IMMIGRATION

Pipeline of children: A border crisis

Daniel Gonzalez and Bob Ortega
The Republic | azcentral.com
Migrants from Central America illegally cross into Mexico from Guatemala using a raft on the Suchiate River June 22, 2014. They were all headed for the U.S. but weren't sure which route they were going to take through Mexico. Crime and lack of jobs have sent people from Central America to the U.S. in increasing numbers. Minors on this raft include Jairo Garniga, 16, from Guatemala (front left) and Julio Carcam, 20 from San Salvador (front center) and Antoni Castellan, 17 from Honduras (front right).

The pipeline bringing a flood of Central American migrants to the United States, including thousands of unaccompanied children, begins in villages like Quebrada Maria, near the Caribbean coast of Honduras.

That's where dimple-faced, 14-year-old Brayan Duban Soler Redondo lived in daily fear of being beaten up or killed by members of gangs like Mara Salvatrucha, also called MS-13, and Calle 18.

Gangs such as these terrorize neighborhoods throughout Central America. Over three days in May, gang members in another Honduran city, San Pedro Sula, murdered five children ages 5 to 13.

"They cut their bodies into quarters as a warning to others because the children didn't want to distribute drugs in their neighborhood," said Father German Calix, director of Caritas Honduras, a Catholic relief agency.

Slayings like these were why Brayan was desperate to leave. He imagines himself working in an office in the United States someday, "wearing fancy clothes" and sending money back to his family.

But his charming smile offered little protection in his village, where gangs kill over the smallest of things, he said, even for trying to go to school or wearing the wrong clothes.

He had no idea how he would escape that world until, the week before Easter, he heard news he thought could save his life.

Two brothers from the same village had set off a month earlier for the United States. Their mother had received a call. The boys, teenagers like Brayan, had made it. Word spread through the village fast. The boys told their mother that, after turning themselves in to "la migra," the Border Patrol, they had been detained briefly and then released to relatives in the United States.

Brayan saw a way out.

There was one big problem. Migrants often pay smugglers thousands of dollars to guide them to the United States. Brayan didn't have any money. He is the youngest of eight children. His parents are coffee pickers. And, unlike many migrants, he didn't know any relatives working in the U.S. to send him money for the trip.

But that didn't deter him. After hearing the story about the two boys, Brayan decided to leave his family behind and strike out the very next day on a 1,400-mile journey to the U.S. To earn money, he killed a rabbit and sold it for the equivalent of $9.50, which he carried in his pocket the day he left.

So in mid-April, Brayan entered the pipeline, which has grown increasingly crowded with children looking for an escape route out of their violent homelands. Kids such as Brayan and 16-year-old Levi Manases Miranda Peña from El Salvador and 16-year-old Jairo Garniga from Guatemala.

A 16- year old boy from El Salvador (right) that was apprehended by Mexican authorities lays on his bed next to a 13 year old boy, also from El Salvador on June 19, 2014, at the Instito Nacional del Migracion, a municipal shelter in Reynosa, Mexico. The shelter is receiving a growing numbers of children caught by Mexican authorities and will be deported to their countries of origin.

The pipeline carrying migrant kids and families to the United States ends at the Rio Grande, where the surge of thousands of women and children from Central America has overwhelmed the Border Patrol in southern Texas.

In the past eight months, about 57,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended in the U.S., already 18,000 more than fiscal 2013. With four months still remaining, experts predict the number could soar to 90,000 this year.

More than 70 percent are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, three Central American countries plagued by poverty and crime. All three rank among the top five countries with the highest murder rates in the world.

Thousands more from these countries have fled to neighboring countries, including Mexico, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

The escalation of fleeing migrants has created a humanitarian crisis that has rippled across the U.S. Thousands of migrant children caught crossing the border end up crowded into detention centers and military bases in Arizona, Oklahoma and California until they can be moved to shelters, reunited with relatives in the U.S. or flown back to their home countries.

A 2008 law requires the United States to provide full immigration hearings to any unaccompanied children who reach the U.S. from countries other than Mexico and Canada.

