Reuniting kids, deported parents painful
SAN PEDRO SOLOMA, Guatemala — Pablo Domingo isn’t getting much sleep. 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, seeking work, crossed illegally into the United States from Mexico with his son. 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-yearold daughter want Byron back. And Byron wants to go home.
“My boy is very small. He’s very sad,” Pablo Domingo said in an interview at the family’s simple concrete-block home in the western highlands of Guatemala. “We can hug each other here,” he said, 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 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, Twelve-year-old Jessica Domingo, whose 8-year-old brother, Byron, has been held in the United States since May, walks to school in San Pedro Soloma, Guatemala.
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, as Pablo Domingo was, 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.
“It’s been enough pain,” Domingo said. “How much more does the government want us to suffer? It’s too much.”
Locating parents in their countries of origin and identifying their children
within the immigration bureaucracy is difficult. That burden has fallen to a coalition of U.S. advocacy groups that have taken on the task in the hope of speeding up the process.
“The ACLU, private firms and NGOs are largely doing what the government should be doing,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU lawyer in the case. “Is that ideal for all of us? No. Is it necessary? Yes.”
The advocates have been trying to call parents to explain the opaque legal system and connect them with lawyers in the United States. But many of the