On the last day of middle-school Gladys Vanessa Chinoy memorized her mother's phone number in New Yo

(25 Jun 2014) On the last day of middle-school Gladys Vanessa Chinoy memorized her mother's phone number in New York City and boarded a bus to Guatemala's northern border.
With nothing but the clothes on her back, the 14-year-old took a truck-tire raft across the Naranjo River into Mexico and joined a group of five women and a dozen children waiting with one of the smugglers who are paid $6,000 to $7,000 for each migrant they take to the U.S.
The women and children waited by the train tracks in this small town in the southern state of Chiapas until the shriek of a train whistle and the glare of headlights pierced the night. Suddenly, dozens of teenagers and mothers with young children flooded out of darkened homes and budget hotels, rushing to grab the safest places on the roof of the northbound cargo train and join a deluge of children and mothers that is overwhelming the U.S. immigration system.
The number of unaccompanied minors detained on the border has more than tripled since 2011. Children are also widely believed to be crossing with their parents in rising numbers, although the Obama administration has not released year-by-year figures. The crisis has sparked a bitter political debate inside the U.S., with the administration blaming crime for driving migrants north from Central America and Congressional Republicans blaming Obama's policies for leading migrants to believe children and their mothers will be allowed to stay.
In interviews along the primary migrant route north to the United States, dozens of migrants like Gladys indicated that both sides are right. A vast majority said they were fleeing gang violence that has reached epidemic levels in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in recent years. The migrants also uniformly said that they decided to head north because they have heard that a change in U.S. law requires the Border Patrol to swiftly release children and their mothers and let them stay in the United States.
The belief that women and children can safely surrender to authorities the moment they set foot in the U.S. has changed the calculus of tens of thousands of parents who no longer worry about their children finishing the dangerous trip north through Mexico with a potentially deadly multi-day hike through the desert in the U.S. southwest.
"There are some people that don't survive the journey because of problems with trains (people sometimes fall off), dirty, the desert -- all of that. But thank God, they (U.S. government) do that law and we don't have to cross all the desert to arrive," said Gladys, 14, who said she was looking forward to becoming a doctor.
Gladys, a smiling teenager with long black hair, said she was more excited about meeting her mother than she was scared about the trip. Her mother said she was aware of the dangers of the trip but had finally decided they were worth it after five years apart.
Reached by phone at home, the mother said she had decided to send for her daughter because "if she gets across she can stay here, that what you hear."
"Now they say that all children need to do is hand themselves over to the Border Patrol," said the mother, who declined to provide her name because she is in the U.S. illegally.
While many children and families may eventually be ordered out of the country, many are reporting in calls back home that they're free to move around the U.S. while their cases wend through a process that can take years.
Thirty-one-year--old Sofia says she had a stark choice - the dangerous journey north on the train or certain death by gangs in her hometown in El Salvador.

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