The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life

“It’s hard to know who the particular killers in this new war are. Most homicides—especially the mass graves, like the one from which the young mother was pulled—are known to be the work of the gangs. Yet around 95 percent of crimes in the Northern Triangle go uncharged. To report a mass grave or denounce a gang member for murder carries a near-certain death sentence for the accuser and often for his or her family, too. So people keep quiet; the bodies pile up.”

The gang war is more violent and deadly than El Salvador’s Civil War. Both scourges have occurred in short succession, and their combined effects on the country and its people are catastrophic. Life is devalued, and those who wish to survive abandon their families for the north.

“The first of the infamous (and infamously Salvadoran) gangs had formed in the United States among Salvadoran exiles, mostly undocumented youth who had fled violence and forced military recruitment during the civil war. They formed allegiances in the image of other Los Angeles gangs of the 1980s and ‘90s. Like the Italian mafia and the Irish gangs that rose to power in the early twentieth century, their lower ranks comprised young immigrants with limited economic options in a society trying to keep them out. Thousands of young men in Los Angeles were incarcerated then deported back to El Salvador, and along with them came the gang culture.”

Salvadoran gangs were born in the United States, initially to protect young Salvadoran immigrants from other gangs in Los Angeles. They migrated south when their members were deported, and proliferated. Like many problems in Central and South American countries, they are the product of the United States. United States politicians fearmonger that Central American immigrants are bringing their gang culture to the United States, but it is the United States that brought gang culture to Central America.

“Eventually, Miguel admitted to Ernesto that his father was in a gang. He told him that his dad had tattoos marking his allegiance to MS-13 and kept guns in the house. Still, they lived poor—even after all the tomatoes and beans the Floreses had given to Miguel, they once watched as Miguel’s dad robbed their corn crop. They never said anything, mostly out of fear, but also out of shame on his behalf. It was upsetting to be stolen from but even more humiliating to have to steal in order to eat. Is that what gang life amounted to, stealing corn?”

Any prestige accompanying gang membership lacks substance. Many join gangs because of economic desperation, but they offer little upward mobility. In every country, people are trapped into gangs by economic conditions, then trapped within gangs once they realize membership does not offer the perks they believed it would. People don’t join gangs because they want to, they join because they have no other options.

“But in the fall of 2011, the number of kids leaving El Salvador for the United States skyrocketed. […] The solo, underage crossers are what the U.S. media has begun to call ‘unaccompanied minors,’ and what the U.S. government officially terms ‘unaccompanied alien children’—kids traveling alone, without papers or parents, and crossing the border into the United States. By the end of fiscal year 2012, the number of unaccompanied minors nabbed by la migra and turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement will nearly double to 13,625. Twenty-seven percent of 2012’s unaccompanied minors will be from El Salvador—almost four thousand more hermanitos lejanos, faraway little brothers and sisters. Meanwhile the number of ‘illegal immigrant’ adults is going down in almost inverse proportion to the rise in unaccompanied alien children; from 1.1 million adult apprehensions in 2005 to 326,034 in 2012.”

Most illegal border crossings are children, unaccompanied by adults. The 2007-2008 economic recession reduced the flow of adults migrating to the United States for work. The gang crisis replaced those adults with children fleeing for their lives. Unprecedented numbers of frightened children are fleeing their families and friends to embark on a dangerous journey into an unknown land and uncertain future because their lives depend on it.

“Wilber Sr. would later remember Raúl leaving because Ernesto had begged him to join him. ‘He missed his brother,’ he would say. But everyone else in the family insists that Raúl made the decision along with the rest of the family, without Ernesto knowing. Though Wilber worries often about the future, the rest of the family contends, he doesn’t like to dwell in the hard, sad stuff of the past. Better for him to remember the story of Raúl’s departure, his third child to be wrested from him by the North, as a story not of violence or family dissolution but of brotherly love.”

Going north is traumatic for families: Parents and children will likely never see each other again. Wilber Sr. turns a devastating memory into a positive one of familial love.

