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The Life of Carlos, an Undocumented New York Teen ­­ New York Magazine
Young Carlos
As many as 74,000 children could come into this country by themselves
this year, undocumented. There are more in New York than in any other
state save Texas, many awaiting court rulings that could send them back
home. Here’s one.
By Alexandra Starr Published Sep 11, 2014
C
arlos, a soon­to­be­19­year­old
from Honduras, is most fond
of pastimes and people who bring on
temporary amnesia. His former
girlfriend, Maria, was one such happy
distraction. He plays soccer every
Saturday in the Bronx at Mullally
Park, just a few blocks from Yankee
Carlos eats breakfast at home in the Bronx. (Photo: Edward Keating)
Stadium. That helps, too. “I
concentrate so much,” he says, “that
I forget about everything else.”
Most of the memories Carlos would like to lose come from the trip he made from
Honduras to the United States as an unaccompanied migrant two years ago. He
fled because it was his best chance of having an adulthood. His hometown San
Pedro de Sula has the highest homicide rate in the Americas. Once, gang
members on motorcycles arrived at a park where he had been playing soccer and
opened fire. A mushy white scar on his right calf records where a bullet pierced
his skin. At 15, he saw a close friend shot in front of him. As a witness, Carlos
would either have to join the gang responsible or be murdered. He went to live at
an aunt’s house, an uncle’s, another aunt’s — at each, gang members arrived,
threatening him. “I told my mother that if I was going to die, it would be trying to
get out,” he says. She gave him $150 and he boarded a bus to Guatemala.
The day he arrived at the Mexican border, he was robbed. The same week, he met
a young woman who was also intent on riding the freight trains, called la Bestia
or el Tren de la Muerte, to the United States. “She was beautiful,” Carlos
remembers. Soon after they talked, he saw her stumble and fall on the tracks as
she tried to board a train. Her decapitated head rolled to the ground near Carlos’s
feet.
A month into his journey, Carlos was
detained by a member of the Zetas
cartel who demanded $80. At the
stash house, he stood on a floor
stained with blood and could hear the
screams of migrants being tortured in
back rooms. It was only because one
of his traveling companions was a
Carlos at soccer practice. (Photo: Edward Keating)
childhood friend of Carlos’s
kidnapper that he went free.
And then there was his 17th birthday, which he calls the worst day of his life.
Carlos was sleeping under a bridge when a man just a few feet away from him was
burned to death. Another migrant awoke Carlos by telling him, “La migra
[Immigration police] is coming.” He panicked and ran. The pungent smell of
burning flesh was detectable even after he’d sought refuge in an adjacent forest.
Carlos witnessed horrible things on the trains, too. He saw a woman gang raped.
Migrants were occasionally thrown from the top of la Bestia onto the tracks.
When a family offered him a job in Veracruz setting up chairs and cleaning an
events hall, he seized it so he could save money to pay for the bus.
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Most Central Americans enter the U.S. by crossing the Rio Grande into Texas.
Because his final bus ride left him in the northwest corner of Mexico, Carlos
traversed through the Arizona desert. He smelled the human bones and
decomposing remains before he saw them. Twenty days into the trek, out of
water and hallucinating, he made his way to the highway and walked on the
double yellow line so he would be picked up by Border Patrol. After two days in a
detention facility in Phoenix, he was transferred to a juvenile shelter in
Westchester. When his grandmother, who is a U.S. citizen, saw him there, she
fainted. During his seven and a half months in Mexico, Carlos was able to call
home just three times. “It ran through their heads a lot that I was dead,” he says.
M
ore than 10,000
unaccompanied child
migrants were apprehended at the
border in June 2014 alone. A public
relations campaign warning Central
Americans against the journey,
combined with a Mexican crackdown
on migrants boarding la Bestia,
With his grandmother at their apartment. (Photo: Edward Keating)
helped reduce the number of arrivals
by two thirds by the end of the
summer. Nonetheless, advocates estimate that some 74,000 children and
teenagers will cross into the United States this year. That’s almost double the
figure from 2013. Aside from Texas, New York has taken in more of these kids
than any other state.
In part because of geography, Carlos stands a better chance than most of being
permitted to stay. As a Central American, he is entitled to a court hearing to
determine if he will be deported. (Mexican children, in contrast, can be screened
and sent back by border patrol agents.) And, in a break with the past, the Office
of Refuge Resettlement — the part of the Department of Health and Human
Services that is responsible for the unaccompanied migrants — is picking up the
tab for legal representation of children who are housed in their juvenile shelters
in New York. Because Carlos was released to his grandmother in New York City, it
also meant he could access a medical and legal clinic operated by Catholic
Charities, the Children’s Health Fund, and Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx.
Every other Wednesday evening at the hospital, he and other unaccompanied
teenage migrants in the city can receive medical check­ups, attend a group
counseling session, and meet with an attorney.
It was through the clinic that Carlos
was introduced to the Saturday soccer
game. (The team is part of South
Bronx United, an organization that
runs a soccer and tutoring program.)
His case manager, 24­year­old Elvis
Garcia Callejas — who himself came
A bodega pit stop. (Photo: Edward Keating)
to the country as an undocumented
minor — moonlights as co­coach of
the team. Most of the boys playing
for him also arrived on their own from Central America and have, like Carlos,
been temporarily released to family members in New York. They are, however, in
removal proceedings, which means they face deportation. (Because of their legal
limbo, I am identifying them by their first names or nicknames.)
