together again
after ‘three months of torture,’ a mother and her son are
GUATEMALA CITY – The U.S. government flew 6-year-old Leo Jeancarlo DeLeon to Guatemala on Tuesday, reuniting him with his mother two months to the day after she was deported without him and nearly three months after separating the mother and son at the border under President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance border policy.
The boy’s reunion with his mother, Lourdes Marianela DeLeon, took place at a shelter in the heart of the Guatemalan capital.
Leo arrived in a white van with four other children. Wearing a blue Tommy Hilfiger ball cap and a Spider-Man T-shirt, he appeared to smile as he emerged from the vehicle, where he and the others were greeted by about 30 members of the media from around the world.
Lourdes, who described their separation as “three months of torture,” had traveled all night by car from her hometown of San Pablo, 200 miles away,
near the border with Mexico. In a brief interview, she said she had spoken to Leo on Monday and that he had said he was “happy because in only a few more hours we will see each other.”
As they were reunited inside the shelter Tuesday, Lourdes said Leo’s first words to her were “I love you.”
About 2:30 p.m., Lourdes and Leo emerged from the shelter, through a large wooden door and onto the street, where they were cornered by cameras and microphones.
“I really missed my mama,” Leo told reporters. “I feel fine now, but when they separated us, I felt sad.”
“He says they treated him very well,” Lourdes said of his time in U.S. migrant shelters.
Leo was among the first nine Guatemalan children reunited with their deported parents, after being separated at the border by U.S. immigration authorities, said Anaeli Torres, head of the migrant department for the Secretary of Social Welfare, a federal agency.
The reunification marked the end of an ordeal that began when Lourdes and Leo crossed the border illegally together on May 10 near San Luis, Arizona, and were quickly apprehended by the Border Patrol.
Lourdes arrived thinking she and her son would be detained briefly and allowed to continue on their way into the interior of the U.S., where she hoped to start a new life with relatives living in New Jersey.
Instead, Leo was taken from her two days later and shipped to New York City. There he was placed in a program with several other children who had been taken from their parents under the zerotolerance policy.
Meanwhile, Lourdes remained in Arizona, at a detention facility in the remote desert near Eloy, an hour south of Phoenix, until she was deported on June 7 without Leo.
Hundreds of children separated from their parents at the border remain in U.S. government custody, even after their parents have been deported.
Officials with the Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said those reunited on Tuesday ranged in age from 5 to 17, and had been apart from family for between one and three months.
Asked if more reunions were expected soon, Marta Larra, the ministry’s director of communications, told
“We are pressuring to reunify these children as soon as possible.”
The first lady of Guatemala, Patricia Marroquin, made an appearance at the shelter Tuesday amid criticism that the government there hasn’t done enough to learn how many of its citizens were affected by the zero-tolerance policy.
Marroquin traveled to Texas the previous week to visit migrant children in shelters there. Upon her return, the Guatemalan government announced that more than 2,200 Guatemalan children were affected by the zero-tolerance policy. The number was much higher than the 465 the government originally said, according to Pedro Solaris, a lawyer working with deported parents.
Solaris said most likely no one knows how many Guatemalan children remained in U.S. custody after their parents were deported. “The Guatemalan government has been sending mixed messages or confusing messages concerning how many children are or were affected,” Solaris said.
He said Guatemala is a small country, about the size of Tennessee, with a vast rural population made up of many indigenous cultures, many of whom speak little or no Spanish. Most of the migration from Guatemala to the U.S. comes out of “not towns, but small villages outside of the small towns,” making it that much harder to locate deported parents, he said.
“When these parents were deported from the U.S., the Guatemalan government lacked a procedure or a protocol in order to even leave contact numbers or identify them as parents who had left children behind,” Solaris said. “I can say without a doubt that the Guatemalan government does not know how many deported parents are left here in Guatemala, who they are or where they are.”
About 95 percent of the children who remain in U.S. custody after their parents were deported are from Guatemala and Honduras, according to court filings.
