Baby who went before judge returns home
One-year-old was thrust into centre of U.S. immigration policy controversy
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — A one-year-old boy who became a poster child for the U.S. policy of separating immigrants and their children is back with his parents, five months after he was taken from his father at the American border.
Johan Bueso Montecinos arrived in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on Friday and was reunited with his parents on a government bus. They were taken away for processing.
So ended the extraordinary journey of a baby whose short life has ranged from Honduran poverty to a desperate dash across the U.S. border to the front pages of the world’s newspapers.
Captured by U.S. Border Patrol agents almost instantly upon arrival, Johan’s father was deported. The boy remained at an Arizona shelter, in the custody of the U.S. government. Over the next five months, he would take his first steps, speak his first words and have his first birthday. His parents, hundreds of miles away, would miss it all.
When his mother and father last saw him, he had two tiny teeth. Now he has a mouthful.
This month, Johan went before an immigration judge. His court appearance — including the judge’s befuddlement over how to deal with this tiny detainee in diapers, sucking on a bottle — set off an international furor, embodying the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents.
“I never thought they could be so cruel,” said his father, Rolando Antonio Bueso Castillo, 37.
Rolando said he thought his plan was a beautiful one. He would escape his hard life in the tiny town of Libertad — Freedom, in Spanish. His children would not grow up in the same poverty that he had endured — he had dropped out of the fourth grade to sell burritos to help his single mother support him and his four siblings.
His younger brother left the coffee-growing mountains of central Honduras for the United States seven years ago and thrived in Maryland with his wife and children. His sister followed, and also did well. Their eldest brother was killed in a drive-by shooting in San Pedro Sula, one of Latin America’s most dangerous cities.
Rolando was left behind with his wife, Adalicia Montecinos, and his 35-year-old disabled sister in their pink, two-bedroom cement home with a corrugated metal roof. He earned $10 US a day driving a bus. His brother in America sent back hundreds of dollars to help out.
Rolando was well aware of the dangers of crossing Mexico. Scores of Central Americans have fallen to their deaths jumping on trains or been shaken down by Mexican police, murdered, kidnapped, robbed or raped on their way to the United States.
He paid a smuggler $6,000, money his brother sent to him. Everything was supposed to be included — hotel stays, three meals daily and transport in an SUV with two other mothers and three children to the U.S. border. He packed five onesies, three jackets, a blue-and-white baby blanket, lotion, cream, 50 diapers, two bottles and cans of formula.
His wife, in her first trimester of pregnancy, would stay behind, working at her market stand selling hats, T-shirts and jewelry. In Maryland, their family would help mind Johan while Rolando worked. Adalicia would join them in a few months.
The father and son made it as far as Tampico, Mexico, 500 kilometres from the Texas border, when their beautiful plan started to unravel. The smuggler drove them into a warehouse in the port city and told them to board a tractor trailer filled with scores of other parents and children from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru.
Rolando and his son would spend three days locked in the trailer, shivering from the cold breeze from a buzzing machine they were told provided air for them to breathe. Buckets served as bathrooms. “We were carried like meat, but we had no choice by then. We had to do what we were told,” Rolando said.
In the Mexican border city of Reynosa, they boarded a makeshift raft and floated across the Rio Grande. They trudged through the Texas brush. They had made it. Minutes later, a Border Patrol agent arrested them and took them to a detention centre. Inside a cell cordoned off by a chain-link fence, they slept on a mattress under a thin, reflective blanket issued to them.
Rolando said he had to ask for three days before being allowed to bathe Johan. “He was covered with dirt,” Rolando said.
On the fifth day, immigration officers told Rolando they needed to take him to an office for questioning. One agent removed Johan from his arms. As they walked away, Johan turned, reaching for his dad. It would be the last time they would see each other for five months.
The agents told Rolando he was going to be separated from the boy and deported to Honduras because this was the fourth time he had attempted to enter the United States. Each time, he was caught almost immediately.
“That’s criminal,” one of the agents told Rolando.
“A criminal is someone who kills, robs, does things to harm people,” Rolando said later. “I just want to work and give my children opportunities.”
Rolando spent 22 days locked up in various detention centres along the Texas border. He knew nothing of his son.
A social worker from the Arizona shelter made contact with Adalicia.
When Rolando arrived in Honduras in April, he was shocked to see how thin she was — she said she lost 20 pounds and her doctor worried she could lose her baby.
Rolando said he had been told by immigration authorities the two would be deported together, so he agreed to go. Then, they told him his son would follow in two weeks. But months passed.
In court, Johan was granted a voluntary departure order that would allow the government to fly him to Honduras.
The father who awaited him Friday was overwhelmed by guilt over the dismal failure of his beautiful plan. Some day, he knows, his son will ask what happened, and why he had left him in the United States.
“I’ll tell him the truth,” he said. “We thought we had a good plan to give him a better life.”
Will Rolando concoct yet another plan to reach America? “They broke something in me over there,” Rolando said. “This was never my son’s fault. Why did he have to be punished?”