Jose's Journey: One Unaccompanied Minor's Escape From Violence and ...

Pete Homeyer had never served tamales at Christmas dinner at his house in Michigan before, but last December the classic Honduran staple was placed right next to the roast beef to help make Jose, a foster child who arrived in America as an unaccompanied minor at age 16, feel more at home.

Jose, now 18, had spent the previous Christmas in a holding facility in Texas after escaping violence in Honduras.

Homeyer, a 46-year-old nonprofit consultant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and his wife Lynne, a 61-year-old Web editor, had no connection to Jose or Honduras before last year.

'When he came here, he didn't speak any English at all,' Pete Homeyer told ABC News. 'He knew his numbers and his colors and 'yes' and 'no' and not a whole lot more than that.'

Now, after living with the couple for 18 months, Jose has done 'very well' academically, transitioned out of his school's English as a Second Language classes, is helping design the class ring and played for the varsity soccer team.

'Soccer is like free time for me, where my mind does not focus on missing my family and friends in Honduras,' Jose told ABC News.

Jose was one of the lucky ones.

He is one of the tens of thousands of minors who have arrived at the U.S. border without legal documents, and without adult relatives for support. The wave of unaccompanied minors reached tsunami-like proportions this summer, with 67,339 children arriving in the U.S. in need of care so far this fiscal year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

While most children are placed with a parent or extended relatives who already live in the U.S., a much smaller portion of these children are sent to live with American families who have offered to take unaccompanied minors in. The Homeyers are one such family, having heard about the plight of these children through a Christian charity and deciding to help.

'I'm happy that in the life of one person, they could be offered something more,' Pete Homeyer said.

Escaping the Violence

Jose is reluctant to speak about the dangers he was facing in Honduras, but the American government knows what was in store for him, like so many teenage boys in the region: the State Department has reported that Honduras has had the highest per capita murder rate in the world since 2010, with gang violence as one of the leading factors. 'He tells me that he and his friends were all being pressured to join gangs,' Lynne Homeyer said.

The Homeyers try not to focus on the trauma from his home life and Jose saves talk of the specific threats for his monthly court appearances when he has to plead his case. 'He was in danger there. He was in physical danger living in Honduras,' Pete Homeyer said.

Instead of looking back, Jose is constantly looking forward to what he hopes is a promising future where he can make his trips to Western Union to wire money home even more frequent than it was this summer when he was working construction jobs. He speaks to his mother and sister by phone every week.

'Sometimes the phone call is difficult because I hear about problems I cannot help them fix,' Jose said, communicating with ABC News via email with the help of his immigration attorney. Jose did not originally plan to be in this new country alone, having made the treacherous journey to America with his cousin.