“Lost in thought, Ernesto tripped on something and fell. Another log, or a water trough? He reached his hands out to catch himself, but as he hit the ground, his hands pressed into a soft mass that collapsed in a wet, sickly mess under his weight. As he got his bearings and pushed himself up, he realized he’d fallen onto a human body. He screamed. Raúl ran up behind him. They could see in the dim moonlight that the corpse was headless. Ernesto fell back onto the ground away from it and began to shake and hyperventilate. A migrant, alone and decapitated, in their very path. ‘I touched it,’ he said. ‘I touched it with my own hands.’”

The journey north is dangerous. After migrants cross the United States border, they confront miles of harsh and deadly terrain. Many do not make it through the desert and die on the route.

“As was formerly common in the U.S. penal system and as remains a norm in adult immigration detention, these youth detention facilities were run by outside contractors, all nonprofit agencies like Southwest Key. But in spite of their 501(c)3 status, youth shelters are often a big business. […] When the budget is broken down, the total cost of detaining each child has, since the initial 2012 surge, totaled between $200 and $500 per night. Profits have been healthy: in 2014 the Southwest Key CEO made $659,000, including bonuses and incentives.”

Private Detention Facility Contractors make a lot of money from the federal government off illegal immigrants. Deportation centers are a profitable business, which creates a financial incentive for apprehending undocumented immigrants. President Trump’s 2017 announcement about constructing more privately-run detention facilities coincided with an increase in immigration raids, which destabilized families and communities—all to make a profit.

“Chapa gathers a group of small children living in foster care to explain what happened in the courtroom. ‘Okay,’ he says in the honeyed voice of a grade school teacher. He explains that they will have another court date, which is listed on the blue paper. The paper is very important, he says, and they need to keep it and bring it with them next time. A little boy, seven years old, holds his manila packet and blue paper in one hand and a Ziplock snack—a packet of Oreos, some chips, and an applesauce—in another. He looks up at Chapa as he speaks, nodding along. ‘Call your family back home and tell them about your court date,’ says Chapa. The boy clutches the papers and the snack bag. He continues to nod until Chapa stops talking. ‘Understood?’ Chapa asks. Understood.”

This passage exemplifies the innocence of children in the United States immigration court system. They are young, fearful, afraid, and forced to navigate a confusingly complex bureaucracy with dire consequences.

“If you returned to El Salvador, you were an unknown, a desconcido. The gangs knew who belonged and who didn’t, and a new guy rolling into town with nice clothes was assumed either to have money, or to be a part of a rival gang, or both.”

Once someone goes north, they cannot return. Deportation is a death sentence for many. Even those without gang affiliations risk death because the gangs are suspicious of outsiders.

“In 2014, the year the twins enrolled in school, an estimated 4.5 million students enrolled in U.S. public schools were English-language learners—nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. public school population. (Over 75 percent of those students spoke Spanish.)”

The United States’ label as a country of immigrants still applies today. Almost 10% of the public school population is learning English as a second language. While the federal government does not officially welcome immigrants, and many live in the shadows in fear of deportation, our institutions are available to immigrants. Without access to the public school system, the twins would not have met Markham and would not have found Allen, who successfully litigated their amnesty case in the court system they were permitted to access.

“Paperless people like him had only so many job opportunities—things that paid in cash, or that accepted phony Social Security cards. In this city, construction, restaurant work, and landscaping were the big three. In the Central Valley, people worked in the fields, but he’d left El Salvador to avoid that life. Worse than forgoing a day’s pay was the shame of walking up to his boss, head hung, to ask for leeway and special favors. He wanted to be the reliable guy, the guy who showed up to work every day with no needs and no drama and worked his ass off. That’s how you got ahead, he knew, when you had to work double time, triple time, just to stay afloat.”

Many undocumented immigrants go north because they are trapped in their home country. However, most find that they are still trapped once they enter the United States. Wilber Jr.’s work, educational opportunities, mobility, housing, and financial options are limited in the United States. Living illegally, Wilber Jr. can only do and achieve a limited amount.

“A paralegal working with unaccompanied minors in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas explains that girls know what they’re risking on the trip north. ‘They take the pill or get a birth control shot so that, if they are raped, they won’t get pregnant.’ A 2010 Amnesty International Report cited research that six out of ten migrant women and girls were sexually assaulted en route to the United States—other estimates are even higher. It’s just considered part of the payment, the paralegal says, of the passage north.”

