Wave of Minors on Their Own Rush to Cross Southwest Border

Robin Tulio was finally heading to the border to be with his mother. A maid, living illegally in Baltimore, she had decided the time was right to smuggle her son into the United States.

Like so many others across Central America, Robin said his mother believed that the Obama administration had quietly changed its policy regarding unaccompanied minors and that if he made it across, he would have a better shot at staying ...

Many say they are going because they believe that the United States treats migrant children traveling alone and women with their children more leniently than adult illegal immigrants with no children.

The Obama administration says the primary cause of the influx of children is rising crime and ailing economies in Central America, not policy changes in the United States ...

“We have heard sort of rumors and reports, or suggestions, that the increase may be in response to the perception that children would be allowed to stay or that immigration reform would in some way benefit these children,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, in a conference call with reporters on Monday ...

But even as the government moves to confront the situation, children, parents, immigration officials, lawyers and activists interviewed say that there has been a subtle shift in the way the United States treats minors.

That perception has inspired parents who have not seen their children for years to hire so-called coyotes, guides often associated with organized crime, to bring them north. It has prompted other parents to make the trip with toddlers in tow, something rarely seen before in the region.

“If you make it, they take you to a shelter and take care of you and let you have permission to stay,” Robin said after he stepped off a bus on a Thursday night with eight others caught on their way north. “When you appeal your case, if you say you want to study, they support you” ...

Ana Solorzano, an immigration official who tends to deportees in El Salvador, said that as the number of deportees flown by air to El Salvador from the United States started to drop, the number of people returned by land from Mexico started to rise. Of the 325 Salvadoran children who were deported last year, only 22 came from the United States, she said.

“They have not publicly recognized a change in public policy, but we see it,” Ms. Solorzano said.

Central Americans, she said, were left with the sense that the United States had “opened its doors” to women and children ...