The case for asylum: A child's long, lonely trek

BROWNSVILLE - The paralegal with chestnut ringlets and inky blue eyes pressed the buzzer at the outer door of a shelter for immigrant children, still unsure what to do about the teenager in Dormitory No. 2.

Laura Rheinheimer's co-workers at a Harlingen-based legal nonprofit had warned her about 17-year-old Elvin Rodriguez.

Another paralegal and an attorney already had interviewed him and passed on his case. They both said he seemed standoffish. Rude, one said, like he didn't want help.

Rheinheimer carried a binder that held a one-page summary about Rodriguez on that spring day in 2010. A co-worker had typed it up shortly after a Border Patrol agent found Rodriguez stumbling along the shoulder of a Texas highway six months earlier, bleeding from a deep cut under his curly hair.

It gave a brief description of why he left home - one that advocates like Rheinheimer have heard with greater frequency and urgency as the tide of unaccompanied children fleeing to the U.S. has reached crisis levels. "Elvin voiced being afraid to return to his home country because of problems he was having with local MS-13 gang members," the summary read.

Rheinheimer, then 26, already worked about 50 hours a week, and feared taking on too many cases and stretching herself too thin. But she wasn't willing to write off Rodriguez without talking to him, and let the government send him back to whatever he might be running from.

She walked down the hall of the dank, cinder block-walled shelter until she reached Rodriguez's dormitory. He looked up from a bottom bunk, his wide, dark eyes framed by angular cheekbones.

"My name is Laura," she said in Spanish with a smile.

He smiled shyly back.

He had no reason to fear any of the rotating cast of staff members, caseworkers and clinicians who appeared at his dormitory door. Not yet, anyway.

Rodriguez was on the front of a wave of children from the "northern triangle" of Central America entering the U.S. illegally without a parent or guardian. In 2009, U.S. Border Patrol agents detained about 3,300 unaccompanied children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. That number spiked to more than 10,000 in 2012. It doubled to more than 20,000 in 2013.

Since October, the number has more than doubled again, topping 44,000 and fueling what President Barack Obama has called a humanitarian crisis.

Border Patrol cells in South Texas are crammed with children sleeping on concrete benches and floors. Within 72 hours, the Border Patrol is supposed to turn over children from countries other than Mexico to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency charged with the children's long-term care.

But ORR officials ran out of bed space this spring, as the flood of children overwhelmed their more than 90 shelters and other facilities scattered across the country, but clustered largely in Texas. Thousands of children are now housed in temporary shelters on military bases in Texas, Oklahoma and California.

Politicians are pointing fingers and pondering changes to federal law in order to speed children's deportations.

On the border, many advocates like Rheinheimer who work directly with children say the crisis has been brewing for years, evidenced in the quiet accumulation of thousands of case summaries like Rodriguez's.

She worries about the speed with which children are churning through the system. The Obama administration is putting new arrivals at the front of the line for immigration court hearings instead of having them wait for about two years behind a backlog of 375,000 cases. A bill proposed by congressional lawmakers from Texas would accelerate deportations by requiring children to appear before judges within a week of landing in ORR custody.

"A lot of the kids are still traumatized at that point," Rhein-heimer said, "and don't know what to do."

Rheinheimer sat across from Rodriguez in the dormitory and pulled his paperwork from the plastic binder.

Age 17 … from a ranch in the hills outside Danlí, El Paraíso, Honduras … "refused to join the Mara gang," the summary said. "Elvin did not agree with that lifestyle and said he doesn't want to get involved in criminal activities, much less to kill somebody ...

"Elvin was afraid they could kill him and perhaps his family."

For decades, the city of Danlí remained largely untouched by gangs, even as members of the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs waged war in the nearby capital of Tegucigalpa, 60 miles away.

As the government's crackdown intensified in big cities, violence spread to smaller cities, including Danlí, where the gang threat has grown so serious that the U.S. Embassy sponsors gang-resistance training in schools.

Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the world, with 90.4 homicides per 100,000 people, compared with 4.7 per 100,000 in the U.S.

Why did you come here? Rheinheimer asked Rodriguez.

He said MS13 members tried to force him to sell drugs and dragged him off the street and blindfolded him on three occasions, punching, kicking and beating him with sticks until he thought he was going to die.

