Schmerzhafte Trennung von den Migrantenkindern
For families split at U.S. border, an anguished wait to be reunited.
SAN PEDRO SOLOMA, Guatemala — Pablo Domingo isn’t getting much sleep these days. 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 Mr. Domingo and the boy crossed into the United States illegally from Mexico. The immigration authorities detained and separated them — deporting the father to his home country of Guatemala and sending the boy to a shelter in Texas.
Mr. Domingo, his wife, Fabiana, and their 12-year- old daughter want Byron back. And Byron wants to go home. Yet as September approached, the boy began his fourth month in the shelter a world away from his parents and sister, with no resolution in sight.
“My boy is very small. He’s very sad,” Mr. Domingo said at the family’s simple home here in the western highlands of Guatemala.
“We can hug each other here,” he continued, 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 that were separated at the border under President Donald J. Trump’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, 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 the American 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, like Mr. Domingo, 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 — uncertainty that leaves them anguished.
“It’s been enough pain,” Mr. Domingo said. “How much more does the government want us to suffer? It’s too much.”
The American authorities declined to comment on individual cases involving minors.
In August, under orders from Judge Dana M. Sabraw of Federal District Court in Southern California, the government submitted a strategy to reunify children with parents who had been deported. Its details were worked out in conference with the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a suit against the government over the separation policy.
The government has designated officials in various departments to steer its efforts and is coordinating with Central American consular officials in the United States to prepare the children’s travel documents. The government has also assumed financial responsibility for repatriating the children. But locating the parents in their countries of origin and identifying their children within the bureaucracy is difficult. That burden has fallen to a coalition of American advocacy groups.
The advocates have been trying to call parents to explain the legal system and connect them with lawyers in the United States. But many of the parents are members of indigenous groups, do not speak Spanish as a first language and live in poor, rural areas of Central America with dubious telephone service.
There is no working telephone number or contact number at all for 56 parents. To find them, advocacy groups have been deploying teams to Guatemala, Honduras and elsewhere, sometimes driving to remote villages and going door to door with scant clues in hand.
In consultation with the advocates, some parents have chosen to have their children repatriated as soon as possible. Others are seeking to have their children remain in the United States so they can pursue asylum claims.
And some parents who feel they were deprived of the right to make an asylum claim hope to have the possibility of returning to the United States to make another attempt, which the Trump administration has indicated it would strongly oppose.
Government officials and advocates said that red tape, including lining up travel documents, can delay a child’s departure by more than a month. And sometimes social workers in shelters fail to complete the paperwork necessary to expedite release. According to the government plan filed in August, the children are now expected to be allowed to leave the country without going before a judge, which may speed things up.
While many of the families said they were fleeing violence in their homeland, that was not the case for Mr. Domingo and his son Byron. Their motivation was economic.
“We went to give our children a better future,” said Mr. Domingo, who works as a laborer on construction sites making the equivalent of a few dollars per day.
Mr. Domingo and Byron left home in mid-May and, with the help of a smuggler, crossed the border into America a week later, immediately turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents.
Mr. Domingo knew that for years, adults traveling with children gener- ally had been detained for removal proceedings but then quickly released to await their day in court inside the United States. But that practice changed with the zero-tolerance policy, which had been put into effect days before their arrival, and the father and son were separated.
While in detention, Mr. Domingo said, he was made to sign some documents. They were in English and he did not know what they meant.
“They told me that the papers were so that he would be in my arms instantly,” he recalled. “Well, they fooled me.”
He now thinks that with that signature, he agreed to be deported. Mr. Domingo was sent home on June 1.
In July, Byron celebrated his 8th birthday in detention. The only contact the family has with the boy are brief video phone calls three times a week that are initiated by the boy’s social worker in Texas.
During the calls, Mr. Domingo and his wife have had difficulty connecting emotionally with Byron, they said. He gives clipped answers to their questions and constantly looks offscreen, as if keeping an eye on someone monitoring his conversations. Recently, he said the place where he was staying was “dangerous,” but he did not elaborate.
These fraught exchanges have left his parents feeling desperate and helpless. They have heard about accusations of child abuse in a shelter in Arizona and imagine worse.
“They are innocent children, and the president is truly punishing them too much,” Mr. Domingo said of Mr. Trump. “He has done a lot of damage.”