In court filings, the American Civil Liberties Union said there are about 120 deported parents for whom the government hasn’t been able to provide viable information about where they live.
Eight-year-old Antony David Tovar Ortiz is one of the separated children who remain in U.S. government custody after his mother was deported. He is living in a shelter in Houston, according to his mother, 25-year-old Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez, who was deported to Guatemala on June 6.
On Tuesday, she stood outside the shelter after arriving from her town — three hours away by car in Moyuta in the Guatemala state of Jutiapa, near the border with El Salvador — to see if she could find out when he might be returned.
She said she has not seen Antony since they were separated on May 27, a day after they crossed the border illegally into the U.S. near McAllen, Texas.
“It has not been easy to be separated,” Elsa said. “I’ve never been separated from him before.”
She said she last talked to Antony by phone a week earlier. While physically he is in good health, “thanks to God,” she said, he is struggling emotionally.
“At times he says he is desperate,” Elsa said. “He doesn’t want to be there.”
In all, about 3,000 children were separated from their parents at the border under the zero-tolerance policy, which the Trump administration launched in full force in April and May to crack down on people crossing the border illegally, including tens of thousands of families arriving each year mostly from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The three Central American countries are especially plagued by high levels of poverty, as well as gang and drug-trafficking violence.
Under the policy, the Border Patrol was directed to refer for criminal prosecution most people apprehended trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border, then send them to federal prisons or detention centers to await deportation hearings. That prompted the government to separate children from their parents due to a U.S. law and a 1997 court agreement, known as the Flores Settlement, that limits the detention of children to no more than 20 days.
As a result, parents were held in detention centers under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement while their children were treated as if they had arrived unaccompanied and placed in the custody of a separate agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, under the Department of Health and Human Services, which in turn placed the children in a network of more than 100 shelters scattered across the country.
The zero-tolerance policy ignited a political firestorm and global outcry, prompting the president to sign an executive order on June 20 to end the practice of separating children from parents at the border. A week later, a federal judge in San Diego ruled that the practice may have violated the dueprocess rights of families and ordered the administration to reunite all separated children under 5 by July 10 and children between 5 and 17 by July 26.
Of the children the government identified as having been separated from their parents at the border, 1,535 had been reunified with parents held in ICE custody, and another 444 had been released either to sponsors or parents no longer in ICE custody or had turned 18.
But as of two weeks ago, 572 separated children remained in ORR custody, more than a week after the deadline had passed for reunifying all separated children with their parents, including 410 whose parents were no longer in the U.S. and likely had been deported without their children, according to court filings.
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego recently told the government it was “unacceptable” that so many children remained separated from their parents and underscored that the stakes were perhaps the highest for children whose parents had already been deported.
“The reality is there are still close to 500 parents that have not been located,” Sabraw said. “Many of these parents were removed from the country without their child. All of this is the result of the government’s separation and then inability and failure to track and reunite. And the reality is that for every parent who is not located, there will be a permanently orphaned child. And that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration.”
Meanwhile on Tuesday, Gilberto Calmo Calmo held the hand of his 8-yearold son, Franklin Noel Calmo Ramirez, as they walked out of the shelter shortly after being reunited.
Gilberto said he had not seen his son since they were separated in March, shortly after crossing the border illegally together near San Luis.
Gilberto was deported to Guatemala without his son on June 8. His son remained in a shelter in New York until he was flown back to Guatemala on Tuesday. They would have time to get reacquainted on the eight-hour drive back to their home in Todos Santos, a Mayan village in the highlands of Huehuetenango.
“When these parents were deported from the U.S., the Guatemalan government lacked a procedure or a protocol in order to even leave contact numbers or identify them as parents who had left children behind. I can say without a doubt that the Guatemalan government does not know how many deported parents are left here in Guatemala, who they are or where they are.” Pedro Solaris Lawyer working with deported parents