Five hundred children were brought to our border and began a new life, but not the ones their parents had planned.
by Mauve Maude
December 13, 2020
For two months in 2018, America and others around the world roared up and raged out over the separation of families at the southern U.S. border. The Presidential administration announced in April it would adopt a zero-tolerance policy for adults entering the country illegally, anticipating arrival of a “caravan” of migrants, supposed to be on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border from Central America. Once across the border, adults were detained to await prosecution. Children were detained separately. From April to June, about 3,000 children were separated from their families on arrival, before the administration was pressured by the public to end the policy.
When the policy was ended, most of those separated families were still in the United States, either in detention or released to await asylum requests. Federal courts ordered information released to reunify the families, a process that took months, revealing that the administration had never planned on reuniting them and took no measures to do so. Those proceedings also revealed that families were being separated long before the zero-tolerance policy was officially announced. During the “pilot program” of the policy, in 2017, over a thousand other children had already been separated from their families. Their families, many of them deported, would be even more difficult to locate, and it wasn’t until 2019 that immigration lawyers were given even meager information with which to start the process.
Of the 545 children reported in October still missing their parents, several dozen were under the age of five when they were separated from their parents.
As USA Today reported, as of this month, more than 600 parents of hundreds of children, separated in 2017, are still unaccounted for. About half of those parents were deported, without the proper information needed to locate them, even if they returned to the homes they fled, even if they are, in fact, still alive. Of the 545 children reported in October still missing their parents, most living with U.S. relatives or in foster homes, several dozen were under the age of five when they were separated from their parents.
Their families were fleeing extreme violence and poverty in one of the most dangerous regions on Earth currently–Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras–neighboring countries whose governments have been de-stabilized in part by the United States. Many fleeing migrants made the trip on foot, literally running for their lives, as Central American migrants have been doing for years. For those 4,000 families in 2017 and 2018, the zero tolerance policy and family separation were what waited at the end of that thousand-mile journey, with some ending up right back where they started, with or without their children.
This New York Times article tells the compelling story of Leticia Peren, a young Guatemalan mother who was recently reunited with her son, Yovany, through a stroke of good fortune. But after they were separated for more than two years, including her deportation, restoring the bonds of mother and child has been challenging.
What is obvious is that the separation of children and parents seeking asylum after fleeing their homes in order to simply live, even for a moment, would be traumatic–a trauma most Americans could never dream of experiencing. And yet thousands of families have now experienced that trauma in our country. For several hundred, it hasn’t even begun to be over. Some of these children–Americans now–may never see their parents again, given to us unwillingly. They wouldn’t be the first. Perhaps we should be ready to assist the adults they will become.