Do not forget children ripped from families at the U.S. border

I crossed the San Ysidro border without my parents when I was 10. There was no other way. My parents would be crossing “irregularly,” and although I myself was a citizen, born in Anaheim a decade before, U.S. law prevented us from crossing together.

A stranger, a light-skinned woman not much older than my own mother, held my hand and led me through the immigration checkpoint. My parents had hired her in Tijuana earlier that day to cross me by pretending to be my mom and walking me to “el otro lado” — the other side. She was tall and quiet and spoke to me only to call me “mijo” in front of the border guard.

As soon as we crossed, she took me to a seedy motel a few blocks from the border, brought me to a room and left me there, telling me as she closed the door to stay put. I was alone. I recall the darkness broken by the occasional spotlights shining through a window, the constant sirens, the terror of not knowing if I would ever see my parents again. The terror of being alone. The terror of being forgotten. The terror. I fell asleep terrified, holding on only to a vague sense of hope.

The trauma of that one night haunts me to this day.

My parents showed up the next morning, covered in mud and smelling like feces from crawling through tunnels and sewage. I hugged my mom as soon as I saw her. I felt her skin and her hair on my face. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. No longer terrified, after a quick shower, we continued north, to Monterey County in Central California, where my father had work lined up laying pipe in the broccoli and lettuce fields.

My terror is now the terror of thousands, fueled by the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” immigration policy that resulted in at least 2,500 immigrant children being forcibly torn from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

How easily we forget the images of children in cages, huddled together like animals waiting for the slaughter. Terrified.

Sure, many of the separated children were eventually returned to their parents. Yet, an unforgettable number have yet to be handed over to the safety and comfort of their families: 666 of them.

In defending the policy, Donald Trump downplayed his administration’s inability to reunite the children with their parents, insisting that “the children are so well taken care of.” This, after a spokesman for the administration suggested that the parents themselves wanted their children to be taken for their own benefit. In fact, he said, parents could easily have their children back, they just don’t want them.

The insinuation that in separating children from their families the administration is doing them a favor is an insult to our primal sense of human decency, as it promotes the barbaric premise that hundreds of mothers and fathers are just fine with losing all contact with their children on the unwarranted assumption that they will be “well taken care of” by the U.S. government.

As the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden approaches, as we fret over our temporary inability to get together with our loved ones due to COVID restrictions, let’s not forget the 666 children who are losing hope of permanent reunification with theirs with each passing day.