Going north is more dangerous for women than it is for men. A migrant encounters many disreputable people on the journey north, and for most disreputable people, women are an easier and more sought-after target. If a young female migrates from Central America to the United States illegally through the southern border, she must be fleeing something awful considering the risk of near-certain rape and death on the journey north.

“The majority of deportations to El Salvador used to come from the United States, but now they come from Mexico: in June only 1,900 came from the United States but 3,000 from Mexico. The Mexican immigration crackdown is part of Mexico’s Programa Frontera Sur, an operation to secure its southern border from drugs and migrants. The United States encourages and has heavily funded these efforts, even more so since the migrant crisis last summer. If migrants can be stopped and deported from Mexico, they won’t become the United States’ problem.”

Increased deportations from Mexico reduce the number, and consequently the cost, of deportations from the United States, so the United States encourages and funds increased deportations from Mexico. This adds another barrier to those seeking a better life in the United States but may also save the lives of many who would have perished in the Texas desert.

“Nearly all the children, according to officials, say they will try again: ‘We’ve seen children who’ve tried six, seven times.’ Returnees have been a part of El Salvador’s social fabric for decades, since even before the civil war days in the eighties. But not on this scale. Everyone—from bus drivers and immigration officials in El Salvador to the Salvadoran consul in Mexico to the migrants themselves—will tell you the migration ‘emergency’ in El Salvador is not going to stop. In response to the crackdown in southern Mexico, people are simply changing their routes: moving on food through the mountains, boarding too-packed boats in the middle of the night. These same buses will be back next week with more.”

The Mexican immigration crackdown hasn’t slowed the flow of migrants. Migrants simply alter their routes and destinations in response to increased immigration presence, the same way they do at the Texas border. When caught and deported, migrants try again as many times as they need to reach their destination. For many, it is not a choice. If they return home, they will die, so they must keep trying.

“Thursday, Friday, the same. By the following Wednesday, it seems the stoppage has come to a close, but then again the news reports trickle in: another bus driver has been shot and killed. That makes eight in total. Along with some wounded. The country has lost well over $60 million in commerce. And the gangs? Everyone can see how powerful they are.”

In El Salvador, gangs are more powerful than the government. Gangs control more of citizens’ daily lives and have the power to bring the country to its knees. The Salvadoran government has acknowledged as much by meeting and negotiating with gang leaders publicly.

“The fact of their permanent residency answered, once and for all, the question of whether Raúl and Ernesto were allowed to stay in the United States. Yet in the same stroke it forced the twins to confront another question: whether they wanted to go back home. Now that they had their papeles, they could get passports, which meant they would legally be able to travel—which allowed them to think, in real terms, about visiting El Salvador. This was an option Wilber had never had (and still didn’t), and while they were waiting on the outcome of their case, it had seemed the most distant of hypotheticals. On the one hand, things back home were terrible and getting worse. […] On the other hand, the twins missed their family.”

Once Raúl and Ernesto achieve legal status in the United States and receive their green cards, they obtain freedom of movement. Undocumented immigrants do not have freedom of movement; they cannot leave the country and reenter, they cannot fly or travel anywhere that requires identification, in many states they cannot get a driver’s license, and any area with a checkpoint could be disastrous. Wilber Jr. cannot return home to see his parents, but now, the twins can.

“Shelters like Belen are safe houses run by nonprofits that string north through Mexico along the migrant trail like an underground railroad. According to an agreement between the immigration forces and immigrant advocates, officials leave the shelters alone.”

Nonprofits provide humanitarian aid on both sides of the border. The journey is deadly, and migrants are vulnerable. These nonprofits exist to save migrants’ lives, not to assist them in their journey, so immigration authorities ignore them.

“Wilber had come to the United States when George Bush was president and watched as Obama—the guy who’d campaigned on hope ramped up his deportations. And now Trump. Wilber told his brothers he wasn’t all that surprised that a guy like this was making headlines. To him, Trump represented the dark but very real side of the United States, filled with subtleties of racism and classism and xenophobia that often only immigrants could see. It wasn’t so much him but his rallies: those seas of people chanting to build the wall, cheering when he said he would deport millions. Wilber knew he might very well be included in those millions.”

