Sonia Nazario Featured Author, Journalist, Humanitarian

Using award-winning photographs, Sonia Nazario takes you inside the world of millions of immigrant women who have come to the US as single mothers, and the children they have left behind in their home countries in Central America and Mexico. She discusses the modern-day odyssey many child migrants—some as young as seven, all of them traveling alone—make many years later riding on top of freight trains through Mexico on their quest to reunify with their mothers in the US. Nazario, who spent three months riding on top of these trains to tell the story of one child migrant named Enrique, shares her story in the context of determination.

She discusses the role of determination in her own life—in overcoming the death of her father at age 13, living through parts of the Dirty War in Argentina, and overcoming major travails in college to ultimately become the youngest person hired at The Wall Street Journal and one of a handful of Latinos to win the Pulitzer Prize—as well as in the lives of the migrants she wrote about. Unlike many who speak on this topic, Nazario sees immigration as an issue with many shades of gray, with winners and losers. She discusses how traditional approaches to the issue of immigration—proposed by both the left and right—haven’t worked, and offers novel solutions to one of America’s thorniest issues.

One in four children in public schools across the United States are now immigrants or the child of an immigrant. Nearly all immigrant children have been separated from a parent in the process of coming to the U.S.

       Nazario's presentation will discuss the tremendous traumas many of these children have faced even before they land in American classrooms--the conditions that pushed them out of their home countries, the modern-day odyssey many of these children go on to reach the United States, and the increasing difficulties they encounter once they settle into the United States and face enormous conflicts with parents who have become strangers to them. 

          Nazario will show how critical it is to understand and address these traumas if immigrant children are to learn through the story of one boy, Enrique, whose mother leaves him in Honduras when he is just five years old to go work in the U.S. After not seeing his mother for 11 years, Enrique braves unimaginable hardship and peril to set off on his own to find her. He makes a harrowing journey clinging to the tops of freight trains through Mexico. He faces bandits, gangsters, corrupt cops, and El Tren de la Muerte--The Train of Death--in his drive to reach her. Enrique's Journey is a timeless story of families torn apart and hearing to be together again, of determination, and it is a story of what so many students have gone through. To report Enrique's Journey, Nazario retraced Enrique's steps and spent months clinging to the tops of freight trains to recount his story. 

       She will talk about Enrique's experience, her experience, and what can be done to help immigrant children learn.

Last year, more than 68,000 children entered the United States illegally and alone from Mexico and Central America, a ten-fold increase from three years before. These children were caught by US Border Patrol and ordered to go to immigration court to see if they would be allowed to stay in the US legally or would be deported. Like all immigrants who come to the US unlawfully, children are not entitled to a public defender. So two-thirds of them – children as young as two years old – go to court alone. They are expected to argue their case for asylum or other relief to stay in the US with no legal advocate by their side. Many of these children have legitimate fears of being harmed if they are deported to their home countries.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Sonia Nazario will discuss:

• What is this nation’s responsibility to provide legal help to the children? Do children who have broken the law coming to the US illegally deserve government legal help?
• The increasing violence and other factors pushing a surging number of these children to leave their home countries – Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico – and travel to the US alone, often gripping on the tops of freight trains to make this modern-day odyssey to reach the US. They face bandits, gangsters, corrupt cops, and the added dangers of getting on and off moving freight trains. Many lose their lives in their quest.

Nazario discusses these issues in a personal way, having spent three months riding on top of freight trains through Mexico to report her national bestselling book, Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother. Some are coming to reunite with family members, but many are fleeing harm in their home countries. She shows how after so many traumas in their home countries and on their journeys north, immigrant children face another blow: the American judicial system.

Nazario provides a provocative look at whether our nation’s immigration courts deal fairly with perhaps one of the most vulnerable populations amongst us: children who come to the US illegally and alone.