Reunited with kids, immigrants describe separation
SAN DIEGO — Immigrant parents who reveled after joyful reunions with their young children spoke Wednesday of the traumatic impact of being separated from their sons and daughters for months after they were taken from them at the U.S. border.
A Honduran man, identified only by his first name, Roger, was happy to be back with his 4-year-old son, who sat on his lap and played with the microphones as the father spoke to reporters. The father said he was still shaken by the ordeal he had to go through just to speak to his boy while he was in government custody. The two were separated in February.
He described feeling a pain in his heart and how he couldn’t breathe after his son was taken away. The father held up his wrist and told reporters that after they were separated, he threatened to use a razor on himself if he couldn’t speak to his son.
He spoke Wednesday at Annunciation House, an El Paso, Texas, shelter, along with another father recently reunited with his child. They arrived there Tuesday.
“I was completely traumatized,” the father said in Spanish. He added later: “Every time I spoke to him, he would start crying. Where are the rights of children? I thought children were Perla Silva, daughter of Concepcion and Margarito Silva, who are in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, pleads on Wednesday for their release during a news conference in New York. supposed to be a priority here in the United States.”
The father said he planned to live with relatives in the United States as his asylum case is processed, which could take years.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many children remain in detention facilities.
In New York, Michael Avenatti — the lawyer best known for representing the porn actress Stormy Daniels — said it took two tries plus a series of tweets Wednesday before he was allowed to see two Honduran girls, ages 9 and 5, who were separated from their family at the border in June and sent to New York.
After Avenatti tweeted a complaint about not being allowed in the Cayuga home for children in East Harlem, he said he got a call from the center assuring him he could see the youngsters. A lawyer for the Cayuga Centers declined to comment.
Avenatti wants U.S. immigration officials to allow the girls’ father, Hector Santos, to travel to New York from Texas, where he is wearing a location monitoring device. Avenatti said that until a week ago, the agency did not tell the father where his daughters were being held.