To many immigrants, President Trump exposes an element of the American populace that they have long observed. The hatred and aggressiveness that some of his supporters exhibit toward nonwhite groups is a surprise to many white Americans, but people like Wilber observe it daily.

“He wanted to tell his parents but was still afraid. It would mean announcing one more financial obstacle. It would also, he felt deeply, renew their sense of loss—the thought of their sons living so far away and now making a new family they might never know.”

This passage embodies the sadness and absolute nature of going north. Ernesto’s parents may never meet his daughter or Sofia, and they may never again see Ernesto. “Far away brother” isn’t a phrase describing a temporary condition; it is permanent.

“He broke the news to his brother gently: they were selling the land. No need to rub it in, to make him feel at fault. Ernesto sighed, then began to cry. He took it harder than Raúl had expected: he did care. As if through a series of sucker punches, they had kept uncovering more of the secret, beating heart of the world: its vastness, its cruelty, and now the interdependence of things. When Raúl thought back to Guatemala now, or his enemies back home, he realized he no longer felt nauseated. The terror and the rage had faded. But this came at a price: he was also forgetting. The contours of his past were blurring, and even his mother’s face now took time to focus against the screen of memory. The thing about growing up and moving on was that you had to let some good things go.”

Children who migrate north must grow up quickly in the face of vicious and traumatic events. To move on, to keep living and progressing, they must forget. However, as they build their new lives and families in the United States, the memories of their Salvadoran lives and families begin to fade.

“At least Isabella was a citizen. They worried about her growing up in a place rife with racism, having fewer opportunities, being hated or scorned. But looking into her eyes, that seemed so improbable. Isabella, like all newborns, was a do-over, a clean slate—a chance for her family, and her world, to raise someone right. She’d inherit the earth, a full Salvadoran American. More than that, she’d make it better.”

Wilber Sr. and Esperanza make every necessary sacrifice to secure a prosperous and safe future for their children. When Ernesto tells his mother about Isabella, she decides to sell the land to satisfy the debt; she wants Ernesto to focus on Isabella, not the family in El Salvador. Isabella is the future of the Flores family, and because Ernesto went north, she is a United States citizen with the opportunity to have a better life.

“My thirteen years of experience working with, interviewing, and reporting alongside thousands of refugees and migrants like the Flores twins have shown me that very few people actually want to leave their homes. People leave because something there has become untenable. Global poverty is a massive driver of migration to the United States and around the globe—and though poverty is not a legally recognized justification for crossing a border, who among us wouldn’t move to a greener pasture in order to feed ourselves, to feed our children? ‘Economic’ migrants worldwide are fleeing drought, famine, languishing economies, and the adverse impacts of globalization. But as the story of the Flores brothers reveals, along with the stories of others they and I met during the journey of living and reporting this book, today’s unauthorized migration across our southern border is driven largely—though of course not entirely—by violence.”

Most do not want to migrate to the United States and would rather be with their families in their home countries. However, people migrate because they are forced to by economic conditions, violence, and authoritarian governments, among other reasons. Many argue that a more effective policy to reduce unauthorized immigration into the United States is one that bolsters countries in the Americas; therefore, people are not forced to leave for the United States and can remain happy and prosperous in their homeland.

“Education, particularly for newly arrived immigrants, who lack many or any connections to the larger community, can, when done right, provide a sense of community, belonging, and purpose. We have seen all over the world, and throughout history, that when young people feel excluded from society they seek belonging in its fringes, among its shadows. This could very easily have happened to the twins.”

Education helps immigrants assimilate. It provides a community for those who would otherwise be relegated to society’s shadows. This can have a profound effect on people and reduce rates of crime and violence among immigrant communities. If the young men who fled El Salvador during the Civil War were better embraced and assimilated in Los Angeles, today’s gang crisis might not exist in the Northern Triangle, and Los Angeles might have a more vibrant, prosperous Salvadoran community.