Casting Off Immigrant ‘Orphans’ : Mexico: Kids as young as 8 and 9 are crossing the U.S. border alone, ending up in drug-infested areas and turning to crime. But critics of a new deportation project worry about what they are returning to.

“Jorge Estrada!”

A Mexican immigration official searched the roomful of boys for the one she wanted. Sullen-faced, in heavy-metal T-shirts and worn pants, the boys stared back.

They were the weekly shipment of children deported to Mexico from Orange and Los Angeles counties, where they had been arrested, mostly for stealing. Every Thursday morning they arrive, bleary-eyed from the trip, shuffling into the Mexican immigration office at the Otay Mesa border crossing in Tijuana.

Jorge came from Tustin; the police arrested him for petty theft, according to Mexican officials. At 16, he is the same age as many of the others, but he is dressed better, in a rugby shirt, jeans and black tennis shoes with new red laces.

How children such as Jorge survive is anyone’s guess. They come alone to the United States as young as 8 or 9, U.S. and Mexican officials say. Once here, many live together in squalid barrio housing and some turn to gangs and crime for protection and support.

Last year, a Mexican government study of unaccompanied minors found that there were 3,000 who had been arrested in California and returned by U.S. authorities to Mexican officials in Tijuana.

This year, that number has increased about 60% so far, said Javier Valenzuela, director of Mexican immigration at the Tijuana border.

They come from families with no fathers at home. Many are suffering the symptoms of poverty: abuse, neglect, malnutrition. Few want to return to the family life they have escaped, the Mexican border study showed.

And few social service agencies are equipped to handle them. In Orange County, there are no social programs to care for them, local childrens’ advocates say. “We send them up to L.A.,” said Suzanne Ellington of Amparo Youth Shelter in Garden Grove.

The only shelter for immigrant children in Los Angeles is Angel’s Flight, said its director, Hayde Sanchez. “The system will help U.S. citizens, but for immigrant kids, there’s no hope,” Sanchez said. “There’s nothing.”

Orange County, following the lead of officials from Los Angeles, San Diego and several Texas counties, voted earlier this year to deport certain juvenile delinquents directly to Mexico without formal deportation hearings.

The program, called the Border Youth Project, started June 1 in Orange County, said Don Hallstrom, the county’s director of juvenile court services. Orange County has sent six boys, one as young as 14, to the Tijuana jail. They tend to be minor offenders, arrested for “anything from drugs to breaking into a car to steal a soda pop, like one kid in San Juan Capistrano,” Hallstrom said.

In the Border Youth Project, U.S. officials work with the Mexican Consulate to reunite illegal immigrant children with their families and free beds needed for American delinquents, Hallstrom said. It also aims to save the taxpayers money, said Bill Gerth, director of Intake and Detention Control for Los Angeles County probation department.

Los Angeles County, for instance, paid the Mexican government $117,000 to take back 144 children, who will finish sentences in Mexican jails, thereby saving the county roughly $500,000, Gerth said.

Orange County has agreed to pay Mexico $54,000 a year, but because the program is so new, it is unclear what kind of savings that would mean.

Sanchez once supported the Border Youth Project, she said, but she changed her mind after visiting the Tijuana jail. “They have no humanity. There are hundreds of kids in very small rooms. After seeing the place, I really don’t want to send any kids there.”

Opponents also argue that the Border Youth Project is difficult to monitor, exposing the children to exploitation once they get to Mexico, since U.S. officials have no control over the children outside this country.

Supporters disagree. “I’ve been to the jail four times and I’m convinced (the children) are getting good services and good food. It’s a pleasant environment,” Hallstrom said. The Youth Border Project provides a much better alternative to the previous situation, “where we just left them in Tijuana, usually without any money in their pocket,” he said.

Hallstrom has received progress reports on two of the six boys Orange County has sent back through the Border Youth Project. After a few days in jail, he said, the boys were reunited with their families. In Los Angeles County, there are no statistics on how many children have been reunited with family members, Gerth said. Enforcement is left to the Mexican government.

Only a limited number of children are eligible for the program in Los Angeles County, usually the more serious offenders, Gerth said. Someone such as Jorge Estrada--a first-time offender charged with a minor crime--would just be sent back to Tijuana.

“Jorge Estrada!”

The Mexican official called the name forcefully this time. She wanted him to return to his family in Mexico City, but he did not want to go.

She took him into a private office. What transpired is confidential, Mexican officials say. Later that day, though, Jorge was taken to Casa del Migrante, a Tijuana homeless shelter, and locked inside. What will happen to him?