She studied him silently.

Rheinheimer was born and raised in Middlebury, Ind., a town of 3,400 nestled among cornfields in Amish country. Her father was a third-grade teacher, her Puerto Rican-born mother the director of a library.

Valedictorian of her high school class, Rheinheimer joined the Mennonite Voluntary Service after graduating from nearby Goshen College. The program placed her with the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project (ProBAR) in Harlingen in 2007 as a volunteer answering phones.

She quickly took on more responsibility, and they hired her full time. She and her colleagues conducted a delicate legal triage, counseling unaccompanied children on their legal rights and arranging pro bono representation for those with strong cases. In the children's program, she said she felt like she'd found her calling.

"My boys," she called the children in the shelter.

Still, Rheinheimer had a solid streak of Midwestern pragmatism. She knew that about 40 percent of unaccompanied children qualify for legal relief.

But children facing deportation are not entitled to government-funded attorneys. About half go through the immigration court system without lawyers, and only 10 percent of those without an attorney are granted legal status, according to a recent analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Rheinheimer knew she couldn't - shouldn't - try to help every child. There was a joke in the office, a nod to her skill at judging character: "If Laura doesn't like a kid, you know something is wrong."

She asked Rodriguez about his family.

He never met his father.

His mother left Danlí when he was 5 years old. His little sister was 3. His baby brother was still in diapers. She boarded a bus to San Pedro Sula, a big city four hours away, and moved in with another family, helping to clean their house and raise their children, Rodriguez said.

His grandparents were left to raise them. Rodriguez said he never set foot in school. He worked in the cornfields surrounding the ranch.

As Rodriguez answered questions, Rheinheimer thought he seemed shy. But she didn't pick up on the negative vibe her co-workers had warned her about. No rudeness or aloofness.

One co-worker had mentioned inconsistencies in his story. That raised a flag for Rheinheimer. She pressed him on details, trying to see if his story had changed, or if he was just afraid to open up to the first attorney.

I didn't know who to trust, he said.

"A lot of people had already given up on him by then, but I don't know. I didn't get that," she said. "I felt he was being very genuine, and he had genuinely struggled and really didn't have anything to go back to."

She knew Rodriguez's legal options were limited. It was too late to apply for Special Immigrant Juvenile status, a visa available to children who were abandoned, abused or neglected by their parents.

Those visas require an attorney, family court filings and time, generally at least six months. Rodriguez already was approaching his 18th birthday, which would surely mean a transfer to adult immigration detention.

She also ruled out visas for crime and trafficking victims. That left asylum. Asylum cases are difficult, even with lawyers. Only about 2 percent of unaccompanied children caught at the border since 2012 have applied for asylum, though government data shows a recent increase in applicants from Central America.

Rheinheimer thanked Rodriguez, saying she would talk to her co-workers and get back to him.

She would have to sell the rest of her colleagues, the ones who'd already written off Rodriguez, on the idea that he deserved another chance. Rheinheimer knew that without help, he would almost certainly be deported.

The nights in Dormitory No. 2 were the hardest, Rodriguez said. He'd try to doze off listening to pop music on his MP3 player. But often sleep wouldn't come, and his thoughts would drift to his uncle.

He was the closest Rodriguez ever came to a father, even though he left for the U.S. in 2002, when Rodriguez was 10.

Whenever his uncle called Rodriguez's grandparents' adobe home in Honduras, Rodriguez clamored for the phone. He wanted to know what life in the U.S. was like. The journey is long and dangerous and hard, he remembers his uncle saying. Don't come, he said.

Before Rodriguez left Honduras, he lied to his uncle. The teenager called and asked for $100 to go to the doctor. His uncle, a 30-year-old landscaper living in Georgia, made him swear that he wouldn't use the cash to the come to the U.S.

Rodriguez promised, but then took his uncle's money to the bus station and bought a ticket into Guatemala. From there, he started walking north, begging for beans, water and tortillas.

Rodriguez was afraid at first that his uncle might be angry and resentful, but he wasn't. After Rodriguez finally made it across the Rio Grande and landed in detention, his uncle offered to take him in while his immigration case was pending.

About 65 percent of children were released to a sponsor while they awaited their court hearings from 2008 through 2010. Now, with the crush of children coming into the system, the government releases more than 90 percent to sponsors.

