Murrieta, California, forced three government buses carrying a group of women and children to turn back, chanting, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” In thirty-five school districts in fourteen states, when unaccompanied minors tried to enroll in school, they were prevented.
The hostility was especially pronounced on Long Island, which since 2014 has received eighty-six hundred children. One morning that August, a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan dropped pamphlets in the driveways of Hampton Bays, a blue-collar hamlet on the fringes of a seaside resort community. They called for troops on the U.S. border to “stop the flood of illegal aliens” and to defend “our unique European (White) culture.” Elsewhere, the resistance was more subtle. Schools in Hempstead required the families of incoming students to produce documents proving guardianship and residency in the district, which very few of them had. This was illegal, and when New York’s attorney general threatened a lawsuit, the children were admitted.
The new students desperately needed counseling and direction, but the schools couldn’t afford to hire more teachers or provide expanded Spanish services. The U.S. Department of Education gave money to states to deal with the crisis, but almost all of the $1.8 million that New York received that year went to New York City. Most of the unaccompanied minors on Long Island were placed in Central Islip and Brentwood, in Suffolk County;