“He can leave if he wants to,” the acting director of the shelter said as he hustled Jorge into a private room for another interview. “We can’t keep him against his will.”

If Jorge Estrada is like the scores of other enterprising Mexican girls and boys who trek to the United States every year, he will soon be back in Orange County, living in a neighborhood filled with Latino immigrants.

These barrios are found all over Southern California, blocks of squat, faded stucco apartment buildings, dour and functional and uninviting. In Westminster, wedged between the Garden Grove and San Diego freeways, is a neighborhood the locals call Barrio Huerfanos, Orphans’ Barrio, named for the abandonados, the steady stream of children from Mexico. Some of them migrated from another Orphans’ Barrio in West Los Angeles a few years ago. Together, they formed the Orphans gang, a band of 30 or so 13- to 20-year-olds who deal drugs and keep the rest of the neighborhood in fear.

Jose Morales, 14, arrived in Barrio Huerfanos at midnight several months ago with the clothes on his back, a soiled bedroll, 42 cents and a scrap of paper with his cousin’s address on 15th Street in Westminster. The cousin had long gone. “I sat down and started crying, really crying, right there,” he says, pointing to the cracked pavement of the parking lot where he now sometimes sleeps.

Jose has dark hair and the sharp flat features of the Mixtec Indians. He has slept on buses, in trenches, on roofs, in the parking lot of nearby Blessed Sacrament Church--even under the bed of a prostitute in Tijuana who felt sorry for him after she saw him late at night curled up in a gutter, covered with trash and stinking of urine.

Why did he come? “I needed the money.”

For Jose, living in Orphans’ Barrio means skulking through a world of crime and poverty, always looking over his shoulder to see the law trailing behind him.

The Mexican Consulate estimates that there are thousands of children and teen-agers like him in similar neighborhoods throughout the Southern California, all with different names but the same sorts of lives. They drift from one place to the next, looking for jobs, a place to stay, someone to take them in, consular officials say.

Though the majority get jobs or go to school, stay out of trouble and send money back to Mexico or Central America, many are now finding it impossible to succeed in America, police and social service workers say. A scarcity of jobs makes them depend on adults who exploit them. They join gangs or steal or deal drugs or become prostitutes to survive, said Mike Proctor, a Westminster police investigator who patrols the Orphans’ Barrio.

No matter how bad life might seem in the United States, though, it is worse in Mexico. The Mexican minimum wage--less than 30 cents an hour--has failed to keep pace with inflation. In the last 10 years, the price of beans has risen 165% to $1.50 a pound. Nearly half the population suffers from malnutrition, according to a study conducted by the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

“My parents need the money I earn here,” says Marco Antonio, an articulate 17-year-old resident of Orphans’ Barrio who got into trouble.

Two years ago, he left his parents and five brothers and sister in a resort town in Mexico, came alone to Westminster’s Orphans’ Barrio, found a job with an American contractor and sent home money every month. “My family has a bank account now, the first one they’ve ever had,” he said, beaming. “And a house with two stories.”

The trade-off for him, though, is living in Orphans’ Barrio. “It’s a terrible place,” he said. “Gangs and crime. They deal drugs constantly in front of my apartment.” Earlier this year, he was arrested in a drug bust he said he had nothing to do with. “Somebody handed me a bag and told me to hold it,” he said in an interview at Orange County juvenile hall.

His experience with local police officers was less traumatic than his run across the border.

“Oh, it was much worse at the border! Lots of criminals, drug addicts, it’s horrible! Whatever they want, they take. Your watch, your wallet, your pants. Even your pants! Yes, I saw them! If they want your pants, they take them, right there and you give them over!”

He expects that after jail, immigration officials will send him to Tijuana. “I’ll try to come back here,” he said. But not to Orphans’ Barrio. “I’m moving to someplace safer.”

Three months after Marco was interviewed in jail, his public defender, the only advocate an illegal immigrant child has in the United States, has no idea what happened to him.

“Usually I don’t follow up because I don’t have reason to know,” said Orange County public defender Andrew Do. “If they’re here illegally, they’re sent to immigration. Nobody follows up on these cases. I don’t know who you’d talk to find out what happened to him.”

Jose Morales has disappeared too--from Orphans’ Barrio. So have two other young boys who had been seen wandering alone in the shadows of the apartment complex. “They used to sleep out here in their car,” said the owner of a neighborhood video store.

“They came in to watch videos,” he said, shouting in Spanish above the the blaring salsa music. “But I haven’t seen them in awhile. I don’t know where they are. There seem to be a lot of them. They come and go like that.”