Note: All names in this story have been changed to protect the identity of the children.
Sergio is alone.
Now, the family members he has been travelling with are staying in the city. But Sergio’s journey is continuing: He needs to reunite with his mother and have an operation so he can walk again. He presses on to the United States.
In collaboration with Save the Children, Plan International talked to youth like Sergio for a new report, Unaccompanied Children: Risks and violence along the migration route through Mexico. They interviewed 155 people, including caregivers and service providers, in migrant shelters run by the Mexican government. Most of the migrants came from Latin America – primarily from Honduras, Colombia, and Venezuela – but there was also a child from Afghanistan.
The report found that for many children in Latin America, like Sergio, violence runs rampant. Girls face gender-based violence that targets them in their homes and communities, and boys are being recruited into gangs and cartels.
So children as young as nine are making the perilous journey through Latin America to escape to the U.S. More than a third of the children interviewed (34.8%) said they were planning to meet up with relatives, but 7.7% didn’t know why they had left their homes, according to the report.
Why are so many unaccompanied minors coming to the United States?
Sergio started his journey from Colombia, where he lived for seven years. He and his family had moved there from Venezuela when he was 10 years old. From Colombia he travelled north, through the Darien Gap – a section of land between Panama and Colombia often described as 100 kilometers of “hell on Earth.” The air is oppressively thick, and everything is wet. The soft marshland, covered in dark green leaves, is so muddy that it is almost impossible to wade through. Any skin left exposed could be cut, bruised, or punctured by mosquito bites that can make you sick with malaria or snake bites filled with venom – with no hope of getting an antidote in time.
“I went through horrible places I never thought I would experience,” said Sergio. “There were times when I was very cold. I couldn’t eat.”
As many as 800,000 people may have crossed the Darien Gap in 2024, according to the United Nations. This included people from Haiti, Venezuela, and even India and China. The journey through the Darien Gap can take more than a week.
But children face more dangers than the Darien Gap.
Gabriela and her younger sister started their journey in Guatemala. They were stuffed into a truck for 24 hours with 250 people, “almost suffocating” on their way to meet their mother in the United States.
It’s “a journey of luck,” 16-year-old Gabriela says. Some people don’t make it. Some girls are raped or kidnapped. Gabriela was terrified, for herself and for her sister, but she knew she had to keep going, to take care of them both.
Thirteen-year-old Karen was also trying to reunite with her mother in the U.S. from Guatemala. She turned to the notorious coyote system, where smugglers take people across borders on foot or in trucks to evade immigration controls.
“I felt very scared when we were crossing because I didn’t know the man [the coyote] at all,” she said.
People continue to turn to this dangerous system, even though they may die from extreme weather conditions like heat, drown in rivers or in a fall, or be hit by a car or truck. These are the risks migrants are taking to escape the violence they face in their homes and communities.
For children, it’s not always a choice – sometimes leaving is the only way to survive.
“We've heard a lot from parents that they would never put their kids in such a risk of migrating if they had any other option,” says Raquel Oviedo of Plan International Mexico.
Oviedo has been interviewing migrant children and families for three years. The children she speaks with are sheltering in border camps in Mexico. Even if these unaccompanied children make it to the U.S.-Mexico border, they may be turned away. Forced to live in overcrowded shelters run by the Mexican government. Separated from their families. Out of school. With no sense of normalcy.
“When I was eight years old, I was in a school, I was having fun with my friends. I went to my home. I could eat,” says Oviedo. “These children are in trailers with tons of people for 48 hours, and they’re trying to reunite with their parents.”
Long stays in shelters often make it nearly impossible for children to go to school. They often lack the documents needed to enrol. The report found that if they do manage to get into school, they’re at risk of being kidnapped or recruited by organized criminals on their way to school from the shelters. These children can also face discrimination for not being Mexican or about not being able to speak Spanish fluently by students and teachers.
School attendance rates dropped to 58.1% from 70.3% after the children started to migrate or were forced to leave their homes, according to the report on unaccompanied minors.
Children in these Mexican shelters spend most of their lives waiting. They wait for days, weeks, sometimes even months, stuck in limbo, desperate to know when they’ll finally be able to cross into the U.S. and reunite with their families.
Sergio, the boy at the start of this story, has since reunited with his mother in the U.S. No update has been given about Gabriela and Karen.
How Plan helps unaccompanied children stay safe
In the last year, Plan International supported almost 5,000 unaccompanied and separated children around the world in areas facing crisis and instability, including Cameroon, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Below, you’ll meet Kalima, Habiba, and Oumar and see how we keep children like them safe while working to reunite them with their families.
Bangladesh
Kalima, 6, and Habiba, 4, had been visiting their grandparents in a camp for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. But when the sisters returned to their own camp, it was unrecognizable: It had burnt to the ground.
The girls were disoriented. Afraid. Crying on the side of a road. That’s how Plan International volunteers found them.
The girls were immediately taken to one of our emergency centres, which had been set up quickly to protect children and adolescent girls who’d been separated from their families in the fire. Kalima knew her camp number, so the volunteers were able to report that the children had been found to one of our fire-response help desks.
Reunification was particularly challenging in this event, as most of the parents’ identity cards had been lost to the fire; it was difficult to determine which children belonged to which family. But the girls eventually were reunited with their mother, Rabeya.
Mali
Oumar was only eight years old when his family brought him to Bamako, the capital city of Mali, for medical treatment in 2020. After he’d made a full recovery, his mother sent him on an errand to buy some groceries nearby. But Oumar didn’t know where he was going in the unfamiliar city, and he got lost.
He spent a year on the streets before he was found and brought to a haven for unaccompanied children that Plan International runs in partnership with ENDA Mali. At the shelter, he was given a place to live, food, medical care, and psychological support, and staff helped him reunite with his family.
“He could not give us precise information beyond his name, that of his father, his mother’s name, and the name of one of his sisters,” said Salif Kone, one of the project officers.
Plan was able to use Oumar’s ethnic identity to reach his family through a community forum on WhatsApp, a messaging app. Two years after his disappearance, Oumar was finally reunited with his family, something his parents had given up hope of.
Central African Republic
Max, 15, and his brother Brad, 13, were forced to flee their home in Central African Republic after fighting between armed groups broke out in their town.
“My brother and I had followed a group of people we didn’t know,” said Max. “We walked for two days in the bush and ended up in a village near Bangui. This is where people of goodwill picked us up and took us to Bangui.”
Max and Brad were placed in temporary foster care, and Plan started work to find their family. They were also given psychological and social support to help them come to terms with what had happened to them. A few months later, the brothers were reunited with their family.
Moldova
In Moldova, Plan has worked to create safe learning environments for Ukrainian children, including those who arrived in Moldova by themselves. These spaces allow the children to play and learn while being supervised by teachers. Unaccompanied children also have access to teams of psychologists and social workers who are trained to help children dealing with trauma or struggling with their mental health.