Rodriguez's uncle moved fast to get him out of detention. He submitted his fingerprints to the U.S. government for a criminal background check. They came back clean, according to government records.

He took a Greyhound bus from Atlanta to Tampa to collect documentation from a previous employer to show he could support his nephew. Border Patrol agents boarded the bus at the Tampa station for a routine check around 10:15 p.m. on Jan. 10, 2010. They asked to see everyone's identification. They ran some checks on his uncle and took him into custody, immigration records show. Within days, Rodriguez's uncle was on a flight back to Honduras.

If I hadn't come, would he still be here? Rodriguez wondered.

The question always brought a fresh wave of guilt.

On July 25, 2010, around 1 a.m., Rodriguez slept on his bottom bunk with music piping softly through his earbuds.

Outside the dorm, a night-shift worker slipped off his sneakers, leaving them outside the door.

Rodriguez said he jolted awake and saw a man standing over his bunk bed in the darkness.

Rodriguez said he felt the man's hands on his stomach, and then under the waistband of his boxer shorts. He said he tried to roll away, but the man did not stop touching him. He wanted to punch him, he said, but he was scared.

A grandmotherly shelter worker spotted the pair of sneakers by the door of the dormitory. That's odd, she thought. Moments later, she saw the night-shift worker she was supposed to relieve slip out of the dormitory door in his stocking feet. Rodriguez followed, obviously shaken. He blurted out what happened. He touched me, he said, "down there," pointing below his waist. She told him not to say anything more, and led him out of the dormitory to her supervisor.

For years, sexual abuse of children in the ORR system remained largely sealed off to the public, protected by laws that make child abuse and neglect records confidential. A Houston Chronicle investigation published in May found that ORR's policy for handling sexual abuse allegations allowed shelter workers accused of molesting and seducing youths to escape punishment under a federal law.

Congress made sexual contact with a child in ORR custody a federal crime in 2008 punishable by up to 15 years in prison. But ORR did not call for the notification of the FBI when a child alleged sexual abuse. Instead, ORR required shelters to notify them and to follow state childcare licensing guidelines for abuse reporting.

As a result, sexual abuse cases, including Rodriguez's, never reached federal prosecutors. In the hands of local police, case after case crumbled.

On Friday, two months after the Houston Chronicle published its investigation, ORR officials said they changed the policy, and now notify the FBI and the Inspector General of abuse allegations.

Child advocates and some lawmakers are calling for more changes. More than 16 months ago, Congress ordered ORR to write regulations to comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which requires strict standards designed to protect youths from abuse and punish workers who harm them. The regulation remains tied up in executive review.

After that July night in 2010 when Rodriguez was molested, shelter administrators suspended the worker, 27-year-old Jonathan Chavez Perez. They followed ORR guidelines and reported the allegation to state childcare licensing officials.

But Rheinheimer, checking in on Rodriguez periodically as she tried to find the best way to help him, knew none of this. She'd heard a vague rumor that something bad had happened, and she knew if Rodriguez had been sexually assaulted, he could be eligible for a U visa for crime victims, which was a far surer path to legal status than a long-shot asylum application.

Advocates say ORR needs to appoint child advocates and attorneys to represent youths who report abuses, so they don't continue chugging toward deportation, unaware they are eligible for U visas.

Rheinheimer asked Rodriguez, gently, if there was anything he wanted to tell her. Did something happen to you?

He trusted her. But he was paralyzed by humiliation.

No, he lied.

"I couldn't tell her," Rodriguez recalled much later. "I was too ashamed."

On an August morning, a Brownsville Police detective summoned Rodriguez to headquarters. He had Rodriguez swear to tell the truth, and started scribbling notes.

"The lights were off in the dorm," Rodriguez told David Navarro Jr., an affable, round-faced detective.

"I was awoken [sic] to someone touching me under my boxers," he said. "I did not know what to do and was very scared to say anything or even move."

As a boy, Rodriguez was taught not to trust the police. They could be on the payroll of a gang or a cartel or a corrupt politician.

Face-to-face with Navarro, Rodriguez told himself this was different; he was in America.

"I felt just like punching him, but I did not do it because I would get in trouble. … I just tried to push him away several times, but he did not stop."

