“Life is just easier when you’re with them. They told us that with them we could earn in one day what we would earn in one week after finishing school and finding a regular job,” Daniel, now 19, said while sitting on bench in Bryant Park one recent day in Manhattan, where he now lives with an uncle and his family.
Once when gang members solicited volunteers for a robbery, Daniel dodged the call. But when the proposition resurfaced weeks later, he left Tegucigalpa and traveled alone to his grandparents’ house outside the capital. He hoped the two months he stayed there would ease the pressure he felt to participate in the crimes. Shortly after he returned, while sitting on the front step of a corner house the gang inhabited, other gang rookies relayed stories of the bloody fate of recruits who had refused gang dictates or simply failed to inform the gang of their whereabouts. The stories, Daniel knew, were warnings.
“When you start to run with the gang you learn that you have to obey when they tell you to go somewhere or do something. They make it clear that if you don’t you will face the consequences. You do what you’re told for fear they will hurt you or your family,” Daniel said.
At dawn on March 12, 2006, Daniel and four friends –who were not fleeing gangs– left for the United States on a six-week journey by foot, train and raft across the mountainous terrain and rivers of Central America and Mexico.
Daniel is among a growing number of Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan youth – many of them minors – running from gangs and seeking asylum in the United States, a noticeable trend that's developed over the past three years, according to attorneys and researchers. Such claims pose new challenges for federal asylum law and are compelling judges to consider the petitioners’ official status as children.
While he waits for his asylum hearing next month, Daniel shadows his uncle, a superintendent for the Morningside Heights building where they live, and helps with cleaning, plumbing and painting around the building.
Not far from his new residence, walking on a patch of grass along a bike path sandwiched between the Hudson River and the Henry Hudson Parkway at around 120th Street, Daniel says he likes the United States and hopes the judge will allow him to stay.
“I like to come to the park and think. I don’t have to worry about getting robbed,” Daniel said, enjoying the peaceful sight of a 20-something man sitting on a rock, absorbed in a book.
He's made a few acquaintances but no real friends in New York. “It’s hard to know who to trust,” Daniel said. He prefers to stay home watching music videos or wrestling matches, in part because he fears being caught for any small infraction, like jaywalking, could compromise his chance of staying in the U.S.
“At first he didn’t want to go out at all,” said Joel Zepeda, Daniel’s uncle. “I told him he should greet neighbors and familiarize himself with his surroundings. Not to isolate himself. It’s not healthy,” he said.
