Waiting, alone: ‘Tomorrow, I’ll be with my dad’
What is life like for children separated from their parents at the border?
Their mothers are missing, their fathers far away. They get pizza, maybe cold cuts. They are exhausted; they cannot sleep. There are other children around, but they had never seen those kids before, and those kids are crying or screaming or rocking or spreading the feeling that everything is not OK.
The children who were forcibly separated from their parents at the border by the United States government are all over the country now, in Michigan and Maryland, in foster homes in California and shelters in Virginia, in cold, institutional settings with adults who are not permitted to touch them or with foster parents who do not
speak Spanish but who hug them when they cry.
Advocates interviewed outside the locked gates described desperate parents giving up their hopes of asylum to get their children back in their arms more quickly.
The children have been through hell. They are babies who were carried across rivers and toddlers who rode for hours in trucks and buses and older kids who were told that a better place was just beyond the horizon.
And now they live and wait in unfamiliar places: big American suburban houses where no one speaks their language; a locked shelter on a dusty road where they spend little time outside; a converted Walmart where each morning, they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.
Why must they say those words, some of the children ask at the shelter in Brownsville, on the Mexican border in Texas?
“We tell them, ‘It’s out of respect,’ ” said one employee of the facility, known as Casa Padre, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job.
U.S. authorities are compiling mug shots of the children in detention. Immigration lawyers who have seen the pictures say some of them show children in tears.
At a facility in Crofton, Maryland, run by Bethany Christian Services, 10 children separated from their parents arrived in recent days. Half were younger than 5, according to Tawnya Brown, a regional director of the organization. Most appeared to be from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
Each child got a drawstring “arrival bag” containing a change of clothes and other necessities. The little ones got a teddy bear, too. They got to leave the shelter promptly, sent to a new home with foster parents who speak to the children in “love language,” Brown said.
In Bristow, Virginia, about 15 boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 17 arrived in recent weeks after being separated from their parents. Now they stay in some of the 10 modern, $600,000 single-family houses on the sprawling green campus of Youth for Tomorrow, a residential facility for at-risk kids.
At some facilities, there are so many children that the staff conduct prisonstyle head counts.
Aspirations
These are the places where the children wait. All around them, and all around the country, people are doing things for them. Caseworkers, lawyers and volunteers work the phones, searching for parents and other relatives.
At first, the kids believe they will soon be back with their families.
“One of them said, ‘I’m not crying anymore. Tomorrow, I’ll be with my dad,’ ” recalled an employee at the Brownsville shelter. But as it became clear that their release was not imminent, the children continued their routines — karaoke on Monday, cake for those celebrating a birthday, occasional group discussions about their future.
“Some say, ‘I’m going to be the most famous singer’ and others say ‘I’m going to be a soccer star,’ ” the employee said. Others share a different expectation: “Remember that we don’t have papers,” an older child said. “We’ll probably work in construction.”
The people who devote their work lives to helping immigrant children at shelters are mostly low-level employees, working 12-hour shifts at $12 an hour. They are accustomed to young people arriving unaccompanied, mostly teens who knew that they would be on their own and came at least somewhat prepared. They might have had crucial bits of information pinned to their clothing or in their pockets or backpacks — birth certificates, names and phone numbers of relatives in the United States.
The forcibly separated children, in contrast, usually arrive with nothing. And the younger ones often know nothing.
“It was never anticipated that they were going to be totally on their own,” said Nithya Nathan-Pineau, director of the children’s program at the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition.
But mostly, from the children’s perspective, people do things to them. At Bethany Christian Services in Maryland, for example, the children get vaccinations and treatment for their physical ailments — “Stomach issues, skin issues, things of that nature,” Brown said. Vigilant for lice, Bethany dispenses shampoo and combs. It also has teachers who instruct the kids in English, colors, letters, numbers. There’s “playtime, nap time, snack, recess,” Brown said.
Antar Davidson, who worked at Southwest Key’s Estrella del Norte shelter in Tucson, Arizona, from February until he quit in early June, described a tense environment that grew worse as the number of separated kids soared.
“People were yelling at the kids all the time” in Spanish, said Davidson, 32. He said supplies were rationed so tightly that kids were given hair gel one spoonful at a time.
“It really wears on these kids, the level of institutionalization,” he said.
Youth-care workers were told to discourage children from speaking their indigenous Central American languages, he said, before the policy was reversed. And when the number of separated kids rose from a handful to more than 50 in the 300-person shelter, employees were given a “refresher” course in how to use physical holds on kids, Davidson said.
Lawyers show up at the centers, sometimes bringing toys or stress balls for the children to play with. Some lawyers try to teach the kids about their predicament, offering “Know Your Rights” presentations, explaining the U.S. legal system to older kids, drawing stick-figure sketches of courtrooms for younger ones.
Some kids engage. Some remain silent. Some have not spoken for weeks.
Traumatic experiences
The children clung to their parents through the terrifying journey north. They rode flimsy rafts across the rain-swollen Rio Grande. They hiked sun-bleached paths under the broiling sun. They were transported in “trucks, on top of railroad trains, in buses,” and on foot, said Gary Jones, chief executive of Youth for Tomorrow.
They crossed the border and were picked up by federal agents and placed in cavernous holding centers. In many cases, that’s where the separation happened. Parents were put in one cell, children in another.
At Customs and Border Protection stations, such as the massive Central Processing Center on Ursula Avenue in McAllen, Texas, some families were divided immediately, especially fathers and daughters, because girls can’t be detained with men. Children were often sorted by country, gender and age, to keep older and younger ones apart.
For some, the separation did not come until the morning they were brought to court on big silver buses. Border officials told parents they’d see their children when they got back from court.
But when they returned, their children were gone, taken to federal shelters. Some parents were told that their children were being taken for a bath, but then the kids did not come back.
At a shelter in McAllen, Texas as word spread that children were being pulled from their parents, some mothers and fathers took to sleeping with their legs wrapped around their children so they couldn’t be snatched.
Sometimes, it fell to lawyers from the Texas Civil Rights Project to break the news, said Efrén Olivares, a lawyer with the organization, which has interviewed 381 immigrant parents who were separated from more than 400 children.
The parents who did know the separations were coming had to tell their kids something. A father from El Salvador said goodbye to his daughter before she was taken to a shelter by telling her that she was going to summer camp.
The scenes of trauma take a toll on everyone — parents and children, but also guards and advocates. Olivares came to the United States legally from Mexico at age 13. He knew no English. Olivares became valedictorian of his high school class and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Law School. Now, he’s 36, running on coffee and adrenaline to meet parents and try to reunite families.
“I’m going to crash sooner or later,” he said.
At a shelter for the tender-aged near Los Angeles, one little child, overwhelmed, panicked. The hysteria set off the rest of the group, unleashing a contagion of crying that left the staff at a loss.
“The trauma for these children is significant,” said Brown, of Bethany Christian Services in Maryland. “You don’t always see the trauma. You don’t always see it in their faces. But you can see it in their physical reactions.”