Navarro thanked Rodriguez. He had what he needed.

The teenager was ushered out of the police station, into the summer sun and then back inside the bowels of the shelter, to wait.

Two days later, Navarro sat across from Chavez, the shelter worker, inside police headquarters. As Navarro and his partner watched, Chavez signed a form waiving his rights and initialed it five times. Chavez told Navarro he'd worked at the shelter for about three months, part time, mostly on nights and weekends.

He told Navarro he took his shoes off outside the door, so they wouldn't make noise on the tile floor.

"There was a boy that caught my attention because he appeared to be older than the rest," he told the detective.

"I was high on synthetic marijuana and just made my way to his bed. ..."

"I did touch his private part (penis) over his shorts but it was very fast," he said. "I really do mean (it) when I say that I made a mistake and I am willing to go to jail for what I did."

Days later, the state childcare licensing investigator issued her finding: "A staff member ... compelled or encouraged a child to engage in sexual conduct." The shelter fired Chavez.

By the end of August, Rhein-heimer feared Rodriguez was running out of time. She had never seen a child fill out any asylum application on his own and win a case. But Rodriguez didn't seem to have any other options.

To qualify for asylum, children must meet a strict definition in federal law: "a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her country of nationality because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion."

She tried to explain the law in simple terms, so he could understand it. That meant to stay in the U.S., he had to show he was afraid to go home for very specific reasons.

Since Rodriguez never learned how to write, Rheinheimer read each question in Spanish, and then jotted down his answers.

"Have you, your family, or close friends or colleagues ever experienced harm or mistreatment or threats in the past by anyone?," she asked him.

"I was abused and mistreated in my home and I was beaten and received death threats by members of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS). My father abandoned me when I was young and never supported me. My mother lived away from home and worked."

"My grandparents raised me. My grandfather used drugs and alcohol and was abusive toward me. He beat me and kicked me often for no reason."

Since Rodriguez fled, experts and academics say problems in Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador have intensified, fueling the record-breaking surge of children to the border.

Rheinheimer typed his answers and dropped Rodriguez's application in the mail. It was dated Sept. 15, 2010. He was less than two months from his 18th birthday. The clock was ticking for his transfer to adult detention.

Fifty-one days after Rodriguez awoke to find the shelter worker standing over his bed, Detective Navarro quietly reclassified the case.

Navarro wrote in Chavez's paperwork that the case originally was assigned as "indecency with a child by sexual contact." "No arrest will be made as the victim is 17 years old and he is not considered a child by Texas law," he wrote. The charge was reduced to a Class C misdemeanor.

It was the equivalent of a traffic ticket. A judge let Chavez plea nolo contendere, or "no contest."

Chavez paid $350 at a window at the Brownsville Municipal Court on the morning of Nov. 2, 2010. He has a clean record.

Chavez, who now works for AIDS Services of Austin, told the Chronicle recently he has no memory of molesting Rodriguez. "I can tell you I don't remember touching no one."

Five days after Chavez paid the fine, a shelter worker told Rodriguez he had a phone call. Rodriguez recognized the voice on the phone as a childhood friend from Danlí: your uncle has been shot in Honduras and is in the hospital.

Rodriguez's friend waited in silence on the phone. He has a wound in his heart, Rodriguez remembers him saying. "Do you understand? He is going to die."

The next time Rodriguez called his mother, she said her brother had died. She said he was shot in a crowded park, while people played soccer and cards. The police didn't even come out to investigate, she told him.

Rodriguez felt sick as he hung up the phone.

He remembered his uncle's words before he left Honduras: Don't come.

This is my fault, Rodriguez thought.

A week later, on the eve of his asylum hearing, Rheinheimer stopped by his dormitory to check on him. She wanted to make sure he wasn't too nervous. Did he have any last-minute questions?

He told her his uncle had been killed in Honduras, and his grandparents were blaming him for his death.

"I'm sorry, Elvin," she said.

They added an addendum to Rodriguez's asylum application.

"My family blamed me for my uncle's deportation," his sworn statement read. "They told me if I had not been detained he would not have offered to sponsor me and immigration would not have found him. If I go back to Honduras I have nowhere to live. My family will not accept me."

