Special Report: What happened to the immigrants that crossed into the US in summer 2014?

It’s been roughly a year and a half since the U.S. saw a surge of Central American immigrants at the southern border.

Melissa Lopez, the Executive Director of Diocesan Migrant Refugee Services, worked with many of the immigrants processed in El Paso.

“One mother that we spoke to said, ‘my child stays here in Honduras he faces certain death. He takes the journey to the U.S. he might survive. His possible survival is still better than his certain death,'” Lopez said.

When facilities in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas were overwhelmed last summer many of them were sent to El Paso.

From there they were handed a court date and sent to other parts of the country.

Lopez said, “When there is a constant influx of children we are trying to get out there as quickly as we can to make sure they know about their rights and we can warn them about things like not showing up for your immigration hearing has consequences.”

ABC-7 asked Lopez if she believed the immigrants were showing up for their hearings.

“It’s been our experience that they are showing up,” Lopez said. “We have not had children who have just absconded and disappeared from the docket in huge numbers.”

In order to get concrete numbers ABC-7 reached out to numerous federal agencies.

ABC-7 first contacted the U.S. Border Patrol. Officials at that agency couldn’t give ABC-7 numbers on deportations but did say 68,541 unaccompanied minors entered the U.S. through Mexico in fiscal year 2014.

A majority of them came from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

In fiscal year 2015 that number dropped 42 percent to fewer than 40,000.

The Border Patrol recommended ABC-7 reach out to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) to get numbers on deportations immigration hearings.

I.C.E. promised to get those numbers, but after weeks or trying and waiting ABC-7 never received the numbers.

ABC-7 then reached out to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) which works to reunite incoming immigrants with family members in the U.S. or a family friend.

The ORR recommended ABC-7 reach out to the Executive Office for Immigration Review which is part of the U.S. Justice Department.

According to the EOIR from July 18, 2014 through December 23, 2014 nearly 20,711 new cases involving unaccompanied children were identified.

More than 4,087 of those cases have been completed.

3,135 or 77 percent were given removal orders and 69 percent of those were in absentia meaning the unaccompanied minor didn’t show up for their hearings.

But remember those are completed cases and ‘in absentia’ ones are always resolved more quickly.

For those who do show up and are eventually allowed to stay the process can take years.

So as more cases are closed we could see that more showed up for their hearings and more were allowed to stay.

Victor Manjarrez, a former Border Patrol Sector Chief, says the tracking system is flawed.

“Absolutely. The tracking system is built on trust, saying that you’ll show up when you say you’ll show up,” said Manjarrez.

Manjarrez is currently the Project Director for UTEP’s Center for Law and Human Behavior.

He also predicted last summer’s surge.

“Those who have gone through the process initially it was close to 70% that were not showing up. Those numbers have come down a bit and it’s close to 45-46 percent. It will probably stabilize at that number because that’s really the pool were dealing with. So, one in two is showing up,” Manjarrez said.

He added, “They could’ve started by going to Chicago, but could be in New York. They could be just about anywhere.”

ABC-7 reached out to one more organization: The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

Based on TRAC’s analysis the average wait time for an immigration hearing is now nearly three years and when a juvenile shows up and has a lawyer he or she has about a 50 percent chance of staying in the U.S.

Nine out of 10 who show up without a lawyer end up deported.