The same law requires unaccompanied migrant children to be placed in "the least restricted setting possible" as they await the outcome of their hearings.

As a result, many are released to relatives instead of being held in shelters until their immigration hearings.

The surge of migrants began sometime in 2011 but was barely noticed outside southern Texas until it became a gusher in recent months. It overwhelmed the Border Patrol system in southern Texas, which was set up to care for only about 5,000 unaccompanied minors per year, nothing like the numbers that are crossing the border now.

Many young people, like Brayan, said they heard stories of others who made the arduous trip to the U.S. and were reunited with mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters or cousins, aunts and uncles.

Others who made the trip told The Arizona Republic they had heard or read reports in the Central American media or on the Internet that they could get "permisos" to live in the U.S. if they made it to the border. But when The Republic was in Central America, news media discouraged going to the United States.

Smugglers also market their services, telling parents that children are their ticket to stay in the U.S.

Poverty prompts some, like 16-year-old Juan David Chavez, to make the journey.

Juan was among 114 Salvadorans — 72 of them minors — who arrived back in San Salvador one day in mid-June on three buses of deportees after being caught in Mexico.

"I left for economic reasons," Juan said. Jobs are hard to come by, he said, and pay far too little. "I'm the oldest son, and I wanted to help my family," he said.

Juan said he will try again to reach the U.S.

But the chance to reunite with relatives in the U.S. and the fear of gangs and violence appear to be by far the major factors motivating so many young people to take the risks involved to reach the U.S. Such risks include being robbed, beaten, held for ransom or killed while traveling through Central America and the length of Mexico.

The gangs reach into almost every corner of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

One day in May, seven gang members boarded a public bus in San Salvador, El Salvador's capital. They were looking for two members of a rival gang. But they fired indiscriminately at passengers, killing six people and wounding a score of others, including a 2-year-old. On that day alone, 31 people were murdered in San Salvador. The city averaged more than 12 murders a day in June, according to federal police.

"The gangs are in schools, neighborhoods. They're everywhere," said Alison Ramirez, who works on a U.S.-funded, violence-prevention project in El Salvador and frequently visits Honduras and Guatemala. "Even if the kids don't want to be a part of it, they get caught up in the crossfire, extorted, threatened."

A woman walks past gang grafitti in a neighborhood controlled by the MS-13 gang in San Salvador, El Salvador June 19. Violent crime has sent increasing numbers of people from Central America to the U.S., including unaccompanied minors and families.Lack of jobs also drives some migrants.

The pipeline begins in the neighborhoods of major cities, like the leafy-green and crumbling Zacamil section of San Salvador. The rival gangs MS-13 and Calle 18 lay claim here.

Members spray-paint the letters and numbers of their gangs on telephone poles, apartment buildings and the walls of concrete-block homes abandoned by families who have fled.

On street corners, young men and boys watch who comes and goes. One shouts curses and flings rocks at a passing car when he spots a photographer's lens peeking out a window.

In contrast, vivid, cheerful murals of women and children cover the outside walls of the community center known as Fe y Alegria — Faith and Joy.

Behind the walls topped with razor wire, children play in a concrete courtyard. A grassy football field awaits just past a padlocked iron fence. But the children don't play there anymore. Last year, a gang member climbed over a wall and shot to death a student and wounded a teacher during a soccer game.

In early June, gang members fired four shots at an older student on the street just outside the front gates, she said. The boy scrambled to safety. He has not been back since, Mena added.

"It's changed a lot in the last four years," said Federico Pliotez, who teaches woodworking. "Many families have no source of income, no work. They eat one meal a day."

The gangs prey on vulnerable families, recruiting children as young as 10 to deliver drugs and to be their eyes and ears on the street. "You can be killed for going to school if they tell you not to," Pliotez said.

The San Ramon neighborhood, at the foot of the San Salvador volcano, is another area infested by the MS-13 and Calle 18 gangs.

"They're a plague," said Kevin Briseño, 18, who agreed to meet reporters at a Catholic-run children's center.

"I was four months from graduating from high school, and I had to leave the school because they threatened me," he said. "I couldn't go out of the house, I couldn't meet with friends. It was too dangerous."

