NYC reunion set
Wall-toss kids’ parents are already here
The parents of the two little girls who were seen on video being dropped by smugglers over a border fence and left in a remote area of New Mexico are reportedly already in New York City and preparing to be reunited with them.
The grandparents of the children, identified as Yareli, 3, and Yasmina, 5, have asked President Biden to facilitate the reunion.
And the Ecuadoran Consulate in Houston told the DailyMail.com Wednesday that the family will soon be reunited on the Big Apple.
Earlier, Manuel Macas, the girls’ maternal grandfather, told Telemundo from Ecuador, that the family was appealing to the White House “that they help us, that these two innocents are together with their parents so that they can give them love themselves,”
The girls’ parents, Yolanda Macas Tene and Diego Vacacela Aguilar, traveled to the US from Jaboncillo, Ecuador, a mountainous town near the western coast, relatives told Telemundo.
Their dad paid a smuggler to take the kids across by themselves, but the grandparents don’t know how much they paid, Telemundo reported.
“[The parents] wanted to be with them. Their mother suffered a lot. For that reason, they decided to take them,” paternal grandfather Lauro Vacacela told the outlet.
“Yeah, it can be a bit risky, so to speak,” Vacacela said when asked if he was concerned that his son and daughter-in-law paid a coyote to bring the kids across the border.
The story of the two girls has drawn international attention since US Border Patrol video showed them being dropped over the fence in the middle of the night, miles from the nearest home.
The girls were soon rescued by Border Patrol agents and have been doing well, the agency has said previously.
When Vacacela saw the video, he told Telemundo, he felt a deep pain because he considers the girls as if they were his own kids. Their maternal grandparents weren’t even aware that they’d left home, Telemundo said.
The Biden administration is grappling with a massive surge of unaccompanied children who undertake dangerous journeys to cross the border, often by themselves or in the company of siblings barely older than they are.
In March alone, more than 18,500 unaccompanied minors crossed the southern border, an increase of more than 60 percent from the previous record set in May 2019.