Forty Bullets to Head Shows Why Hondurans Flee to U.S.
Forty Bullets to Head Shows Why Hondurans Flee to U.S.
By Eric Martin Jul 31, 2014 10:18 AM CT
Heidy Cabrera said she was finishing her shift at a supermarket checkout counter in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, when her mother called to deliver the news. Her boyfriend, Diego, had been killed on the way home from his construction job -- shot in the head 40 times.
Seven months later, with his murder unsolved, Cabrera, 22, got on a bus and left Honduras. She had her eight-year-old son Eduardo in tow and was pregnant with Diegos child, who was born after she crossed into Mexico.
I no longer felt safe living in my neighborhood, Cabrera said, sitting on a bed at a shelter for migrants in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula while cradling 16-day-old Cristopher in her arms earlier this month. My friends have also had family members killed. These kind of things happen all the time. I want a good life for my children in the U.S., one without crime.
Cabrera and her sons represent one of the biggest shifts in immigration to the U.S., one that has been overlooked in a debate about the arrival of unaccompanied children. The number of families apprehended at the southwest border, the primary point of entry for immigrants from Central America, surged sixfold this year, almost exceeding the number of unaccompanied minors, which doubled.
More:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-31/forty-bullets-in-the-head-shows-why-hondurans-fleeing-for-u-s-.html