It took more than a year before Briseño felt safe enough to go out into the community again.

He lives in a single, ill-lit room with his father, off a narrow courtyard they share with three other families, along with a common bathroom and large sink. Anyone arriving or leaving carefully locks the outer door, made of thick iron bars.

Briseño and his friend, Omar Barrera, 19, both spoke matter-of-factly about why it may be a death sentence for those who try to leave but are caught and sent back.

One friend fled a year and a half ago after he was threatened and gang members murdered his father, a policeman. Their friend was trying to reach his mother in Maryland, but he was stopped in Mexico and returned to San Salvador.

"He was murdered the week after he got back," Barrera said, shaking his head.

A woman holds a baby in a gang-controlled neighborhood in San Salvador on June 18. Increasing gang violence has forced many to flee to neighboring countries or to the United States.

One mother tried desperately to help her three daughters escape the gangs in San Salvador, taking them on the journey herself.

"I don't want to go to the United States," she said. "I don't speak English. I don't think we'll be welcome there." But she said she saw no alternative but to flee north.

The woman huddled with her daughters, 10, 16 and 19, on plastic seats at the Salvadoran government's crowded processing center for returned deportees in San Salvador. They had been caught in Mexico and sent back.

Twice a week, the buses bring children there. Some are accompanied by their mothers; others, mostly teens, travel alone. No unaccompanied children younger than 12 are sent by bus, said Ana Solorzano, chief of the department of migrant needs at the center.

The mother begged that none of her family be named or photographed. As she explained why, she gripped her hands so fiercely her knuckles turned white.

A few months ago, some members of the Calle 18 gang went to their house in San Salvador's Soyapango neighborhood looking for the girls. They ordered the mother to turn over the two oldest daughters to be the "girlfriends" of gang members.

That night, the mother fled with her daughters to another part of the city. The gang soon found them. They ran again, to a countryside village. But, like its main rival, MS-13, the Calle 18 gang has tentacles throughout the region. Again, the gang caught up with them.

"The authorities here did nothing to protect us," the mother said. "Nothing."

So, they fled north into the pipeline to the United States.

"We had to go; I want to save my daughters' lives," the mother said.

But near Villahermosa, in southern Mexico, police stopped the bus they were on to check for documents. They were deported to El Salvador.

With almost no money left, the mother said, "I don't know what we'll do. I don't know where we'll go. I have to save my daughters, but I don't know what to do."

Levi Miranda, 16, of El Salvador, looks out from the locked door of the boys sleeping area, at the Instito Nacional del Migracion, a municipal shelter in Reynosa, Mexico. Levi was apprehended by Mexican Federal Police while trying to cross into the United States and brought to the shelter that is receiving growing numbers of Central American children. Levi was deported back to El Salvador.

All children who arrive in the United States illegally without a guardian are categorized as unaccompanied minors by Customs and Border Protection. But most children don't enter the pipeline alone, especially the younger ones.

There has been a steady stream of mothers and their children making the trip, like the ones caught in Texas and then dropped off by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security at bus stations in Arizona because of a lack of detention space. Other children are accompanied at least part of the way by an older family member.

Brayan, the 14-year-old from Honduras, traveled for a while with his 25-year-old brother, Grebil.

Some families with at least modest means entrust their children to total strangers — the human smugglers called coyotes or polleros.

Levi Manases Miranda Peña is a 16-year-old who left El Salvador on June 5. His friends call him Guero because of his fair skin and light-brown hair. He is from Tonacatepeque, a small city about 12 miles northeast of San Salvador.

His mother owns a small restaurant and store that sells clothing and stuffed tortillas called pupusas. She contracted with a smuggler to guide him all the way to Omaha, Neb., where his 17-year-old sister, Linda, lives. Once in Omaha, Levi hoped to continue school, something he couldn't do in El Salvador because of threats from gangs.

He said he didn't know how much his mother paid the smuggler. His sister confirmed that her mother borrowed $7,000 to pay a smuggler for her trip to the United States.

