Alize Mejia, 5, tears up as she waits for dinner at Casa de Elizabeth orphanage in Imuris, Sonora, Mexico.

She says Chávez’s assertion that the U.S. ignores DIF’s calls “struck me as being odd because we have several cases open now” that the department is working to fix. In those instances, she says, DIF has dialed the CPS hotline.
“I would believe that if [the children] are U.S. citizens… there has to be something that can be done,” she adds.
The Mejia children had come to Mexico one year earlier with their mother, a Mexican national running from an Arizona arrest warrant full of drug charges. Until then, they’d spent much of their lives in the U.S., attending school, speaking English, eating at McDonald’s – by all accounts, being “American.”
But once she abandoned them in Nogales, the children, rather than being sent back to the States to live with relatives who are U.S. citizens, were shuttled to Casa de Elizabeth.
They are not alone.
The director of one orphanage along the border, who asked that his name not be used for fear he might anger the Mexican government, says he has seen at least two cases of U.S. children stuck at his orphanage in the past 14 years. He calls it a “gray area.”
Another orphanage along the border reports it has housed two American children from two different families for the past five years. An employee with the orphanage, who also asked that his name not be used, says he contacted the U.S. consulate about the situation and was told the children can go to the U.S. once they are legal adults. A woman at a third orphanage says it also has housed an American child but that the child recently returned to the U.S. with the help of her American aunt and Mexican authorities. The employee isn’t sure how the aunt worked with the authorities to get the young girl home.

The Mejia siblings (from left): Junior, 8, Alize, 5, and Rainny, 9.

Making the Call
Consuelo Rivera Maldonado looked on from her small corner shop as flashing lights, sirens, social workers and police fell upon her small neighborhood in the rocky hills overlooking Nogales. It was like nothing she had ever seen in the more than 20 years she has called the city home.
But she knew they were coming; she had called them. Though it was hard to watch the officers take the children away, she believed they’d find a better place away from their broken home. They couldn’t stay there, fending for themselves, a mother nowhere to be found.
Maldonado has a raspy voice but a comforting tone. Her skin, the color of rust, is leathery, more a product of her own life’s hardships than her age. The woman, 58, owns a small, rickety shop just feet from the home where the children lived. She sells odds and ends here, like tortillas, dulces (candy) and soda. That’s how she came to know the little ones so well.
In the year the children lived there, they were left alone often, Maldonado explains in Spanish. “Ella no les puede tener,” she says. Their mother didn’t care for them like she should have. The drugs and drinking made sure of that.
“How could you bring these little kids into the world if they’re going to suffer like this?” she asks.
Maldonado would sometimes sneak food to the children, passing it through the window when their mother would lock the doors and leave for the night. But for the most part, Rainny took care of her brother and sister, making sure they were fed and cleaned.
It was on days that the three would come to sit at Maldonado’s store and wait for their mother to come home that she grew to love them. Rainny would play with the woman’s long, salt-and-pepper hair. When Garcia left her children in March, Maldonado decided it would be for the last time. Her patience had run dry. She reached for the phone and called DIF.
When Lourdes Garcia finally came back, the house was empty.
Maldonado told her what had happened. “I thought she would be very angry at me…. She cried a lot, but she wasn’t angry,” Maldonado says.
“There’s nothing here for them.”