Immigrant families fear separation in US

Attorney-General Sessions has presented policy as a deterrent to illegal immigration

When they took his son away from him at an immigrant detention Centre in Texas, Edilberto Garcia thought he would lose the teen forever.

“I felt a lot of fear,” Garcia recalled.

Garcia can’t stop crying, still shaken by the terrifying ordeal and the relief he felt when he got his boy back four days later.

Father and son had travelled overland from Honduras so that Kevin, 17, could pursue his dream of becoming a mechanic. They crossed the chest-deep water of the Rio Grande together on Monday, but were stopped by US Border Patrol, and Kevin was separated from his father.

“For me, that was one of the hardest of days because I felt I was losing my son,” said Garcia, a 46-year-old textile worker.

Kevin smiled and patted his father’s back to console him.

“I don’t know where they held him. Even the younger children were taken from their parents,” Garcia said.

‘Zero tolerance’ policy

Four days later, the pair were together again in a Catholic refuge in McAllen, a poor, hot, dusty city in southeastern Texas, where the influence of Mexican culture can be seen in the quinceanera gowns and cowboy boots on display in shop windows.

Garcia had never heard of US President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which has led to 2,000 children being separated from their immigrant parents over a recent six-week period.

Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, who announced the new policy in May, has presented it as a deterrent to illegal immigration.

“There’s only one way to stop this and that is for people to stop smuggling children. Stop crossing the border illegally with your children,” Sessions said in a speech on Thursday.

But the process is not so simple. Manoj Govindaiah, an immigration lawyer at the Refugee and Immigrant Centre for Education and Legal Services, says the new policy is going beyond the law.

“The government is taking children who have been with their parents, who are with their parents and whose parents are physically inside the United States and then changing their classification to an unaccompanied child,” he charged.

The parents are then placed in adult detention and the children are transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

“It’s terrifying, absolutely terrifying,” he said.

M. Govindaiah, an immigration lawyer at the Refugee and Immigrant Centre for Education and Legal Services, says the new policy is going beyond the law.