Levi (pronounced LEH-vee) said his grandmother accompanied him on a 70-mile bus ride from Tonacatepeque to Ahuachapan, a city near the border of Guatemala. In his backpack, Levi carried two pairs of pants, three shirts, three pairs of socks. In his pocket, he carried $150, about what many factory workers in El Salvador earn in a month.

For good luck, he wore bracelets on both wrists given to him by his friends before he left El Salvador. One said "Peace" in English.

His mother arranged for Levi to meet the smuggler at the bus terminal in Ahuachapan. Levi had never met this person. His mother instructed him to look for a short man about 35 years old with straight black hair wearing a red shirt, gray pants and black shoes.

Levi said he was scared, but in El Salvador, "my life was already in danger."

"It's very dangerous in my country," he added. "You can't even go to the store without being afraid of being robbed or killed."

Levi rode in a bus with the smuggler to Guatemala City, where they were joined by five more teenagers from El Salvador heading to the United States. Along the route, the smugglers changed guides often, handing off the group of boys from one smuggler to the next in different cities.

Brayan and his brother traveled by bus, too, out of Honduras, then through Guatemala, where the pipeline funneled them to the same place it carries many of the migrants from Central America headed for the United States — to the Suchiate River in Tecun Uman, Guatemala, on the border with Mexico.

River runners work their floats on the Suchiate River between Tecun Uman, Guatemala and Mexico on June 21.  Migrants typically cross illegally using these floats, while black-market goods flow south.

One night in June, 16-year-old Jairo Garniga and six other boys — three from Honduras, and Jairo and three others from a coastal town in southern Guatemala — arrived in Tecun Uman long after dark. The doors of the migrants' shelter had shut for the night.

They lacked money for even the seediest of hotels in the crime-ridden border town. So instead, they stretched out for the night with several other migrants in front of the doorway of the Catholic church.

"It seemed safer than just sleeping in the street," Jairo said. They had risen just after dawn and waited beneath a towering lapacho tree until the Casa de Migrantes shelter opened. After a breakfast of rice, beans and bananas, Jairo and several other boys chatted while looking at a map posted on one wall, showing the dangers— river currents, deserts, bandits, kidnappers, towns hostile to migrants — along various routes north.

They couldn't afford to travel by bus, said Jose Hernandez, a 28-year-old neighbor guiding Jairo and another boy. So, they would hop a freight train known as "La Bestia" (the Beast) and take it up the Gulf coast and north to Texas' Rio Grande Valley. Riders sit atop freight cars, clinging for their lives to the metal roofs.

Carlos Gonzalez, 18 (left), Jose Hernandez, 28 (center), and Jairo Garniga, 16, study a map at a migrant shelter in Tecun Uman, Guatemala before preparing to cross the river into Mexico. The map warns of dangers along the route to the U.S., including natural dangers and criminal gangs that prey on migrants.

"The train is riskier, but you don't have to have so much money. So, we'll go by train," Hernandez said. "They told us about the dangers. ... We'll go slowly."

They know — having met a man at this shelter who lost one foot this way — that gangs extort money from riders and throw those who don't pay off the moving train. The migrants hope to find work and earn money along the journey, which can take days or even months — if they stop and work along the way.

Jairo listened and grinned. His mother told him she was worried about the risks.

"My mother wouldn't have let me go alone. And I didn't want to," he said.

Thin and small for his age, Jairo didn't seem fazed by the two days he'd spent roughing it since leaving home. Like several other youths at the shelter, he was traveling with next to no money and only the clothes on his back. Unlike most, he had no family waiting for him in the United States.

"I'm not sure where I'm going in the U.S., or how we'll get there," he said. "I hope God will help me along the way. I'll do whatever work there is. I just want to work."

The Casa de Migrantes is one of a string of shelters along the routes north through Guatemala and Mexico run by the Roman Catholic Scalabrini order.

Father Ademar Barilli, who founded the shelter 19 years ago, has spoken with many of the 135,000 migrants who have passed through its doors over that time. He said he has seen a jump in minors staying at the shelter: up to 123 in May and June from 47 for those two months a year earlier.

Barilli said the closing of many parts of the U.S. border and tougher enforcement have pushed migrants into the arms of the Mexican drug cartels.

