Reunited immigrant families could face future separations

Detained together, parents could be expelled, kids stay.

DILLEY, TEXAS — Inside America’s largest immigration jail — where women and children can take yoga and Zumba classes while fighting speedy expulsion from the United States — the fuzzy outline of a black-robed judge appeared on a giant plasma television.

“Let’s bring the ladies out,” immigration Judge Robert Powell ordered from the screen like a reality-show host, sitting 270 miles away in a courtroom at a detention center in Los Fresnos, Texas.

Nobody could find a Mam interpreter for a Guatemalan woman who spoke that Mayan language. So Powell’s docket dwindled to Mirian, a mother from El Salvador who lost her asylum bid during the frenzied weeks after the Trump administration separated her from her daughter and was seeking another chance.

But she couldn’t see Powell’s face.

“It’s blurry,” said her lawyer, Shalyn Fluharty, who asked that her client’s last name not be used for her safety.

“I’m afraid that there’s nothing we can do on this end,” Powell said.

After President Donald Trump’s experiment in criminally prosecuting all adults who crossed the border illegally, triggering the separation of more than 2,500 children from their parents, the fate of hundreds of reunified families has come to this.

Parents who were ordered deported are pleading for a day in immigration court, saying they did not qualify for one in their initial asylum interviews because they were too distraught over their missing sons or daughters.

Several lawsuits are pending in federal courts over the separated families, and U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw — who ordered them reunited — has imposed a temporary ban on their deportations, which he reaffirmed Thursday. But much uncertainty remains.

As the lawsuits proceed, parents and children are pondering what to do if deportations resume in the future. If the parent has a deportation order and the child does not, should they agree to be separated again?

“The stakes are life-and-death for many of these families,” said Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who is leading the main lawsuit in the case. “These are not just ordinary immigration cases.”

The majority of children taken from their parents as a result of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy have been reunited with family members, and hundreds have been freed in the United States to await hearings in immigration court. About 500 to 600 children remain in Health and Human Services custody, in many cases because their parents were deported and officials are now trying to locate them in their homelands.

But 700 to 800 parents and children are being held together in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family detention centers, including this compound in a faded Texas oil town south of San Antonio.

A top immigration official stunned Democratic lawmakers last month by likening family detention facilities to a “summer camp.” Last week officials guided reporters on a tour of Dilley’s South Texas Family Residential Center, a sprawling 2,400-bed campus, dotted with blue government-issue baby strollers and arranged into “neighborhoods” with monikers such as “Brown Bear” and “Blue Butterfly.”

Children attend school here, building solar ovens or taking trips to the zoo. They have an infirmary, a library and a cafeteria that serves roast chicken, green salad and sheet cake — all you can eat.

But many parents have final deportation orders, the judge said Thursday, often after little more than an interview with an asylum officer. Federal officials say the fasttrack deportations of migrant detainees are designed to swiftly dispense with asylum cases that the government suspects are a ploy to smuggle people into the United States.

But migrants’ lawyers say families traumatized by the separations should be given full hearings, especially children, to determine if they truly are in fear for their lives.

Many fled violence, poverty or abuse and endured harsh conditions traveling to the U.S. After they crossed the border, the Trump administration filed criminal charges against the adults and sent their children to HHS shelters nationwide.