During the Central American wars of the 1980s, President Reagan would routinely scare the American public with visions of immigrants flooding our borders should the “communists” win.
The “communists” lost, but immigrants kept coming. Today there are reports of tens of thousands of children from Honduras, Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America desperately fleeing violence, fleeing poverty, seeking their mothers, and finding the Department of Homeland Security.
Last week, Amy Goodman on Democracy Now interviewed Jose Luis Zelaya, who fled Honduras in 2000 at the age of 13 in search of his mother. Currently a Ph.D. student at Texas A&M in the Department of Education and a member of the immigrant rights group United We Dream, Zelaya tells a hair-raising tale which is as common as it is extraordinary.
Zelaya’s story begins above at 6:49.
Prior to Zelaya, Goodman discusses the current situation on the border with Sonia Nazario in Los Angeles, California. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of “Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother.”