- Anchee Min will be interviewed by Rachel DeWoskin at tonight’s fundraiser.
On Sunday, the New York Times ran the chilling story of Noemi Álvarez Quillay, a 12-year-old girl who attempted, twice, to travel alone and without papers from her home in the southern highlands of Ecuador to join her parents in New York. The first time, she got as far as Nicaragua and then turned back. The second time, she made it all the way to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico where last month she and a coyote, a human smuggler, were apprehended. The authorities placed Noemi into a children’s detention center where, a few days later, she hung herself.
There are currently between 400 and 500 beds available for detained children in Chicago. (The Young Center also has an office in Harlingen, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande.) They live in remodeled nursing homes. Most of them spend between one and three months in detention; because of the influx of immigrants, they’re being released more quickly than in the past. The center works with the more vulnerable children.