Four or five years ago, he said, many coyotes were respected figures in their own communities. They would accompany migrants all the way from Central America to the United States. But those coyotes have been pushed out of business, he said, as new border fences have forced migrants onto cartel smuggling routes.

"The drug traffickers saw another source of income," Barilli said. "They organized themselves. And now, the coyotes have to have ties to the cartels, and these organized groups see the migrants as a milk cow."

After a night in the shelter, Jairo, several other teens, and Jose Hernandez left the next morning to cross the Suchiate River.

The southern bank of the river, wider and faster than the Rio Grande, lies less than 100 yards from the shelter. Sturdy men on homemade rafts, crafted of wooden planks lashed to massive inner tubes taken from tractor-sized tires, called out for passengers.

Not all the crossers are undocumented. Many townspeople cross into Mexico to shop, and rafts ferry black-market goods south. Passage costs the equivalent of just over a dollar. A wide bridge, the legal crossing point, can be seen less than half a mile downstream.

At small stands, vendors sell iced drinks, corn and snacks. Coyotes wait by the main road. A pedicab pulled up, and a mother and three children, all in neat, clean clothes, with large handbags, were met by a coyote.

He walked them to the river and settled them on a raft, then called on his cellphone to a counterpart on the other side. His associate waved in acknowledgment, and the raftsman started to pole upstream, to the point from which he would let the current carry them across.

Meanwhile, Jairo and the others boarded another raft.

Jose Hernandez, the neighbor, asked the raftsman whether they needed to watch for Mexican authorities on the other side.

"No," the man said, "not this early." It's about 7 a.m.

Within minutes, they were in Mexico, with the most treacherous section of the pipeline still ahead. Jairo waved at the reporters and turned north with his companions, hiking out of sight, the last contact The Republic had with him.

Brayan Duban Soler Redondo, 14, (left) of Quebrada Maria San Luis Conayagua, Honduras, looks on as Alba Duarte, 33, holds Anni Martinez, 5, also of Honduras. All three were at the Senda de Vida, a shelter for migrants in Reynosa, Mexico. Brayan left Honduras in mid-April to reach the United States. He and others at the shelter didn't  have the money to pay the smugglers to cross into the United States.

Brayan, the 14-year-old from Honduras, and his brother decided not to pay the fee to cross the Suchiate. They swam to the other side at midnight.

But after a dispute over money, the two separated on the Mexican side of the river in Hidalgo, Chiapas state.

So, Brayan set out alone.

He begged for money and food. He asked people which buses to take. He slept on the street.

"Do you have a job for me? Because I need something to eat. I am from Honduras," he would say.

On the way to hop the freight train in Arriaga, a city in Chiapas state just north of the Guatemalan border, Brayan said he fell asleep near a railroad terminal in the city of Tonalá.

A hard slap on the back startled him awake. Men in Mexican immigration uniforms asked him where he was from. After telling them he was from Honduras, Brayan said the men threatened to send him back to Honduras unless he paid them money. Brayan handed over all he had: 200 pesos and 70 lempira, or about $18.

Levi said he and the other migrants from El Salvador had a similar experience with Mexican authorities after crossing the border from Guatemala by bus.

In Mexico, he said, men in federal police uniforms stopped their bus. The men climbed aboard and asked each passenger where he or she was from. Passengers from other countries were allowed to continue only if they handed over 400 pesos, about $30.

"If you don't give them the money, they don't let you go," Levi said.

Levi and the other minors from El Salvador arrived in Reynosa before dawn on June 12. The city of 600,000 in Mexico is located on the border with Texas. For Levi and many other Central American migrants, Reynosa is the last stop on the pipeline before trying to cross the Rio Grande into the United States. A smuggler was waiting for them at the bus terminal in a minivan to drive the group to the Rio Grande so they could cross while it was still dark.

Brayan Duban Soler Redondo, 14, of Quebrada Maria San Luis Conayagua, Honduras, looks out on the Rio Grande river separating Mexico from Texas, at the Senda de Vida, a shelter for migrants in Reynosa, Mexico, last month. Brayan left Honduras in mid-April to reach the United States. He does not have the money to pay the smugglers to cross into the United States.