They are well aware of the precariousness of their situation. On the sidelines, the
boys reel off the dates they will appear in court to determine whether they can in
fact stay the way pregnant women recite their due date. Being among other
teenagers who are also facing possible deportation seems to have forged a tight
bond among the players. They throw their arms around each other’s shoulders,
affectionately calling each other loco. Some of the boys’ relationships predate
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Saturday soccer. Ariel and Jose — both 17­year­olds from Honduras — met when
they were waiting in line to be seen by a nurse at an Arlington, Texas, adult
detention facility, which they refer to as a hielera, or the icebox, because of its
very cold temperature. After being transferred to a shelter for juveniles, they were
flown to LaGuardia Airport, where they were released to their mothers, whom
they’ve lived apart from for a decade.
Ariel tells how their parents reacted to seeing the sons they’d left behind as small
children. Jose’s mother was on the phone when the boys emerged; she threw it
to the ground and started screaming. Ariel’s own mother grabbed onto him and
wouldn’t let him go. “Even when I couldn’t breathe,” he says, smiling.
Living together is an adjustment. For
most of their childhoods, the boys
didn’t know the women who now
serve as their caretakers. That’s
particularly true for Carlos and his
grandmother, whom I’ll call Alicia.
She’s lived in the United States for
almost 30 years and visited Honduras
Carlos, center, with friends on the roof of his
building. (Photo: Edward Keating)
just a handful of times while Carlos
was growing up. After losing her
house­cleaning job three years ago,
she has since supported herself by selling empanadas and juice on the street, a
few blocks from the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, not far from the apartment
she shares with Carlos.
In Honduras, Carlos started doing odd jobs at 11, and as a teenager, he washed
dishes and bussed tables at a restaurant 60 hours a week. But while he awaits
court hearings in October that will determine whether he can stay in the United
States, Carlos is not permitted to seek legal employment. “Even people with
papers can’t find work,” he says to me. “I’ve seen people with green cards cry
because they can’t find a job.”
Since June, when he earned his GED, Carlos’s days have acquired an
unstructured quality. He listens to bachata and reggaeton. He misses his ex,
Maria, a 16­year­old Puerto Rican girl who broke up with him a few months ago.
Sometimes Alicia will send him to deliver empanadas. He high­fives the other
vendors on the Grand Concourse, smiles a greeting at the owner of a coffee shop.
“I know everyone,” he boasts. He soaks in the attention.
It’s the same on the field. At the Saturday pickup game, the boys don’t have
assigned positions; they either serve as goalie or try to score. While some players
love to play defense, Carlos likes to attack. When he scores a goal, he grinds his
hips and turns in a circle as his teammates laugh.
C
arlos’s grandmother Alicia
constructed her empanada
food stand by herself. The oversize
umbrella patched with duct tape
came from Home Depot. She wheels
it in a metal shopping cart along with
a vat of frying oil, the wooden card
table she stacks with lemonade and
At soccer with his coach, Elvis Garcia Callejas. (Photo: Edward Keating)
tamarind juice, and the uncooked
empanadas she makes at home and
sells for $1.50 each. On an unseasonably cool August afternoon when Carlos and
I visit, business has been light. Alicia doesn’t expect to earn more than $40 for
the day.
She plunges a cheese empanada in the oil, and before turning it with a pair of
tongs, removes a ticket from her jeans’ pocket. She’s been fined $2,000 for
violating the New York City health code. She says she will just tell the judge she
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can’t pay it. With her rudimentary English and third­grade education, this is the
only way Alicia can envision earning a living. She has to pay rent and ConEd, and
feed Carlos and herself.
At first, Carlos says, there was a
honeymoon period when he moved
into Alicia’s apartment. She would
spontaneously embrace him and
bought him clothes and shoes. When
she saw Carlos in the Westchester
juvenile facility where he was held for
Grabbing ice cream. more than a month, his jet­black
(Photo: Edward Keating)
hair, brown eyes, and broad mouth
brought to mind her son, his father.
But that resemblance also worries
Alicia. Carlos’s father lived in the
States for a period before he was
deported over 20 years ago. (Carlos
doesn’t know the cause and doesn’t
ask.) When Carlos pierced his tongue,
acquired earrings, and occasionally
went out with friends at night, Alicia
Carlos greets his friends. (Photo: Edward Keating)
was unnerved. “He wouldn’t say who
he was meeting with, the time he was
coming back,” she says. If that seems like typical tension between an authority
figure and a teenager, it was compounded by the fact that Carlos was beginning to
grapple with the enormity of what he had witnessed back home and on his
journey coming over. "There was a time I was depressed,” he says. He still has
trouble sleeping.
Something that looms over him is his October court date, when his lawyer will try
to argue that Carlos qualifies for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, a precursor to
a green­card application. Carlos will need to demonstrate he was abused,
abandoned, or neglected by at least one parent. The vanishing act his father
pulled when Carlos was a baby may actually end up being his path to becoming a
U.S. citizen. But it also evokes Carlos’s scorn. “My father drank,” he says. “My
mother showed me the right path.” The way Carlos dismisses his father is another
source of conflict with Alicia. “Things aren’t as clear­cut as his mother might have
made him think,” she tells me.
Earlier this year, Carlos moved out of
his grandmother’s apartment. He
lived with some friends and later
spent ten days at a shelter for
homeless youth in the city. Alicia
called him there and said to return,
that he had a home with her. Things
are better, both of them say. They’re
Carlos crosses the Grand Concourse on his way to a
haircut. (Photo: Edward Keating)
living together again. But recently,
the health inspector confiscated
Alicia’s stand, so she’s been selling
the empanadas on foot. When describing his last few months in New York — his
breakup, the ups and downs with Alicia — Carlos gets quiet, thoughtful. His court
date is less than two months away. There was a phrase he repeated when he
walked for 30 hours straight in southern Mexico: “This is nothing.” Now he has a
new way of coping. “I try,” he tells me, “not to remember stuff.”
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