People have always called me a rabble rouser.
When I was three years old,
my nickname was “la granuja,” Spanish for “troublemaker.”
That year, in my very first drawing, I was clutching two glasses of whiskey.
When I drank the first, I told my mom, well, then, I’d drink the second one.
As a Jew, my mother fled Poland before World War II to go to Argentina.
My father was born in Argentina,
right after his Christian family fled persecution in Syria.
Seeking opportunity, my parents came as newlyweds to the U.S. where I was born.
When I was 13 years old, my father died suddenly,
and my mom took us back to live in Argentina.
Her timing was terrible; the military was taking power.
I lived in fear every single day.
Officers would roam the streets in unmarked cars,
picking people up who disappeared, tens of thousands of people.
One day, walking down the street, I saw a puddle of blood on the sidewalk.
The military had killed two journalists.
“Why?” I asked my mom.
“Because they’re trying to tell the truth about what’s going on here.”
I decided that very instant
– some of you would have made a different career choice staring at blood –
to become a journalist.
In the U.S. as a reporter, I became known
for throwing myself right in the middle of the action on the front lines
so I could take my readers there and they could see, smell, feel
the big social issues that I wrote about up close.
The ride of my life started two decades ago in my kitchen
when I asked my house cleaner:
“Carmen, are you thinking about having any more children?”
It was an innocent question; I thought she just had one young boy.
Sobbing, Carmen told me about four children she had left behind
in Guatemala.
She could only feed them once a day.
And at night when they cried out with hunger, she would tell them:
“Sleep face down so your stomach doesn’t growl so much.”
I could not fathom the desperation that it took to leave your children
and go to a strange land 2,000 miles away.
Carmen hadn’t seen her children in 12 years.
I soon discovered that there were millions of single mothers who had come to the U.S.
in recent years, unlawfully, from Mexico, from Central America,
and they had left children behind.
These separations, they often stretched to a decade.
And each year tens of thousands of these kids would despair
and set off on their own to come and find these mothers.
Most of them are teenagers like this boy I met traveling north through Mexico,
but I learned of kids as young as seven years old
crossing four countries alone.
They were hitchhiking, walking hundreds of miles,
and they were gripping on mostly to the tops and sides of freight trains
that go through Mexico, that go north.
Often these children are robbed, raped, beaten.
Many times they are killed
by bandits along the rails, by corrupt cops in Mexico,
and by gangsters who control the tops of these trains.
And they hurl them off, and children lose legs, arms, fingers.
I met Enrique when he had made it all the way north to northern Mexico.
He told me he was just five years old – this is his kindergarten mug shot –
when his mama left him in Honduras to go to the United States.
11 years later, this is what he looked like.
He set off to go and find her, and all he had on him was this tiny scrap of paper
with his mother’s telephone number inked on it.
He was on his eighth attempt to get through Mexico;
seven times Mexico had deported him.
I wanted to truly grasp the hell he told me he had already been through.
So, I went back to his starting line in Honduras, and I did this journey
step by step, the exact route, just as he had done it a few weeks before.
I would travel on top of seven freight trains.
I almost got swept off the top of one train;
that branch that hit me swiped off a boy on the car behind mine.
He probably died.
A gangster, he tried to rape me on the train.
Every day for three months, I felt filthy, thirsty, hungry;
I feared the worst, and yet I knew because of the advantages I had
I wasn’t going through, facing, 1% of what these children endure.
I chronicled this odyssey children make in a newspaper series and later a book,
called “Enrique’s Journey.”
Back in 2002, 6,800 children were arriving alone on our southern border
and being apprehended.
But by 2014 that number had risen tenfold:
68,000 Enriques.
Honduras had the number one homicide rate in the world of countries not at war.
And together with El Salvador and Guatemala,
these had become among the most dangerous countries in the world.
Children understood that the danger of dying traveling north,
it was less than the danger of dying if they stayed.
Honduras’s Rivera Hernandes neighborhood was the most lethal place
in the city of San Pedro Sula, which itself for four years running
was dubbed “the murder capital” of the world.