But they never made it. On the way to the river, Mexican federal police intercepted the van and arrested the coyote.

Levi remembers looking out the window of the smuggler's van and seeing a "mysterious" white pickup race up. He saw the windows roll down and pistols pop out. The men in the pickup, apparently part of the smuggling organization, "started firing bullets everywhere," he said.

Levi and the other migrants threw themselves on the floor of the van until the shooting stopped. The federal police didn't fire back, he said. In the end, no one was hit.

"I felt an incredible fear, a terrible fear," Levi said.

The federal police turned Levi and the other boys over to Mexican immigration authorities. After they were processed, the boys were taken to Centro de Atencion a Menores Fronterizos, a government holding shelter in Reynosa for undocumented minors caught near the border.

Brayan also ended up in a shelter near Reynosa.

Alba Duarte, 33, (top left) of Honduras, does the hair of Carolina Galeas, 26, also of Honduras as Catalina's daughter, Joaquin Galeas, 16- months, (right) hangs out with Anni Martinez, 5, (center) also of Honduras, who has Down Syndrome, and Lydia Carrillo, 8, a Mexican migrant, at the Senda de Vida, a shelter for migrants in Reynosa, Mexico.

Brayan's luck seemed to change after the men who identified themselves as immigration officials took his money. He met a truck driver and his wife who were hauling mangoes, pineapples and other fruit from southern Mexico to the north. He called them Don Macario and Doña Maria.

The couple offered to give Brayan a lift in their tractor-trailer rig 1,000 miles from Tonalá, Chiapas, all the way to Reynosa. Along the way, they passed through several immigration checkpoints. Each time, the truck driver told the immigration officials that Brayan was their son. The couple let Brayan stay at their house in Reynosa for a month.

Brayan had no money to pay smugglers to take him across the river, so the truck driver took Brayan to the Senda de Vida (Path of Life), a migrant shelter run by a Christian pastor in Reynosa. The shelter has three dormitories, one for women with children, one for men, and one for elderly men and people with disabilities. Brayan slept in the one for the elderly.

For Levi and Brayan, the end of the pipeline was now a mere 100 yards away, across the Rio Grande into the United States, where they had planned to turn themselves in to la migra.

But it might as well still have been 1,000 miles away.

A teenage boy looks out the window of his sleeping area last month at the Centro de Atencion a Menores Fronterizos , a municipal shelter in Reynosa, Mexico,. The shelter, for child migrants, has been inundated with a growing number of children caught by Mexican authorities. Most will be deported to their countries of origin.

Reynosa is one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.

For more than four years, two rival drug-trafficking organizations, the Gulf cartel and their former enforcers, the Zetas, have waged pitched gunbattles in the streets with each other and with Mexican law-enforcement authorities.

Hundreds of people have been killed, and thousands have fled the city.

Gunbattles still happen regularly, though not as frequently as the past. Federal police patrol the streets in pickups mounted with machine guns.

On June 19, at Centro de Atencion a Menores Fronterizos, the government shelter in Reynosa, eight teenage boys sat cross-legged in the shade of a peach tree.

All were from either Honduras or El Salvador. One by one, they named cities and states in the United States. The names mean nothing to them. They have never been to the United States. They know nothing about these places. They are just the names of places given to them by relatives they were trying to reach in the U.S. before they were caught.

One has a mother in Virginia.

Another a brother in Miami.

Another a mother in Boston.

Another a brother in Atlanta.

But before they could cross the border, they were intercepted by immigration authorities, not in the U.S. but in Mexico.

For now, their journey through the pipeline to reach their U.S. destinations has been halted.

The teens spend their days waiting to be deported to their countries of origin. On this particular day, there were 15 minors from Central America being held at the shelter: 12 teenage boys and three teenage girls.

The boys are kept segregated from the girls. They are allowed to sit outside in the shelter's courtyard for an hour or two each day. The rest of the time they are locked up in cell-like dormitories with bars on the doors. They sleep on dirty mattresses thrown on the floor, with nothing to do except watch a small TV sitting on top of a dresser.

