"They are the ones more likely to take the risk. "It's the young who are coming to the country," said Belen Villamizar, a lawyer working in Cucuta with Colombia's child welfare agency. A recent census found that of the estimated 442,500 Venezuelan migrants living in Colombia illegally, about a quarter are minors - 10 percent are 5 years old or younger. Over 1 million Venezuelans have fled across the porous border into Colombia in less than two years, many of them young children. Rosalba Navarro, a sister with Cucuta's Roman Catholic archdiocese, says mothers on several occasions have begged her: "Please take them.
At the city's biggest soup kitchen, some parents have even tried to give their children away. Police in Cucuta regularly turn at least one or two children a day over to the nation's child welfare agency, where many are then placed in foster homes. More than 500 Venezuelan children have been taken into custody in Colombia, according to government documents. Doctors found the child's umbilical cord had been well cut and clamped, indicating she had been born in a hospital.Īs Venezuelans flee their country's collapsing economy and an autocratic government in rising numbers, a grim toll is becoming evident among the youngest arrivals in Colombia: Children are sleeping on the streets, suffering from hunger and untreated infections, and sometimes being lured into sex work. Officers arrived within minutes and took the child to a nearby hospital. The woman picked the girl up from the ground, later telling police she could see ants climbing on the newborn's body.
#5 YEAR OLD ABANDONED AT BORDER DRIVER#
They traced the faint wail to the car, just as the driver was starting the engine, coming dangerously close to striking the child.
"She is four days old and her name is Angela."Ībout an hour later, another woman, her son and a teenage friend emerged from the stadium and heard the baby crying. "I don't have the means to take care of her," she wrote on graph paper with a pink border of hearts, paw prints and flowers. Late last month, officials said smugglers dropped two young children from Ecuador, 3 and 5 years old, were dropped over a 14-foot-high barrier along the New Mexico-Mexico border.CUCUTA, Colombia (AP) - On a recent humid evening in the Colombian border city of Cucuta, a Venezuelan woman wrapped her newborn daughter in a pale yellow blanket and left her with a note alongside a car parked near a stadium hosting a high school field day. "The only people we are not going to let sit there on the other side of the Rio Grande by themselves with no help are children," he said late last month. President Joe Biden has said that there is a seasonal increase in migration, and he also blamed the Trump administration in part for neglecting Central America and the root problems that drive migration and for what he said was a dismantling of systems to deal with migrants.īiden has said most people arriving at the border are being turned away. It has resulted in children being held in overcrowded border patrol stations far past the 72-hour legal limit. The Biden administration's policy is to expel migrants except minors who come alone, which is a change from the Trump administration policy of turning away asylum-seekers including children under a pandemic rule known as Title 42. Health and Human Services and Customs and Border Protection - federal data shows.
A record number of unaccompanied children crossed the border in March.Īs of Monday, about 19,000 unaccompanied migrant children were in federal custody - U.S. The incident comes amid a rise at the border of unaccompanied minors, fleeing conditions in Central America and other places. He woke up and realized he had been left behind by a group of migrants he was traveling with, and he is safe at a Border Patrol facility and will be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement, it said. The video, taken Thursday in the Rio Grande Valley, shows the boy sobbing and saying that he didn't know where the group he was with went.Ĭustoms and Border Protection said that the 10-year-old boy from Nicaragua was found walking alone on a rural road near La Grulla, Texas. A frightened child alone in Texas last week told a Border Patrol official that he'd been abandoned by a larger group and was without his parents, video of the encounter showed.
0 kommentar(er)
