Is Trek of Undocumented Immigrant Children Safer Than Staying Home? Miguel Almaguer and Elisha Fieldstadt - NBC News
go to original July 6, 2014

A Pulitzer Prize winning author who followed the treacherous trip of a young Honduran boy to the United States said many of the children crossing the border today are refugees and should be treated as such.

Sonia Nazario, who won the Pulitzer for a 2002 L.A. Times piece which eventually became the book "Enrique’s Journey," retraced the trek from Honduras through Mexico of the young boy who, without a dollar to his name, spent months on the tops of freight trains on a quest to find his mother in the U.S.

Having personally — physically — held on to the sides and tops of seven different freight trains in an effort to get a sense of what Enrique and other immigrant children endured, Nazario knows the dangers firsthand.

"There are gangsters who control the train tops ... bandits who will rob you and rape you and sometimes kill you," she said. Then there’s the train itself — dubbed "La Bestia" or "The Beast” — that children jump on to and off of as it speeds onward. The kids “lose arms and legs to that freight train," Nazario said.

But the danger faced on the journey is nothing compared to the violence these young immigrants face in their home countries.

Read the rest at NBC News

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