After traveling more than 1,400 miles for days and sometimes weeks, they give the same answer about what they will do when they are sent back: Turn around and try again.

All except one.

At first, Levi thought he would try to come back to the U.S. once deported back to El Salvador. But after spending several days at the shelter, he wasn't so sure. Despite the dangers in his home country, he said, he wouldn't want to leave his mother alone again. And he wouldn't want to repeat the ordeal of being smuggled.

Salvadorans deported from Mexico arrive by bus in San Salvador, El Salvador June 19, 2014. Three busses arrive every day including children and families two days a week. Crime and lack of jobs have sent people from Central America to the U.S. including unaccompanied minors in increasing numbers.

"I have been thinking a lot all these days that I have been here at the shelter," he said. "I don't want to have to suffer through everything I have already suffered. I don't want to go through everything I have already gone through and what I am still going through."

On June 26, Levi was sent back to El Salvador. His sister, Linda in Omaha, said he is back home living with their mother. But he is afraid to go outside for fear he could be attacked by the gangs, she said.

Over at the Senda de Vida shelter, Brayan remained in limbo as of July 11. The shelter sits on land on the edge of Reynosa overlooking the greenish waters of the Rio Grande. By climbing up a small hill in the back, Brayan can see the United States on the other side.

Smugglers want 1,000 pesos, about $76, to ferry him across the river in a raft. But he was out of money, and he had no idea how he would come up with the smuggling fee.

Trying to cross the cartel-controlled waters alone is too risky.

So, he waited, hoping that his pipeline dream hasn't ended.

Two unaccompanied boys from Honduras walk along a dirt road coming from the Rio Grande near the Anzalduas International Bridge not far from the river in Mission, Texas on June 21. The boys sat down at the end of the road and waited till Border Patrol agents came and took them away in an SUV.

At the end of the pipeline, on a Saturday in June in southern Texas, two young boys walked up a gravel road from the Rio Grande a mile to the south.They were among the hundreds of migrants from Central America streaming across the Rio Grande daily.

One boy appeared to be about 9 or 10, the other 12 or 13. The younger one carried a jacket thrown over his right shoulder. There were no adults in sight. Just two boys walking up a road by themselves in the middle of a vast wildlife refuge on the U.S.-Mexican border.

This is an area where armor-plated gunboats operated by the Texas Highway Patrol cruise up and down the Rio Grande, keeping a lookout for drug traffickers and human smugglers.

Smuggling trails snake down the banks on the Mexican side and come up on the Texas side of the river. Hiding in the brush or high up in houses on stilts, los mañosos — thugs — working for the criminal organizations that control these waters on the Mexican side keep watch for the Border Patrol.

But at this time of the morning, the wildlife refuge was quiet except for birds chirping and the wind rushing through the thick brush. Up above to the east, there was hardly any traffic on the Anzalduas International Bridge connecting McAllen, Texas, and Reynosa, Mexico.

The boys looked down at the ground as they trekked up the road, glancing up occasionally to scan the horizon. When they reached the top of a levee where two gravel roads meet, they stopped and crouched on their haunches. They reached the spot where they had been told to wait.

Soon, they saw a Border Patrol van in the distance racing toward them on top of one of the levees. An agent climbed out of the van and walked up to the boys, a radio clipped to his belt. Only the older boy stood up.

Two young unaccompanied Honduran boys turn themselves in to a Border Patrol agent near the Anzalduas International Bridge not far from the Rio Grande in Mission, Texas, on Saturday, June 21. The boys walked down a dirt road coming from the Rio Grande, sat down at the end of the road and waited until they turned themselves in to the agent.

"Where are you from?" the Border Patrol agent asked.

"Honduras," the older boy replied.

The agent opened one of the van's side doors, and the two boys climbed inside. They had made it to the United States and turned themselves in to the Border Patrol, the same way thousands of migrants from Central America have.

The pipeline worked for them.

But many questions remain.

What will happen to the boys?

Will they be reunited with their families in the U.S.?

Will they be allowed to stay?

Will they be sent home?

And how many more are coming?