During the past decade, around a quarter million children from the “Northern Triangle” countries of Central America — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — may have arrived at the US-Mexico border unaccompanied by their parents. Academic researchers first noticed the phenomenon as early as 2008, but by 2014 the trickle became a deluge: that year, US border officials apprehended more than 68,000 children, some as young as six years old.

In the five years between 2011 and 2016, the United States apprehended 178,825 unaccompanied child migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. This number includes 53,287 seventeen-year-olds — 8 percent of all seventeen-year-olds in the Northern Triangle.

In a great many cases, the children deliberately sought out and presented themselves to US law enforcement, believing their claims for asylum to be unassailable — facing widespread and increasingly inescapable gang violence in their countries of origin, young children took the only avenue of escape available to them and braved the arduous journey north.