Immigrant families struggling with trauma of separation

Sspring as part of the government’s “zero tolerance” policy.

The Trump administration declined to comment.

Researchers and medical professionals have analyzed the effects of traumatizing events on children over the years, and studies have shown that persistent stress may alter brain structure in regions affecting emotions and regulating behavior. Imaging studies have found these regions are smaller than usual in severely traumatized children, and the damage may be worse the younger the child because the brain is still developing.

Jenifer Wolf Williams, who is among thousands of U.S. mental health professionals offering free services to help the families, said recovery takes longer than people think. If not treated properly, children may become teens who engage in self-destructive behavior and struggle to make the right choices.

The Texas therapist, who has counseled immigrants separated from their families for various reasons, said these kinds of separations can be even more traumatic for immigrants from Latin America where the culture is centered on large extended families.

Thousands of miles away in Honduras, Baby Johan almost nightly lets out piercing screams. He stops when his mother mentions Emily, the social worker who cared for him in U.S. government custody. To make him feel better, she sometimes plays Johan the old videos the social worker had sent to his parents.

Johan — who captured the world’s attention by appearing before a judge in diapers — spent a third of his life at a U.S. government-contracted shelter in Arizona after being separated from his father at the border in May.

When he returned home in July he didn’t seem to recognize his parents at first. Since then, he has refused to play with his toys, drink from his bottle or eat much, rejecting the food he once loved, like bananas.

He can’t sleep without the lights on. He vacillates between holding onto his mother with an iron-clad embrace to hitting her to shutting down.

“I wonder if this is normal for a toddler, but he cries out like he’s having nightmares, he yells loudly like he’s traumatized,” said his mother, Adalicia Montecinos, who is eight months pregnant with her second child. “We thought once we got him back, everything would go back to normal, but he acts so traumatized, we don’t know what to do.”

His father, Rolando Antonio Bueso Castillo, is consumed by guilt for ever taking him. He feels angry that his son, then 10months-old, was separated from him. He said he agreed to be deported because he was told he would get his son back immediately.

But Johan spent five months at a shelter in Phoenix. He spoke his first words and took his first steps there.

Bueso Castillo wants to file a lawsuit against the U.S. as well. But the bus driver, who makes $10-aday, doesn’t have the means to pursue it.

“This is all their fault,” he said.

Isai Valenzuela Segura, a 29-year-old Guatemalan, who was reunited with his 9-year-old son on July 26, wishes he could do more to help his boy, like a hire a counselor. The father has turned to his faith to guide him, reading the Bible to his son on a regular basis.

“I thought when I saw my son that he’d be happy, but he asked me why I left him. He said, ‘You left me alone for 41 days. You don’t know how much I suffered,’” said Valenzuela Segura, who is living with his son in Tennessee while they seek asylum after fleeing violence in Guatemala.

“With God’s help, we’ll heal,” he said.