Five boys and two girls, none of whom looked older than perhaps 15, followed the Border Patrol agents' instructions in Spanish obediently.

"Stand over there."
"Go get your backpack."
"Listen to this man, he'll help you get back home."

At the Nogales Border Patrol station a couple of miles north of "the line" with Mexico one Tuesday morning, the seven minors picked up in the desert the night before were being turned over to representatives of the Mexican consulate. The two men would interview the teens and figure out how to get them back to their families.

John Fitzpatrick, patrol agent in charge of the Nogales station, told U.S. visitors who included Catholic representatives that the group of teens typified the number of unaccompanied minors among the hundreds of people picked up nightly in what the Border Patrol calls the west desert, between Nogales and the Yuma County line, east of the California border.

As arrangements were settled to hand the seven youths over, they waited patiently --- with an air of resignation --- in a line just outside several locked holding cells where a few dozen other people watched through thick windows as they waited to be processed. Border Patrol policy barred outsiders from speaking with the teens.

For the U.S. delegation, made up of about 15 people including three bishops and employees of two Arizona dioceses and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meeting with the Border Patrol Oct. 24 was part of a three-stop introduction to programs run by church groups, the U.S. and Mexican governments and private entities. The group's focus was on the treatment of minors who cross the border without family members and on victims of human trafficking.

In Houston the next day, the group visited two shelters for juveniles run by the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston and met with representatives of the U.S. Attorney's office and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a part of the Department of Homeland Security. Later in the week, a stop in El Paso brought the travelers to shelters for minors across the border in Juarez run by the Mexican government, the YMCA and the Scalabrinian religious order.

The delegation visiting the Border Patrol station included bishops' migration committee chairman Bishop Gerald R. Barnes of San Bernardino, Calif., committee member Bishop Armando X. Ochoa of El Paso, Texas, and Auxiliary Bishop Jaime Soto of Orange, Calif., a member of the board of directors for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network.

Bishop John B. McCormack of Manchester, N.H., a member of the Catholic Relief Services board, was with the group the previous day when they visited Altar, Mexico, a staging ground for illegal border traffic. He later concelebrated Mass for the group at Mission San Xavier del Bac in Tucson.

A June report for Harvard University's Committee on Human Rights Studies, "Seeking Asylum Alone: Unaccompanied and Separated Children and Refugee Protection in the U.S.," notes that "despite, or perhaps because of, the large number of government actors involved with children in the asylum system, there is a general deficiency of information about them."

The report said 122,222 juveniles were caught by the Border Patrol in the 2004 fiscal year. All but about 19,000 were from Mexico and immediately deported. The remainder were placed in immigration proceedings, which sometimes took months.

Until recently, minors were the responsibility of the immigration service, which sometimes jailed them with adults in prisonlike conditions.

Now, juveniles unaccompanied by a legal guardian are turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services until they can be reunited with family members.

In 2004, the resettlement office had custody of between 750 and 900 minors at any one time, for a total of 6,200 unaccompanied and separated children that year.

Debra Fergus, a child welfare supervisor in a foster care program run by Catholic Charities of the Phoenix Diocese for the federal resettlement office, said the majority in that program are Guatemalan, though she has worked with some from Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, Costa Rica and Mexico. The program was started in 1986 to aid refugees and was expanded three years ago under the reorganization of federal immigration agencies.

Briefing the border delegation en route to Nogales from Tucson, Fergus explained that time spent in the foster care system is generally a good experience for the young immigrants.

Participants stay for as little as a day but typically for a few months before they are reunited with relatives, she said. During that time they're living in a family environment, going to school, working with a counselor and learning English, and they have someone working on their behalf to make sure their legal rights are protected.

Fergus said it's often not until after the juveniles have been in the program for a few months that they begin to open up and tell how they came to be in the U.S. on their own. Those stories often are critical to how the youths and children are treated by authorities hearing their cases for asylum or other legal status in the U.S.

"If not all, the majority of the kids have witnessed death," Fergus said. "They've had a lot of traumatic experiences that are beyond our comprehension."

Some have been victims of human traffickers, either for the sex trade or as underage labor.

"Whether they're trafficking victims is very difficult to determine," said Fergus. "It's such a secret part of their lives. They're ashamed of what happened, they're scared, they've been threatened." Even youths whose families only owe money to smugglers they hired to get the youngster to the U.S. are fearful for their families, she added.

"We had one child whose uncle was murdered while he was in our care," Fergus said. "These kids feel responsible and they feel guilty."

That's also a problem for the Border Patrol, which has to determine whether young-looking people picked up in the desert are adults or juveniles. Adults remain in jail-like detention while awaiting resolution of their cases and have no right to legal representation. Juveniles are supposed to receive more compassionate treatment and are more likely to have legal assistance provided for them.

Fitzpatrick of the Border Patrol said some minors have been told they're more likely to be released if they say they're over 18. Others think there's an advantage to saying they're Mexican when they're not, or lying about whether they were with someone when they came across the border.

"The challenge with minors is that a lot of them have been coached about what to say by smugglers," said Fitzpatrick. "Sometimes it takes the intervention of the Mexican consul before we get the real story."

Aryah Somers, a staff attorney with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, practices what she calls "therapeutic jurisprudence," a combination of legal representation and counseling, for under-age would-be immigrants.

She described a complex web of legal possibilities and pitfalls that await minors. Among options for legally staying in the U.S. might be asylum or a special-status visa for juveniles, or they might fall under laws protecting victims of human trafficking or family violence.

But even if the youths have family in the U.S., sometimes family members' illegal status makes them reluctant to come forward to claim their children, lest they be deported themselves, Somers said.

The Florence Project staff also must be sure their young charges understand that sometimes it's in their best interests to accept voluntary deportation quickly. After a 30-day window, Somers explained, deportation orders are considered involuntary and the subject is barred from entering the U.S. legally for longer than if he had accepted voluntary deportation.

---CNS