Anxious migrant mother waits for taken daughter
HOMESTEAD, Florida — She came to the U.S. to help her family, and ended up having it torn apart instead.
Buena Ventura Martin Godinez, a petite mother of two, carried her infant son from Mexico into the U.S. in May, fleeing what she said were threats from violent local gangsters demanding money in their hometown in northwestern Guatemala. Her husband followed two weeks later with their seven-year-old daughter. All were caught by the U.S. Border Patrol.
Now, despite their request for asylum, the family is scattered. The husband, convicted of the misdemeanour offence of illegal entry into the U.S., awaits almost certain deportation at a jail in Atlanta. Martin, a heavy black monitoring device strapped to her ankle, and her baby boy are with relatives in a gritty town south of Miami. Their daughter is in the custody of a child-welfare agency in Michigan, making tearful calls to a mother desperate for her return.
“Every time she calls, she cries. I tell her we never should have come here,” Martin said as she cradled 10-month-old Pedro in the front yard of her in-laws’ house as the sun went down Wednesday. “I never thought it would be like this.”
The family is one of thousands who have tried to find refuge in the U.S. in recent weeks only to be caught up in the harsh reality of an immigration system that has never been as welcoming as many desperate migrants hoped, and has grown harsher under President Donald Trump, with the separation of parents from children as a means of discouraging illegal immigration.
More families are crossing the Southwest border from Guatemala than any other nation, with 29,278 families apprehended between October and the end of May.
Martin and her husband, Pedro Godinez Aguilar, could easily have been apprehended under the previous administration, too, and would have faced a tough battle for asylum. But the father wouldn’t have been prosecuted for a first-time crossing; he would likely have been briefly detained with his daughter and then released with a monitoring device while they battled their future out in court. And their daughter, Janne, wouldn’t have been shipped alone across the country, leaving them desperately trying to get her back.
It is a bitter lesson for people like the 29-year-old Martin.
“I see now that it’s not true that people count here, that the laws protect families,” she said in an interview with the Associated Press. “It’s a lie.”
Central Americans now make up half the people crossing the border from Mexico, a trend fuelled by poverty and violence associated with gangs and drug cartels as well as lawlessness and corruption that are a legacy of the civil wars that flared in the 1980s and 1990s and featured U.S. involvement.
Many of those caught are like Martin and are found to meet the initial threshold of showing a “credible fear” of persecution at home, allowing them to stay in the country until a judge can make a final determination. But asylum cases are rarely successful; just 11 per cent of Guatemalans who claimed asylum immediately upon entering the U.S. won their cases in 2016, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.