Families split at border endure wait for reunion
SAN PEDRO SOLOMA, Guatemala — Pablo Domingo isn’t getting much sleep these days. He barely eats and can’t focus on work.
His thoughts turn day and night to his 8-year-old son, Byron, whom he hasn’t seen since May. That’s when Domingo and the boy crossed into the United States illegally from Mexico. The immigration authorities detained and separated them — deporting the father to his home country of Guatemala and sending the boy to a shelter in Texas.
Domingo, his wife, Fabiana, and their 12-year-old daughter want Byron back. And Byron wants to go home. Yet last week the boy began his fourth month in the shelter, a world away from his parents and sister, with no resolution in sight.
“My boy is very small. He’s very sad,” Pablo Domingo said in an interview at the family’s simple cement-block home here in the western highlands of Guatemala.
“We can hug each other here,” he continued, gesturing to his wife and daughter. “But my son is there alone. Who’s going to hug him?”
Most of the 3,000 or so families that were separated at the border under the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy, which was meant to deter illegal immigration, have been reunited under a court order.
But in more than 500 cases, children are still separated from their parents, including 22 under the age of 5. Their fate lies, to a large extent, in the hands of nonprofit groups that have stepped into the breach left by the government to do the hard work of finding and reconnecting families.
More than 300 of these cases, like Byron’s, affect children whose parents were deported without them. The majority of these families are from Guatemala, followed by Honduras, while a small number are from El Salvador and several other countries.
Advocates have said in court that U.S. authorities forced or induced many parents to accept deportation and abandon their hopes of pursuing asylum on the promise of quick reunification with their children.
But many parents who were deported without their children, like Pablo Domingo, have found that instead of speeding things up, leaving the United States has only delayed reunification. They often don’t understand the cumbersome legal process in which their children are trapped, or know when they might be with them again — uncertainty that leaves them anguished.
“It’s been enough pain,” Domingo said. “How much more does the government want us to suffer? It’s too much.”
U.S. authorities decline to comment on individual cases involving minors.
Last month, under orders from Judge Dana M. Sabraw of U.S. District Court in Southern California, the government submitted a strategy to reunify children with parents who had been deported. Its details were ironed out in conference with the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a suit against the government over the separation policy.
Under the plan, the government has designated officials in various departments to steer its efforts and is coordinating with Central American consular officials in the United States to prepare the children’s travel documents. The government has also assumed financial responsibility for repatriating the children.