Like many Jews, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author comes from a family that was persecuted and that migrated. She continues to help people fleeing violence and hopelessness.
Some might call Sonia Nazario a heroine. Others might call her a troublemaker. Some might not like her position on immigration. Others might not like her outspokenness about the inherent problems of immigrants leaving children behind. By any measure, however, Nazario may be one of the most important Jewish social activists that you have never heard of.
In 2015 alone she has received awards from the First Focus Campaign for Children and the Golden Door Award from HIAS Pennsylvania. She has also testified before Congress and the United Nations and is routinely speaking at college campuses around the nation. This week she was awarded an “honorary visiting professorship” at the Universidad Autónoma de Hidalgo in Mexico, from where she’ll also be reporting for the New York Times on migrant deaths in the country.
Nazario is a woman of coraje or chutzpah. She rode on top of rickety Mexican freight trains, better known as the trenes de la muerte or la bestia (trains of death; the beast), from Chiapas, Mexico, to the U.S. border to report on unaccompanied minors. With her on this journey were hundreds of immigrants, children, women, men, and gang members.
Many are fleeing unimaginable violence in Central America and Mexico in large part due to drug trafficking and gang warfare; by some measures Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the world, El Salvador the second, and Guatemala the fifth. Many are looking for better economic opportunities. And many, many more, especially the children, are following an implacable urge to find their mothers.
It took Nazario three months, seven freight trains, and one hitchhike with a driver of an eighteen-wheeler semi to travel from what she calls Mexico’s “heart of darkness,” Chiapas, to the U.S. border. Along the way she almost got knocked off the train by a tree branch, experienced extreme cold and heat, fear, and hunger. Why did she do this? Because she had heard from Carmen, who cleaned her house in Los Angeles, that her son, like many, was making the journey by himself to reach her. And that many more were doing the same thing. She set out to find out why. But nothing had prepared her for what she discovered: This year alone the United States projects that 40,000 unaccompanied minors will try to cross the border. That is down from last year’s high of 69,000, but Nazario says the number is likely higher, at least 85,000, because the numbers do not include the children who are just “tossed back over the border,” nor does it include those who were not caught…
Nazario’s U.S. citizenship—she is the only one of her siblings born in the United States—would prove useful during the military dictatorship. At 14, when she was safely back in the United States, she personally lobbied congressional leaders to save family friends…
The history of her own personal family is what served as the compass for her truth telling. “I think coming from two families that were persecuted and migrated had a big impact on me. There is always a sense of being an outsider, of being ostracized, and of being the other. I think Jews have always felt that way. Having a foot in both worlds means you never really fit in,” she said. “I think that has made me want to write about social issues.”
..Nazario told me that she is not “a radical pro-immigration open borders kind of gal.” She also knows that many of the governments in Central America are to blame for their current economic and political situation. But our tangled history with Latin America is also to blame. Today’s immigration is largely predicated on push factors that are deeply rooted in the United States’ long and infamous history of destabilizing the region through political and economic intervention for our benefit, our love affair with illegal drugs—we use more than any nation on earth, she said—and our failed immigration policies.
“As part of Plan Colombia we have spent about $8 billion to disrupt the drug trafficking up the Caribbean corridor,” she explained. “But narco-traffickers simply reroute. They even use submarines. Today four to five cocaine flights land every day in Honduras, and the cartels are fighting for turf to move the cocaine north. They recruit children to be their foot soldiers in this enterprise. They try to get young kids hooked on drugs. They especially target 10- and 11-year-old boys, telling them to start using crack or they will beat or kill them.”
Our failed immigration policies, past and present, are responsible as well. Since 1996, the United States tightened laws toward permanent residents who had committed certain crimes, which resulted in higher numbers of deportations back to Central America. “We have deported some 300,000 people, many with criminal histories. We deported gang members from the MS 13 gang and the 18th Street gang. So, we exported violent gangs to Central America, and that only increased the violence in those countries.”
In an attempt to protect these children, Microsoft and Angelina Jolie in 2008 founded the nonprofit Kids in Need of Defense: KIND, which recruits pro-bono attorneys to represent unaccompanied immigrant children. To date, over 9,000 lawyers have taken on a case.
…Nazario will continue her fight by using her position as a journalist and her involvement with KIND to advocate for society’s most vulnerable citizens.
Why would America want these low IQ immigrants from Central America? What advantage will they give America? The article does not bother with these questions.
Notice how the article calls these illegal immigrants “citizens”!
At least we can better get to know somebody who’s destroying our country. It makes us better at recognizing these people.
According to Wikipedia: “In 2006, Nazario published a book, Enrique’s Journey, which significantly expanded her newspaper series. It became a national bestseller and won two book awards. It has been published in eight languages and has been adopted by 54 universities and scores of high schools nationwide as their “freshman read” or “all-campus read.” In the fall of 2010, it was the second most-chosen book for freshman or all-campus reads at universities across the country.”
