We start with a story from Moises, a young teenager in New York state who made the long journey from Honduras to the U.S. border by himself when he was just 8 years old. He’s just one example of the number of children migrating from Central America in what’s being called the “child migrant crisis.”

But child migration is nothing new, nor is mass migration from Central America. Civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala and a revolution in Nicaragua in the 1980s spurred a large refugee migration from Central America. We follow up with César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, immigration law professor at the University of Denver, about the United States’ involvement in those wars and how the drug war fueled a cycle of deportation.

Finally, we talk to Elizabeth Kennedy, a Fulbright scholar on the ground in El Salvador who is researching the reasons why kids are fleeing El Salvador to make their way north to the U.S. Her findings show that, while the majority of kids have family in this country (over half have a parent here), gang violence is the most common reason for migration–asking the question: Where is this crisis exactly, and what is does it really look like?

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