The next morning, Rodriguez arrived early for his interview at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Harlingen. Rheinheimer went with him to translate.

She always gets nervous for children before interviews but tries her best to hide it.

Rodriguez seemed nervous, too. He kept glancing at her for her reassurance.

They filed into a small, stuffy room with a desk. The officer was short and stocky, built like a smallish football player. He wanted everything word-for-word, by the book.

During an asylum interview, an officer is allowed to consider a range of factors, including consistency, plausibility, candor, responsiveness and omissions.

The officer asked Rodriguez about his mother, his father, his grandmother, his grandfather.

Rheinheimer remembers the officer asking the same questions about the gangs over and over.

"I remember thinking, 'Oh no, what's he looking for? What did he hear that I didn't? What's making that raise a flag for him?'"

Rodriguez gave clear, simple, answers.

This kid is doing great, Rheinheimer thought.

On his 18th birthday in December 2010, an ICE agent picked up Rodriguez from the shelter and drove him to Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Los Fresnos, Texas.

His first weeks in adult detention, he had trouble sleeping, he said, because he was afraid he would be assaulted.

After four months in Port Isabel, Rodriguez considered for first time just giving up. He could sign papers agreeing to go home voluntarily. He'd seen other detainees do it. But then, he said, he thought about what waited for him back in Honduras.

Rheinheimer knew the deadline for a decision on his case was approaching. On a Wednesday in March 2011, she popped in on a caseworker at the children's shelter in Brownsville with a question about another case.

The caseworker handed Rhein- heimer a thick, white, oversized envelope. It was addressed to Rodriguez, care of Rheinheimer.

Rheinheimer knew what it was the moment she saw it. Only the winning asylum applications come back in the big envelopes. Denials come in thin envelopes.

She let it sink in, the mixture of happiness and relief. The thick envelope meant that against the odds, the U.S. government believed Rodriguez deserved protection.

"I don't think there were too many people who would have placed bets on things working out for him," she said. "Kids like that, it's amazing to me that they get it into their heads that it's worth trying for something, when all their lives, people have told them they're not worth anything."

Rheinheimer and a coworker drove to Port Isabel in her white Mazda to pick up Rodriguez. In the parking lot, he seemed to be in shock. He kept saying: "Thank you."

He had nowhere to go.

Rheinheimer dropped him off at a shelter run by nuns in a rural stretch of San Benito. He had a work authorization card because he'd been granted asylum by the U.S. government.

After a few months, Rodriguez joined some of his uncle's friends in Florida, mowed lawns and trimmed hedges, then headed for New Orleans, where he painted commercial buildings. He's been in Houston for the past three weeks. Denver is his next stop. He is less than two years from U.S. citizenship. But his life is nomadic and lonely.

Rodriguez said he hardly thinks about what happened in the children's shelter. But it sometimes comes back to him after he drifts off to sleep.

"To this day, I have nightmares," he said. "I wake up and he is at my bed. And it is happening again."

More than anything else, Rodriguez said, he misses his uncle. "I wonder if I hadn't come here, would he still be alive?"

Months ago, Rodriguez talked with an attorney to see if he could help bring his younger brother to the U.S.

If he had received a U visa, the one available to crime victims, he could have applied to bring his brother to the U.S. But with asylum, his only option is to wait until he becomes a U.S. citizen and then apply for his brother, who would get into a decade-long line to wait to immigrate legally.

Lately, his brother, now 17, has started talking about crossing illegally.

Rodriguez has tried to talk him out of it. He sends money so he can go to school in Honduras. He repeats the same thing his uncle said to him when he talked about heading north: It is long and hard and dangerous. Don't come.

He and Rheinheimer keep in touch. He calls her when he's confused about something, like how to pay taxes, or if he can become a firefighter. They are friends on Facebook.

Rheinheimer left ProBAR in July 2012 to pursue a dual major in social work and law at the University of Denver. This summer, she returned to the border as a supervisory paralegal. She is watching children move through the system at record speed and in exponentially larger numbers than when Rodriguez landed in custody.

The number of shelter beds in the Rio Grande Valley has more than quadrupled since 2009, topping 1,600. Children are in custody for half as long as they used to be, with some released to relatives in the U.S. within a week.

She said what worked most in Rodriguez's favor was "the luxury of time." It's something she no longer has.