I mean parents, they didn’t let their kids go outside during broad daylight.
Six gangs controlled this neighborhood, and they enforced a six P.M. curfew.
Bodies would litter the streets in the morning.
One day these gangsters were casually playing soccer
out in the street with the decapitated head of someone they had just executed.
1,000 families had fled this neighborhood.
Gangsters took over their homes, stripped them, sold anything they could,
leaving whole blocks in rubble.
Children, refugees, were fleeing for their very lives.
Last summer in Rivera Hernandes, I met Kevin Rodriguez.
When he was seven years old, Kevin started collecting cans
in the neighborhood to recycle.
When he was eight, the gangsters started pressuring him:
“You must join.”
They wanted him to use his bag to deliver drugs and guns
throughout the neighborhood for the gang.
They pressured Kevin every day. He always answered, “No.”
When he was 10 years old, three gangsters barged into his hut
when his mom was out working.
They held him down, the three gangsters,
and they took turns raping this boy.
When he was 11 years old, he was at a soccer game
in the neighborhood when gangsters showed up,
and they massacred 15 spectators and referees in front of him.
And when he was walking to middle school one day,
he had to sidestep a body hacked to bits
that had been stuffed in a black, plastic bag.
Kids like Kevin, they get the dicey odds of making it in one piece through Mexico.
The bloodthirsty narco cartels and gangsters,
they are kidnapping 18,000 Central Americans every single year.
These are the faces of the disappeared, migrating through Mexico.
They enslave children; they put girls to work as prostitutes.
They will kill you and harvest your organs.
Recently, the last two-three years, the U.S. has made matters much worse.
We gave Mexico tens of millions of dollars
to fund a ferocious crackdown aimed at keeping these children from arriving
at our border and begging for asylum, which, by the way,
they are legally entitled to do.
Despite all these mounting obstacles, today, just as many children
are fleeing these countries than ever before.
In the U.S., the largest wave of immigration in our nation’s history,
it produced winners and losers.
Businesses, well they got cheap, compliant workers,
and this fueled our economy.
But the losers are the folks who can least afford it in this country:
the one in 14 Americans who do not have a high school degree.
They were forced to compete with migrants in certain industries
and that drove down their wages.
Migration hurts migrants, too: something we don’t talk about very much.
Children feel abandoned by the very person
who’s supposed to love them the most in this world, their mothers.
There’s no happy ending.
The truth?
Most migrants, they don’t want to actually be here.
Imagine if you had to leave everything that you know and love;
your family, friends, culture, language,
to fling yourself out into an unknown, often hostile environment.
I want to be very clear: I am not an open borders gal.
I want a policy that actually works.
Our politicians, both on the left and on the right,
have been promoting, pushing, three immigration solutions
for the last 40 years:
border enforcement;
guest worker programs;
legalization.
All three have failed to permanently stem the flow of migrants
coming here unlawfully,
and keep more children and families safe back in their home countries.
We build walls, and we’re probably going to do more of this.
We spend $18 billion a year at this, at last count.
And yet, studies show 97% of those who try repeatedly get in.
In 1986, we legalized millions of people.
But then they sent, often illegally,
for friends and family to come from back home.
We need to rip up this playbook and try something new.
The good news, and there is good news,
the U.S. is helping bring a new strategy that cuts violence in Central America.
In Latin America cities, four out of every five homicides,
they happen in fewer than 2% of all street addresses.
Usually, it’s just a few people, a handful that are doing most of the killing.
In taking what’s worked in L.A. and in Boston,
the U.S.-trained Honduran police are using data to increasingly target
where are those violent hot spots, the neighborhoods,
and even the very corners within neighborhoods where murders take place.
Like in Rivera Hernandes, where Kevin lives,
where the U.S. is helping courageous residents
who are putting their lives on the line
to try to jumpstart change in this neighborhood.
We organize community leaders, the U.S.
