“There is a couple of reasons that I came here,” Lili said, “but the main reason is because there is a lot of violence in Honduras.” Lili left Honduras at age 16 with her infant son, whose birth was the result of sexual assault.
She attempted to find safety in the U.S., where her mother lived. She hadn’t seen her in 11 years. She made her way through Guatemala and Mexico by bus and walked through the desert for hours. Eventually, she was picked up by immigration officials, held in a detention facility, and then finally reunited with her mother.
Lili was an unaccompanied minor. An unaccompanied minor is a child arriving at the U.S. border without parents or a legal guardian. These child migrants are legally referred to as Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs). Some of these children made the dangerous trek alone, traveled in groups for safety, or are with adults who are not their parent or guardian.
According to a report from CBS, in the month of February 2021 alone, “nearly 9,500 unaccompanied children were taken into U.S. border custody — a 21-month high, according to government data.”
In 2014, Russell Moore wrote about the growing number of unaccompanied children arriving at the border then, calling it a “humanitarian crisis” and calling Christians to “recognize both the complexity of this situation and what it means to be people of justice and mercy.” This crisis continues today.
Please pray with us for these vulnerable children.
Find out how you can help and learn more about transitional foster care and what’s next for kids at the border.
