Year- old detainee in US reunited with parents in Honduras

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — A year-old boy who became a poster child for the U.S. policy of separating immigrants and their children was back in the arms of his parents Friday, five months after he was taken from his father at the U.S. border.

Johan Bueso Montecinos arrived in San Pedro Sula and was reunited with his parents on a government bus. They were taken away for processing.

Captured by Border Patrol agents almost instantly upon arrival, Johan’s father was deported — and the 10-month-old remained at an Arizona shelter in the custody of the U.S. government. Over the next five months, he would take his first steps, speak his first words, have his first birthday; his parents, hundreds of miles away, missed it all.

When his mother and father last saw him, he had two tiny teeth. Now he has a mouthful.

In early July, Johan went before an immigration judge. An Associated Press account of that court appearance — of the judge’s befuddlement over how to deal with this tiny detainee in diapers, sucking on a bottle — set off an international furor, embodying the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents.

“I never thought they could be so cruel,” said his father, Rolando Antonio Bueso Castillo, 37.

Rolando said he thought his plan was a beautiful one. He would escape his hard life in the tiny town of Libertad — Freedom, in Spanish.

Rolando was well aware of the dangers of crossing Mexico. He paid a smuggler $6,000, money that his brother had sent to him. He packed five onesies, three jackets, a blue-and-white baby blanket, lotion, cream, 50 diapers, two bottles and cans of formula. Adalicia Montecino holds a toy tiger as she waits for toddler son Johan at the airport in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

His wife, in her first trimester of pregnancy, would stay behind, working at her market stand selling Nike baseball hats, “California Dreaming” T-shirts and jewelry.

The father and son made it as far as Tampico, Mexico, 300 miles from the Texas border, when their beautiful plan started to unravel.

The smuggler drove them into a warehouse in the port city and told them to board a tractor-trailer filled with scores of other parents and children from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru.

Rolando and his son spent three days locked in the trailer, shivering from the cold breeze from a buzzing machine they were told provided air for them to breathe. Buckets served as bathrooms.

“We were carried like meat, but we had no choice by then. We had to do what we were told,” Rolando said.

In the Mexican border city of Reynosa, they boarded a makeshift raft and floated across the Rio Grande. They had made it.

But minutes later, a Border Patrol agent spotted them. “Where are you going?” the agent asked.

Rolando said his response was simple and sincere: “We’re going to search for the American dream.”

The agent said he was taking them to a detention center. Still, Rolando did not doubt his beautiful plan.

Inside a cell, they slept on a mattress under a thin, reflective blanket issued to them. Rolando said he had to ask for three days before being allowed to bathe Johan.

On the fifth day, immigration officers told Rolando they needed to take him to an office for questioning. One agent removed Johan from his arms. As they walked away, Johan turned, reaching for his dad.

It would be the last time they would see each other for five months.