How an asylum-seeking mom found her son again
BLOOMINGTON, ILL.— The first time Jeny Amador fled Honduras for the United States, she tried to enter the country legally: She presented herself at an El Paso, Texas, border checkpoint in early 2018 and asked for asylum.
Amador instead was separated from her 10-year-old son. Authorities accused her of being a smuggler.
She was detained for months until she agreed to be deported — without her boy, who went to live with relatives in the Midwest.
When Amador tried to enter the country again in February, she found a shocking about-face. She was turned away from the same checkpoint. When she and a teenage daughter then crossed the border illegally, they were taken into custody, spent five days in a U.S. immigration jail and were suddenly released into the United States, setting up a reunion with her son, Isaac.
“I missed you so much,” Amador whispered to him on Feb. 16, shortly after stepping off a bus in central Illinois, a few hours’ drive from Chicago.
Eight months after U.S. President Donald Trump’s retreat from a “zero tolerance” approach at the border, asylum-seeking families like Amador’s are being released into the United States in growing numbers.
Though Trump wanted to end a policy he says has been a failure — a policy he calls “catch and release” — the administration has reverted to that very approach, favoured under former president Barack Obama, as record numbers of migrant families are crossing the border.
Amador experienced both ends of this policy whiplash.
“I prayed that the Lord would give people here knowledge to fix the mistake they made with me,” Amador said. “This second time, it was corrected.” Experts say Amador’s two interactions with U.S. border policy are emblematic of the confusion and contradictions that have emerged over the past year in the United States, as federal officials have been trying to implement tighter controls over illegal immigration while also pursuing hundreds of miles of border barriers aimed at stemming the flow.
Isaac was one of several thousand migrant children taken from their parents at the border, according to a report issued in January by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services.
More than 2,700 children were separated from their families under the administration’s nowabandoned “zero tolerance” prosecution initiative. After months of court orders and administrative chaos, the majority of these children were reunited with their parents — some in Central America but most in the United States.