Child migrants reunited with parents
Nine Guatemalan child migrants who were taken from their parents at the US border arrived home for tearful reunions yesterday as the Trump administration tries to comply with a court order to return hundreds of separated minors to their families.
‘‘I want to see my mama,’’ Leo Jeancarlo de Leon, 6, said after he got off a plane from New York at Guatemala City’s international airport.
Four children arrived on a first flight and five on a second, each one escorted by an adult. Ranging in age from 4 to 14, they wore jeans, T-shirts and newlooking sneakers. Around midafternoon the children were taken to a state-run shelter where Leo’s mother, Lourdes de Leon, was waiting. She wept as she knelt to embrace him nearly three months after the last time she saw the boy in person.
‘‘I promise I will never again leave you,’’ de Leon said, surrounded by a gaggle of journalists. ‘‘I missed you so much, my God!’’
Manuel Estuardo Roldan, Guatemala’s vice-minister of foreign affairs, said on Monday that 53 Guatemalan children separated at the US border had been reunited with relatives so far.
In late June, amid widespread outcry over US policies that led to separations of migrant families along the border, a US judge ordered that more than 2500 children be reunited with their parents. However, hundreds remained apart after the deadline, often in cases in which parents had already been deported without their children. Lourdes de Leon was one of those.
In a previous interview, de Leon said she and Leo went to the United States in search of a better life because her low-paid job selling clothing wasn’t enough to provide him with a good future.
They arrived in Arizona on May 10, and the boy was taken from her a couple of days later.
She ultimately agreed to sign a deportation order because she said Guatemalan consular officials told her that would be the easiest way to see her son again.
She was returned to Guatemala on June 7, while he remained in a shelter in New York. During the separation, the only contact she had with him from Guatemala was video calls arranged by workers at the US shelter.
Asked whether she would try to go to the US again, she gave an emphatic, ‘‘No. I am happy,’’ she said. ‘‘The only thing I want is to be alone with my son.’’ –AP