Separation of immigrant families at border continues

President Donald Trump claimed in June to have ended the practice of separating immigrant families at the southern border. “We are going to keep the families together,” he declared from the Oval Office.

Mr. President, meet Clemente and his daughter Wendy, both fleeing gang violence in Guatemala. Your administration separated them six months ago and kept them apart.

These family separations, continuing but at a lower level than before, are an element of the real “emergency” at the border — the one also involving physical and sexual abuse of immigrant children in U.S. custody and systematic deception from Washington.

The paradox is that Trump’s policy to deter immigrants appears counterproductive; apparently the furor it provoked drew attention to the possibility of migration. The result is a surge of Central Americans traveling to the United States, with the number crossing the border far higher than a year earlier.

Clemente, 34, is from a small Guatemalan village. He doesn’t want to use his last name because of all he has been through at the hands of the U.S. government. There is no way to verify parts of his story, but individuals who work with immigrants say it rings true.

A gang in Guatemala murdered his cousin, and last year gangsters stabbed Clemente’s father and sent warnings to Clemente: “It’s now your turn.”

Terrified, Clemente fled with his eldest daughter, Wendy, then 15, leaving his wife and five other, younger children, whom he did not believe the gang would target. He feared that the gang would abduct Wendy.

They crossed Mexico without serious incident, then waded across the Rio Grande and turned themselves in to Border Patrol officers, requesting asylum. That was Aug. 20, two months after Trump said he had ended the family separation policy. But officials promptly separated Clemente and Wendy.

Clemente was put in a “hielera,” or ice box, notorious detention rooms predating Trump that are kept cold. Clemente, wet from the river crossing, was soon freezing as well as hungry and weak because he had given his food to Wendy. “As a dad, the last thing you want is for your daughter to suffer,” he explained. “So I gave everything to her.”

In this frail state, he caught pneumonia and passed out. Many hours went by before he was taken to a hospital, unconscious and gravely ill. Inadequate health care in detention centers is common, and two migrant children died in December in Border Patrol custody.

“I woke up in the hospital, and I didn’t know where I was,” Clemente told me. “It was a nightmare. My first question was, ‘Where’s my daughter?’” After he was released from the hospital and later from detention, he found himself on the streets of Brownsville, Texas.

Clemente discovered that she was in a shelter. She was allowed to telephone him once a week, but not return to his care; his voice broke as he described her as “an angel from God.”

Immigration is a complicated challenge, but ripping families apart isn’t the solution. Perhaps the best approach is to help improve security in Central America so that people like Clemente need not flee. Some anti-gang initiatives there have been very successful in reducing murder rates that drive migration.

“If it were peaceful, I’d like to be back there where I grew up,” said Clemente, who received help from Immigrant Families Together in his quest to reunite with his daughter. “I’d love to be in the land where I was born.”