No relief for parents of migrant children in custody

AURORA, Colo. — Micaela Samol Gonzalez, dressed in blue detention scrubs, made her way to the front of a windowless courtroom in Colorado on Thursday and faced the judge. After she gave her name and arranged a future court date for her immigration case, the judge asked whether she had any questions. She had just one. “My question is regarding my son,” Gonzalez, whose boy was taken away by immigration authorities shortly after she was accused of crossing the border illegally on a journey from Guatemala, said in Spanish. “I’ve been given a number to contact him but nobody’s replying to me, and I’m wondering if he’s doing well.”

A day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order scrapping his administration’s practice of separating immigrant parents and children at the border, there was no relief for Gonzalez and hundreds of other parents who were little closer to reuniting with the more than 2,300 children who have been taken from them under the administration’s “zero tolerance” border enforcement policy.

Parents said they still did not know how to track down their children, and struggled to find out any information through a

1-800 hotline set up by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. Others who had located their children said they were still separated by thousands of miles and a bureaucratic maze they did not know how to navigate.

The one thing they wanted was their children. But parents and lawyers said those reunions still seemed achingly distant and uncertain.

Administration officials have said children were taken only from parents who had violated the law by crossing the border without proper documents. Brian Marriott, senior director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, said after the new executive order was signed that the agency was “working toward” reunifying families, though he could not say how quickly that would happen.

As Gonzalez listened to the judge over a pair of translation headphones, a court officer gave her a photocopied fact sheet titled, in Spanish, “Are you detained and separated from your children?” She said she had not seen her son since May 25, when they were separated at the border. She thought he was in New York. She knew nothing for sure.

“I called but nobody answered,” she said. “I tried before. I will keep trying.”

Even outside the walls of a detention facility, some parents could only guess when they would see their children again.

Angelica, a 31-year-old asylum applicant from Guatemala who feared repercussions if she disclosed her last name, said she had not seen her 8-year-old daughter since the two were separated at an immigration detention facility in Arizona in early May. They had been apprehended by immigration officers somewhere in the desert.

After her arrest, Angelica was flown to Las Vegas, Nev., and transferred to a detention facility in Aurora, Colo. She spent more than a month there before being released on a $1,500 bond this week. She is now staying with a friend who is helping her financially and trying to help her navigate the immigration system.

On Thursday, she said she was finally able to talk to her daughter for 15 minutes and learned she was in a facility on the southern border. She did not know what city. She did not know the name of the facility.

All she knew, she said, was what a social worker there had told her: She would be allowed to call her daughter twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday —“no más.” She would need to fill out lots of paperwork. She should not attempt to visit. And she should not expect to reunite with her daughter for a month. Maybe two.

“It feels like an eternity to know I won’t be able to see my daughter and I can’t hold her,” she said in a telephone interview, speaking through an interpreter. “I feel like I’m going to die. I feel powerless.”

She feels alone, her mother said.

“She’s sad,” she said. “She wants to come home. She doesn’t know if she’s going to see me again. She just wants to come home with her mom.”

When they video-chatted Thursday, she said that she told her daughter that she would buy her a backpack and take her to school, and that they would have a real celebration for her eighth birthday, which had passed while she was in custody.

She said she was determined to navigate the immigration system successfully. Her situation in Guatemala had reached the point that she felt sure that she and her daughter would be killed if they were returned.

“I want a chance at another life,” she said. “But I don’t want another life without my daughter.”

Across the country, immigration lawyers said they were slogging through confusion, bureaucracy and secrecy as they tried to locate children.

Many were tapping private social media networks to find social workers who might know their clients’ children. They were asking colleagues in other cities to search immigration court dockets for the name of a child’s parent. Some were preparing legal complaints to try to force the release of children being held by the government.

“No one knows what’s happening with these children,” said Laura Lunn, the managing attorney of the detention program at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network. “There’s no concept where their child is.”