And yet, they had very different relationships to the U.S., to El Salvador, to why they left, to whether they wanted to stay and whether they would ever want to go back. “They were two people who looked the same and grew up in the same family. Markham acknowledges that she’s seen more extreme cases in her work at Oakland International, but she was intrigued by the twins’ story. They were better off than some they were able to stay with an older brother, and they had assistance from Markham, who helped them find tutoring, legal aid and health services.

Markham, who has traveled extensively to Mexico and El Salvador to report on unaccompanied minors, does an excellent job of detailing the legal and social challenges faced by the brothers, who struggled to assimilate even as they dealt with more mundane adolescent issues. So they get jobs, start cutting their losses.” “They need to learn English, and they need a certain number of credits to graduate, but they can’t get those credits because they don’t have the English to pass those classes. “They’ve left their homes in real danger, and they’re struggling with the stress of being away from their parents and the past trauma they’ve experienced along the way,” says Markham. When they arrived in Oakland, new struggles began. Once across the border, the brothers were held for two months in a Texas detention facility. To reach the U.S., teens like Ernesto and Raúl become easy targets for drug cartels. government officially terms them “unaccompanied alien children” - making the trip north is treacherous. came from those three countries.įor unaccompanied minors - the U.S. In 2013, 93 percent of unaccompanied minor immigrants in the U.S.

In “The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life” (Crown, $27, 298 pages), she recounts the experiences, illuminating the fears and palpable dangers that young people in Central America’s Northern Triangle - El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala - encounter every day. Markham, who has been a program coordinator at the Oakland public school since 2011, spent the next few years helping Ernesto and Raúl (not their real names: Markham used pseudonyms to protect them) as they navigated the system from crisis to safety.

And they were terrified that they were going to be deported.” “They’d missed a court date because they couldn’t find the courthouse. “They were totally panicked,” says Markham. The 17-year old identical-twin boys had fled their native El Salvador in fear for their lives. Lauren Markham, a program coordinator at Oakland International High School, found her encounter with twin teenage immigrant brothers so compelling that she wrote a book about their experiences coming here from El Salvador. BEN GUCCIARDI/PHOTO In 2014, Lauren Markham was in her office at Oakland International High School when Ernesto and Raúl Flores walked in, desperate for help.

The Far Away Brothers by Lauren Markham