Some immigrant families find luck, no separation at border
McALLEN — Gripping plastic bags stamped with “U.S. Department of Homeland Security” and manila envelopes with their destinations scrawled in permanent marker, the immigrants waited at the bus station.
Images of fences, caging and thin floor mats in a large warehouse flashed above their heads on a television. The two immigrant women who were released from detention remembered the scene.
“We were there,” Dayana Orozco, 20, said to her 1-year-old son, slumped in her lap. “Did you see?”
For eight days this month, Orozco and her son traveled from Guatemala to the U.S. border with only a change of clothes and a couple of thousand dollars to their name. By the time they arrived, she said, they had spent it all.
Orozco said she left Guatemala to escape violence and find a better life for her son. She said they crossed the Rio Grande in a rickety raft. On the Texas side, she said she wandered, lost and shivering, before curling up with her infant in the brushes to sleep. They were apprehended by Border Patrol the next day.
Orozco and the other immigrants like her who make it to this McAllen bus station are what Sister Norma Pimentel, director of Catholic Charities of Rio Grande Valley, called “the lucky ones.”
They had their first asylum interviews, were given court dates to present their cases and released with ankle monitors from the McAllen immigrant processing center. Orozco said she was headed to Oklahoma.
Many take buses to meet relatives or friends across the country or head to the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center here, a couple of blocks from the bus station.
Sharing similar stories
But there were others who, in Pimentel’s words, weren’t so lucky. Some were told to board a different, also unlabeled, bus and were taken to the federal courthouse for criminal prosecutions in McAllen, where they were shackled before a judge and sent to detention facilities or deported.
Since early May, more than 2,200 parents were subjected to that fate under the Trump administration’s policy to prosecute border crossers who entered the country illegally. A national outcry over the separation of their children prompted the president to reverse his policy Wednesday.
“When you see this, you know that it’s wrong,” Pimentel said, gesturing to the immigrant families around her. “That we as a country, as a people, must have better options to process and figure out why these families are here, and how can we help them, make it easy for them.”
Most asylum-seeking migrants share similar stories, having endured some form of violence or threats in their home countries, and brutal conditions on their journeys here.
Yet while their experiences leading up to the border are similar, their experiences afterward can be vastly disparate.
“It all depends on whatever officer they’re dealing with at the time,” said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration lawyer based in Harlingen.
Many immigrants at the Respite Center said they were separated from their kids while they were at the processing center and reunited when they were released. But others said they were able to stay with their kids the entire time at that same facility.
The agents’ discretion
Acting Border Patrol Chief Brian Hastings acknowledged this week that agents use discretion when it comes to deciding whether to separate parents from children under age 5.
At the Respite Center, all the immigrants had managed to steer clear of detention or deportation.
After David Rivas of El Salvador crossed the border with his son last week, Border Patrol agents apprehended them both and separated them for 35 hours, Rivas said.
“A lot of things ran through my head. If I’ll never see him again, what will happen to him? What will happen to me?” Rivas said.
As he had approached the U.S. border, rumors of family separation began cropping up, he said. He had prayed it wouldn’t befall him and his child.
“That whole time we were being processed I thought, it would’ve been better if I had never come here. Because in this process, I know that my son is suffering, too,” he said.
He and his son were reunited and taken to the immigrant processing center.
“It’s a reuniting that, you can’t imagine it. You’re trapped, but you’re so happy to be close to him. It’s something really beautiful,” he said, noting he was going to Boston.
Immigrants at the Respite Center, which opened in 2014 when a surge of unaccompanied minors overwhelmed border communities, typically stay for one night. It’s a way station for asylum-seekers, offering them a reset and resources before they continue on to their destination city.
Catholic Charities volunteers here help the immigrants arrange for bus tickets to get to their destinations.