And we funded partly outreach centers where kids can go and get mentors,
vocational training, help get jobs so we can dry up the lifeblood of gangs,
new recruits.
We have another program that zeroes in on kids in schools in this neighborhood
who have some of the nine risk factors of going into gangs,
and we get them a year of family counseling,
making them 77% less likely to commit crimes
or abuse drugs or alcohol.
And in a country where 96% of all homicides in Honduras get no conviction
– you can shoot someone in broad daylight and totally get away with it –
we are helping bring criminals to justice.
Witnesses understand that if you step forward in Honduras to testify today,
you’re going to be dead tomorrow.
But the U.S. is funding a Honduran nonprofit
that goes into the most violent neighborhoods
and resolves to investigate all homicides in that neighborhood.
And they are also coaxing reluctant witnesses to step forward,
anonymously, covered in a black burqa like you see here.
Now, more than half of homicides in this neighborhood
and in seven pilot neighborhoods in Honduras,
they are getting guilty verdicts.
In two years in Rivera Hernandes, a 62% drop in homicides.
They have cut the number of kids fleeing this neighborhood in half.
Kevin who was determined that other children not face what he faced
at the hands of the gangs,
he’s volunteering in one of these outreach centers,
and just last month at the age of 17, he started U.S.-sponsored studies
to become a stronger community organizer
to try to reweave the tattered fabric of his neighborhood.
Just to be clear, Rivera Hernandes is still crazy violent.
And the U.S. approach, it has huge flaws.
The State Department doesn’t even do what most studies show works best:
work with active gangsters.
They’re the ones doing the shooting.
We need to leverage community leaders with sway over these guys.
We need clergy or ex-cons gone straight to drive home a message
delivered by the police:
If one person in your gang shoots someone,
we will immediately come down on your whole gang like a ton of bricks.
We must scrap Treasury Department rules that don’t even allow us to work with
one of the two main gangs in the region, MS-13.
Still, something incredibly promising is happening here.
Honduras is the country where the U.S. has most aggressively pushed
these violence prevention programs.
Three years ago, 18,000 Honduran kids showed up at our southern border alone.
Last year, that number was cut almost in half.
Meanwhile, kids leaving El Salvador, Guatemala, the numbers keep going up.
If a politician swears to you they can solve illegal immigration
by driving down on the same three policies of the past,
don’t buy it.
Let’s invest in violence prevention programs that actually work.
Let’s replicate these in other countries.
And let’s get corrupt governments, like Honduras,
to put some skin in the game as well; after all it’s their country, right?
I know many Americans do not want to spend one red cent in foreign lands. I get that.
But this is smart policy.
It is a rare win-win for us.
We can keep spending billions of dollars
once these children arrive at our doorstep.
And by the way, that doesn’t even include the fact that we don’t give these kids
government lawyers when they arrive in our country
to go before immigration court.
Half of these kids are going before judges alone to argue their asylum cases.
I witnessed a seven-year-old boy.
He was shaking with fear standing before that court.
Toddlers pee their pants.
They clutch teddy bears because anything they tell that judge
can send them hurtling back to danger.
This is a sham that we are doing in our courts, and we should remedy it.
But we can spend billions here,
or we can spend $100 million in Honduras,
which is what we’re spending on these violence prevention programs
each year there, and we can cut migration.
The solutions are there; they are not here.
Mexico, for years, promoted family planning,
and the average Mexican family
went from seven kids per family, nearly, to just over two.
Today, more Mexicans, they’re leaving the United States
than actually coming here illegally.
In one decade experts believe that in Latin America
– it has a tenth of the world’s population but a third of all of its homicides –
with the right programs, we can cut this carnage in half.
And we can see more children happily playing out in the streets,
like they’re doing here in Rivera Hernandes.
We can keep screaming across the political divide.
Or we can do something that actually works on the immigration issue.
We can do the right thing.
If a vulnerable child is running from danger
and that child knocks at our door,
a nation like ours, we should always open that door.
We should also help ensure that child never has to run north in the first place.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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