Immigrant parents fight chaotic system
after being told they would get their children back in their home country, only for that promise to be broken.
The government says parents of about 400 children are outside the U.S., likely deported.
Eduardo Almendarez Meyer, 11, regularly sees other children leave the government facility where he is being held and get returned to their parents. In phone calls back to Honduras, he asks his mother if he’ll see her again.
It’s been more than two months since he and his father, Douglas Almendarez, were separated in Texas. Almendarez was deported to Honduras on June 13. His wife, Evelin Roxana Meyer, who stayed in their hometown to run their neighborhood grocery store, said he was told when he signed his deportation papers that his son would be waiting for him in Honduras.
After he arrived in San Pedro Sula, Almendarez waited at the airport for days, with no information.
It took weeks for someone from the U.S. to call to say Eduardo was at a shelter in Brownsville, Texas. Eventually, they got a number where they could call him twice a week, for 10 minutes each time.
At first, Eduardo could not sleep and cried on the phone, saying he wanted to go back home, his mother said. He has since calmed down and made friends, but his anxiety is rising as he watches the friends leave the shelter one by one.
“He has been suffering, just as I have as his mother,” Meyer said. “They shouldn’t be allowed to do this.”
The government counts 444 children as having been “discharged in other appropriate circumstances.” Those circumstances included discharges to sponsors other than the parents — typically a relative — including situations where the “parent is not eligible for reunification.”
It appears that the government is refusing to release some parents after their children were given to sponsors, because the parents had previously been removed from the U.S. and came back to seek asylum. The San Antonio-based Migrant Center for Human Rights identified at least two such cases.
One of the women still detained is Vivian, a 24year-old woman from Honduras who entered the U.S. in late April and had her 3-year-old son taken and given to her aunt.
Vivian, who asked to be identified only by her first name out of fear of endangering her immigration case, was previously deported in November 2016.
Her aunt says she calls every day, crying, from the detention facility.
Her aunt puts her son on the phone, so Vivian can repeat the story they’ve agreed to tell him: She’s gone away for work but is coming back soon with an armful of toys for him.
“When he goes to sleep, he always says, W` here’s Mommy? She sleeps next to me,’ and he starts to cry,” his aunt said.
Sara Ramey, the migrant center’s director, received a letter last week from ICE denying Vivian’s request for release without further explanation. Ramey is working with another mother detained while her adopted son is with her adult daughter.