There Will Be Fewer LatAm Child Migrants This Year, But the Crisis Isn't Over Ian Gordon - Mother Jones
go to original February 13, 2015

Las Patronas: Women Helping Child Migrants as They Make Their Way Across Mexico (GlobalPost)

It was right around this time last year that sources in South Texas began telling me that an expected surge of unaccompanied child migrants was going to be much larger than previously anticipated. They were right: The number of kids crossing the US-Mexico border skyrocketed in 2014, and the border crisis was soon front-page news. But the numbers have been dropping since last fall, and according to new projections, they're on pace to recede even further in 2015.

According to projections from the think tank Washington Office on Latin America, around 41,000 child migrants traveling alone will be caught by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the 2015 fiscal year, a 39 percent decrease from last year. WOLA's data also suggests that border agents will nab more than 56,000 migrant families (typically a mother traveling with children), a 16 percent drop from 2014.

The number of apprehensions is proportional to the number of people crossing the border. The predictions are extrapolated from CBP data and seasonal migration trends. Adam Isacson, WOLA's senior associate for regional security policy, acknowledged that the numbers are "very tentative" and that the sample sizes were small, but that 2015 is still on pace to see the second-biggest influx ever of kids traveling alone.



Read the rest at Mother Jones

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