CULPEPER, Virginia — For years, Angie’s parents resisted her pleas to bring her to the United States. There was no legal path to bring her here from Guatemala, and she was too young to travel by herself.
But the pandemic changed everything. Two years ago, the family — parents, grandfather and uncle — put their savings together to pay a smuggler to bring the teen to the U.S.
“We were afraid that we would never see her again,” said Angie’s mother, Norma, 38. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Angie arrived in 2021. The federal government released the teen to her mother a few weeks after she was taken into custody by Border Patrol after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. She was finally home with the family that left her behind in Guatemala 10 years ago.
“What I like the most about the U.S. is being with my whole family for the first time,” said Angie, 16. “I missed them every day.” (The Center for Public Integrity is not publishing Angie’s and Norma’s full names to protect their identities.)
Angie is the third generation of her family from the town of Huehuetenango in the western highlands of Guatemala to come live here. She is also one of more than half-a-million immigrant children who have come to the U.S. alone in the past decade. Almost half came from Guatemala, federal data show.
While most of these children are more likely to live in major U.S. cities, hundreds are also arriving in rural counties and towns like Culpeper. At least 428 minors made Culpeper their home between 2014 and 2021 after crossing the border without a parent or guardian, data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows.
Almost half, or 190, came in 2021 when the U.S. southern border was closed to most asylum seekers except a few, including unaccompanied minors, under a Centers for Disease Control emergency order known as Title 42. The order was enacted in March of 2020 and later lifted in May of 2023.
Culpeper was among the top three rural counties with the most unaccompanied children placements nationwide in 2021, according to department data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity and Scripps News.
Many of them came here to fill labor shortages caused after the border was closed while others, like Angie, came to be reunited with their loved ones, according to dozens of interviews with immigrant children, sponsors, community leaders, social service providers, law enforcement officials, attorneys and immigration experts by Public Integrity and Scripps.
For at least three decades, immigrants from Guatemala have found refuge and work in this rural town of some 20,000 people nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Northern Virginia. Angie’s grandfather came here in the late 1980s fleeing persecution during the country’s 36-year-long civil war. Others came after droughts and floods uprooted their lives but most were driven out by extreme poverty and hunger.
Angie's mother, Norma, came with a temporary visa in 2011 to work at an industrial greenhouse in a neighboring county. She joined her husband who came to work here with his father in 2007, shortly after Angie was born. Norma said it was a hard decision to leave Angie in the care of her parents. She never thought they would be apart for so long.
Angie's father joined the family’s tree trimming business built by his father, where his brother also works. Angie’s mother overstayed her visa when she learned that they were pregnant with their second child.
“I knew she [Angie] was in good hands and that I could help her and my parents who were struggling financially,” Norma said.
Poverty, inequality and corruption
Guatemala has a population of more than 17 million people, and more than half of them live below the national poverty line, according to the World Bank.
To survive, millions of families across Guatemala rely on remittances or money sent by their loved ones living and working abroad. In 2023, remittances reached a record $19.8 billion, according to Guatemala’s Central Bank. That’s more than the government’s entire annual budget.
A 2022 study by the Migration Policy Institute found that 80% of migrants returned to Guatemala left the country for economic reasons, 10% were fleeing violence, and 7% left to reunify with their families.
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The number one cause of migration in Latin America is inequality, according to a 2018 presentation from Alicia Bárcena, former executive director of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a United Nations research organization. Bárcena said the top 10% make up to 70 times more than the bottom 10% across Mexico and Central America.
In Guatemala, inequality is driven mainly by a handful of families that control most of the country's major industries, including cement, metal products, and sugar, according to Juan Alberto Fuentes Knight, an economist and Guatemala’s former finance minister.
These powerful, wealthy families have “strangled the economy” and controlled the government to benefit themselves for over a century, he said. He blames low wages and a lack of social services on the greed of these families.
Knight said for many families in Guatemala, immigration is the only feasible way to escape poverty. He said it’s not uncommon for families to pitch in and invest to send someone north to work or go to school.
“With these children, it’s not that they’re just sending them irresponsibly,” Knight said. “They want them to have a better life and they are investing a lot of money to do that.”
Family ties
Víctor Díaz Sánchez came to Culpeper in 2018 from Colotenango, a municipality in Huehuetenango. The same department or state Angie and her family came from. With a population of about 35,000, Colotenango consists of at least eight villages separated by mountains, each with its own Mayan dialect and traditions, according to Sánchez.
