After Raid, Honor Student Becomes Overnight Parent

SAN DIEGO -- Sixteen year-old Leslie Muñoz is trying to sell her parents’ sport utility vehicle. On weekends, she rummages through her family’s luxuries, the televisions, the radios, the computer gadgets and all the furniture to sell what she can from their home, where she’s also stuck a ‘For Rent’ sign out front.

She has a new Chrysler PT Cruiser that’s paid off, but she needs it to get her eight-year-old sister to school. Her thirteen year old brother, Marco, takes the bus to a prestigious middle school in La Jolla. For them, what was once a lavish lifestyle is now a financial anchor since their parents were deported in February and are now living an alien lifestyle in the colonias of Tijuana, México.

“We never had to ask for anything because we always had it all,” Leslie says. Now scared that it’s been two months since her parents, Abel and Zulma, have been gone and food in the house is scarce, she’s taken parental control and is running out of options.

kids leslie and marcoLeslie, who speaks to her father daily with a cellular phone through a family share plan, has been thrown into the realm of bill paying, tax season and mortgages.

“I have to make the payments and check the bank account online,” she says. “I have to do all the stuff that my parents did. I didn’t used to pay too much attention, but now I have to do it.”

March’s mortgage payment, $2,500, on the home they own was paid because Abel was able to do his taxes before he was taken. The money he got in return paid the bills and left his three children with a little over a thousand dollars to fend for themselves until they figure out a plan.

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