Migrant may lose American child
Vilma Carrillo hasn’t seen her daughter since being separated in May
Vilma Carrillo was one of a group of migrant women flown to Texas in July from a detention centre in Georgia to be reunited with their children, who had been separated from them as part of the Trump administration’s clampdown at the border.
Over the next several days, she watched as immigration officials paged one mother after another and took them to meet their children.
“I was never called,” Carrillo said.
Her heart in tatters, the 28year-old Guatemalan woman was sent back to the Georgia detention centre without her daughter, Yeisvi, 11. “The others got their children back,” she said, “I was left with my despair.” She hasn’t seen her daughter since they were separated in May, but they talk on the phone twice a week.
Carrillo has been caught at the intersection of several Trump administration policies intended to make it harder for Central American migrants to settle in the United States. Her case is more serious than what thousands of other migrant families have faced: Because her daughter is a U.S. citizen, Carrillo has been told that she could lose custody.
One cause of her dilemma, ironically, is the very reason Carrillo undertook the hazardous trip to bring her daughter back to the United States. Carrillo sought to re-enter the country with a claim of asylum, citing years of beatings she had suffered at the hands of her husband in Guatemala.
Her asylum claim was denied after the Trump administration early this year ruled out domestic abuse as legal grounds for granting refuge. Even if Carrillo agreed to go home to Guatemala, immigration lawyers said, her daughter’s status as a U.S. citizen could prompt authorities in the United States to decide that the reports of domestic violence in the family make it too risky to allow her to return.
The fact that Yeisvi is a U.S. citizen creates another problem: While migrant families can be placed together in family detention centres in cases where the courts rule against allowing them to go free with a bond or other restrictions, it is against the law to hold a U.S. citizen in one of the facilities.
Now, more than six months since they were separated, Yeisvi remains in foster care, and Carrillo is still in detention, appealing a deportation order.
“Vilma presumed the fact that her daughter is an American citizen would protect them. Instead, she is in a grey zone that could result in her losing Yeisvi,” said Shana Tabak, executive director of the Tahirih Justice Center, a non-profit in Atlanta that provides legal services to immigrant survivors of genderbased violence. Tabak is one of the lawyers representing Carrillo.
Yeisvi was born in 2006 in Vidalia, Ga., three years after her parents illegally crossed the border and settled in the onion capital, where they toiled in the fields and warehouses. In 2007, they returned to their village in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, to be with Carrillo’s ailing mother.
A few years later, Carrillo said, her husband, Juan Bernardo, began to physically abuse her. The beating, biting and other violence intensified, she said.
In May, mother and daughter fled north with the goal of returning to Vidalia, where Carrillo has a brother. She said that she had expected that coming with her daughter would protect them from being placed in detention.
The pair arrived on May 10 at the Arizona border, where Customs and Border Protection officials reviewed their documents and noticed that the girl was a U.S. citizen.
“They said that Yeisvi could not stay with me,” the mother recalled.
Hours later, when a man and woman came to take the girl away, “Yeisvi clung to me, crying and screaming. They took her by force,” Carrillo said.
Yeisvi was transferred to Arizona’s Department of Child Safety and placed with a foster parent in Yuma, near where she and her mother had entered the country. Carrillo was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and eventually sent to the detention facility in Georgia.
Rosa Fernandez, who is fostering Yeisvi in her home, said the child talked frequently of her mother’s plight. “It touches me how much she wants to be with her mother and protect her mother from the pain,” Fernandez said.