A human rights researcher documents the stories of Central American migrants leaving behind endemic poverty and high homicide rates. In limbo in Mexico, many use art therapy to express their anxiety.
Migrants on a ship intercepted offshore near the Libyan town of Gohneima, east of the capital Tripoli, in July 2018.
Libyan Coast Guard via AP, File
After 1.3 million migrants from the Middle East and Africa came to Europe in 2015, many countries built fences or closed their ports. That has pushed migrants to take riskier routes into the EU.
Salvadoran immigrants were pivotal in the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles in 1990. It earned wage increases for custodial staff nationwide and inspired today’s $15 minimum wage campaign.
AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
Central Americans who came to the US in the 1980s fleeing civil war drew on their background fighting for social justice back home to help unionize farmworkers, janitors and poultry packers in the US.
One of 2018’s unforgettable images: Maria Meza and her twin daughters sprint from tear gas lobbed at the border wall between the U.S and Mexico in Tijuana, Nov. 25, 2018.
Reuters/Kim Kyung Hoon
The migrant caravan was one of the biggest international stories of 2018, a roving human drama that laid bare Central America’s pain for all the world to see.
Members of the migrant caravan, mostly Hondurans, cross a river that separates Guatemala and Mexico.
EPA/Esteban Biba
Honduran migrants trudging north towards the US-Mexico border are fleeing violence and poverty that has its roots in activities of 10th-century American fruit companies.
Central American migrants face extortion, robbery, assault, kidnapping, rape and murder on their weeks-long journey through Mexico. Some find safety in numbers.
AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd
More than two-thirds of Central American migrants will experience violence on their journey through Mexico, from robbery and extortion to rape. Caravans create safety in numbers.
Javier Garrido Martinez holds his four-year-old son during a news conference in New York on July 11, 2018. The pair were reunited after being separated for almost two months when authorities stopped them at the U.S. southern border.
(AP Photo/Robert Bumsted)
The U.S. immigration detention system under Donald Trump is abusive, racist, sexist and haphazardly implemented, all designed to terrorize people attempting to exercise their right to seek asylum.
Daily life in some parts of Central America is so fearsome for parents and children that crossing Mexico and risking detention in the U.S. seems less fearsome.
Reuters/Edgard Garrido
Central American youth are 10 times more likely to be murdered than children in the US. Child homicides in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are rising even as other violence declines.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will take office as Mexico’s president on Dec. 1, 2018.
Reuters/Goran Tomasevic
Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor and career outsider, won Mexico’s July 1 presidential election in a landslide. The US-Mexico relationship is about to change.
The Trump administration’s new family separation policy has become a hot issue in Mexico’s presidential election. All four candidates say that Mexico must do more to respect the human rights of Central American migrants.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
Mexico elects a new president on July 1. Frontrunner Andrés Manuel López Obrador says Trump’s immigration policy is ‘arrogant, racist and inhuman’ and that he won’t do the US’s ‘dirty work’ anymore.