Mum, dad welcome tot home
For months, a Honduran couple watched their only son grow up in videos while he was kept in US Government custody. That’s where he took his first steps and spoke his first words.
The parents got to embrace the 15-month-old boy again Friday, five months after US immigration officials forcibly separated the baby from his father at the Texas border.
Johan, who grabbed the world’s attention when he appeared in a US courtroom in nappies, at first didn’t recognise his mum and dad after he was flown to San Pedro Sula.
“I kept saying Johan, Johan, and he started to cry,” said his mother, Adalicia Montecinos.
She broke down in tears as she talked about how her son had become a poster child for outrage over the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
“He suffered everything that we have been suffering,” she said.
His father soon won him over and the tiny boy laughed as both parents kissed him outside a centre where they finished final legal paperwork before heading home.
“I feel so happy,” Adalicia said.
And so ended the extraordinary journey of a baby from Honduran poverty to the front pages of the world’s newspapers.
Captured by Border Patrol agents upon arrival, Johan’s father was deported — and the 10-month-old remained at an Arizona shelter, in the custody of the US Government. Over the next five months, he spoke and walked for the first time and had his first birthday; his parents, hundreds of kilometres away, missed it all.
In early July, Johan went before an immigration judge. A report of that court appearance and the judge’s befuddlement over how to deal with the tiny detainee set off an international furore.
Judge John W. Richardson could hardly contain his unease at having to ask the boy’s lawyer whether his client understood the proceedings.