Honduran baby who appeared in US court is back in dad’s arms
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras (AP) — A year-old boy who became a poster child for the U.S. policy of separating immigrants and their children was back in the arms of his parents Friday, five months after he was taken from his father at the U.S. border.
Johan Bueso Montecinos arrived in San Pedro Sula and was reunited with his parents on a government bus. They were taken away for processing.
And so ended the extraordinary journey of a baby whose short life has ranged from Honduran poverty to a desperate dash across the U.S. border to the front pages of the world’s newspapers.
Captured by Border Patrol agents almost instantly upon arrival, Johan’s father was deported — and the 10-month-old remained at an Arizona shelter, in the custody of the U.S. government. Over the next five months, he would take his first steps, speak his first words, have his first birthday; his parents, hundreds of miles away, would miss it all. When his mother and father last saw him, he had two tiny teeth. Now he has a mouthful. In early July, Johan went before an immigration judge. An Associated Press account of that court appearance — of the judge’s befuddlement over how to deal with this tiny detainee in diapers, sucking on a bottle — set off an international furor, embodying the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents.
“I never thought they could be so cruel,” said his father, Rolando Antonio Bueso Castillo, 37.
Rolando said he thought his plan was a beautiful one. He would escape his hard life in the tiny town of Libertad — Freedom, in Spanish. His children would not grow up in the same poverty that he had endured — he had dropped out of the fourth grade to sell burritos to help his single mom support him and his four siblings.
His younger brother left the coffee-growing mountains of central Honduras for the United States seven years ago and thrived in Maryland with his wife and children. His sister followed, and also did well. Their eldest brother was killed in a drive-by shooting in San Pedro Sula, one of Latin America’s most dangerous cities.
Rolando was left behind with his wife Adalicia Montecinos and his 35-year-old disabled sister in their pink, two-bedroom cement home with a corrugated metal roof. He earned $10 a day driving a bus; his brother in America sent back hundreds of dollars to help out.
Rolando, an easy-going and hard-working man, was well aware of the dangers of crossing Mexico. Scores of Central Americans have fallen to their deaths jumping on trains or been shaken down by Mexican police, murdered, kidnapped, robbed or raped on their way to the United States.
He paid a smuggler $6,000, money his brother sent to him. Everything was supposed to be included — hotel stays, three meals daily and transport in an SUV with two other mothers and three children to the U.S. border. He packed five onesies, three jackets, a blue-and-white baby blanket, lotion, cream, 50 diapers, two bottles and cans of formula.
His wife, in her first trimester of pregnancy, would stay behind, working at her market stand selling Nike baseball hats, “California Dreaming” T-shirts and jewelry.