A Migrant Father Sends His Son To The U.S.: 'I Know That He's Safe'
More parents are sending children across the Gateway International Bridge to Brownsville, Texas, to get them away from squalid, dangerous conditions in a displaced persons camp in Matamoros, Mexico.
After a 10-month odyssey from a Honduran slum to a North Texas suburb, 17-year-old Marvin Joel Zelaya takes a sip from his first vanilla Frappuccino and marvels at his new surroundings.
"There's order, there's security," he says. "There's not so much poverty and delinquency."
Zelaya is living with a relative in the antiseptic suburbs that extend from Dallas to Fort Worth. He is going to high school and waiting for his first asylum hearing in June.
This is the Promised Land compared to the destitute, gang-infested that he and his father fled in the hills of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, last spring. The catch is Marvin Jr. is here without his father. They separated at the Texas-Mexico border in November,