Sánchez drank a black coffee from the 7-Eleven across the street on a cool spring morning as he explained the different variations of Mam and K’iche’ spoken by the 50 or so men soaking up the sun and having breakfast at a regular Culpeper day-laborer pickup spot.
“I don’t think most of us want to be here,” said Sánchez, 27. “But because we were born poor in a country run by corrupt individuals, we are forced to leave.”
Migration from Guatemala to the U.S. has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Census data show the Guatemalan foreign-born population living in the U.S. more than tripled, from 320,000 in 2000 up to 1 million in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center.
Sánchez said day laborer sites here typically swell with workers during the spring and summer and subside with the cold weather. Most of the immigrants he’s seen were young men until 2021 when teenagers began to outnumber the adults.
“Look, he came here a few weeks ago from Guatemala,” Sánchez said as he pointed towards a young man sitting a couple of feet away from him, wearing a black Venom sweatshirt and skinny jeans, outside the 7-Eleven. The 15-year-old who did not want to disclose his name said he’d crossed illegally into the U.S. through the Arizona desert. He came here from the western highlands of Guatemala to find work trimming trees like his brother and cousins did years ago.
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About 200,000 Guatemalans turn 15 every year and enter the labor market, but there are few new jobs for them, according to Bárcena, who led the ECLAC from 2008 to 2022.
The majority of these Guatemalan children arriving in the U.S. alone are coming from the department or state of Huehuetenango, according to an ongoing study of deported Guatemalan unaccompanied minors by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM works with the United Nations to advocate for safe and legal pathways for migrants worldwide.
Huehuetenango has one of the highest child malnutrition rates in Latin America. Guatemala is among the five most food-insecure countries in the world, according to a 2021 report by MPI and the World Food Program, an organization within the U.N. About 47% of children in Guatemala suffer from malnutrition compared to 1% in the U.S. and 13% in Mexico. In Huehuetenango, that number is 68%, according to the report.
Most communities in the western highlands also lack access to quality hospitals, schools and other public and social services, according to the study.
But things have been this way for a long time for people in this region, according to Juan José Hurtado Paz y Paz, director of Associacion Pop Noj, an organization that runs immigrant shelters for children in Guatemala. Paz y Paz co-authored a 2022 report with MPI and IOM titled, “Migration from Huehuetenango in Guatemala’s Western Highlands.”
For more than a century, Guatemalans from this region have migrated in great numbers to coffee plantations located near the country’s Pacific coast and across southern Mexico to find seasonal work. Others have migrated to Guatemala’s major cities looking for better job opportunities, according to the report.
In the 1960s, some communities in the region, including families from Huehuetenango, began immigrating to the U.S. These immigration patterns were accelerated in the 1980s when the region was ravaged by violence including multiple massacres during the country’s civil war, according to the report.
Most migrants moved to California, Florida, Nebraska, Texas, and major metropolitan areas like New York and Washington, D.C. One of the first studies about migration conducted in this region in 2004 showed that up to one-third of families from Huehuetenango had a relative living in the U.S.
“These networks and routes to the U.S. have facilitated and are a driving force behind the intense migration we’ve seen from this region,” said Paz y Paz.
Support from afar
While living in Huehuetenango, Angie received money from her parents in Culpeper every month. She used the money to pay for her school, food and clothing.
A 2020 study by the Catholic Diocese of Huehuetenango found more than 80% of people living here had a close family member living in the U.S. Many families rely on money from relatives abroad to survive.
In 2022, the money sent from abroad to this country totaled $18 billion, nearly four times the amount of money sent in 2012, according to Guatemala’s Central Bank. Half of that money was spent on food, according to the MPI and Paz y Paz study.
Back in Culpeper, Angie was sitting on the front steps of her multi-generational home scrolling through her mom’s phone with her 10-year-old sister, who was born in the U.S. The two had not met in person until Angie came to the U.S. The elder sister said she thanks God each morning for her life in the U.S. and for her parents who fought so hard to bring her.
Even so, Angie is anxious about her future. She checks the mailbox every day dreading a letter from immigration court summoning her to appear before an immigration judge who will decide her fate and possible future in the U.S.
“I want to stay, but I know there’s a possibility that I get sent back,” she said. “Either way, I want to continue studying and I know my parents will support me as best they can from nearby or afar.”