Migrant families torn apart in US still waiting to be reunited
Xiomara can recall every detail about the moment her eightyear-old daughter was taken away. It was May 10 2018 – Mother’s Day in her native El Salvador – and she and her daughter Sofia were in a cramped, filthy US detention centre.
Xiomara, 34, had travelled to the US border to make an asylum claim days earlier, after facing threats of extortion and violence from the gang MS-13. She had been taken to “la hielera”, or “the ice box” – the nickname many migrants give the US border patrol’s notoriously cold holding cells – which was packed with dozens of other mothers and children. The only water they had to drink came from the lavatory; their meals consisted of packets of cold instant soup.
Then immigration officials informed Xiomara that Sofia would be kept in the US – but she would be deported.
“I felt so distraught,” Xiomara said. The immigration officials were unmoved. “I remember them telling us we were invading their country.”
She remembers how one young child began screaming and had to be forcibly removed from his mother.
“My daughter wouldn’t let go of my hand either,” Xiomara said. “I told her ‘just go’ because I didn’t want the officers to pull her from me by force.”
Her voice cracked as she added: “So she went and I just stood there crying.”
Xiomara assumed she would be reunited with Sofia in a matter of weeks – but more than two years later, she is still waiting.
Many are familiar with the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy, which saw more than 5,500 migrant parents separated from their children and deported. But despite Donald Trump later publicly disowning the policy, hundreds of parents have still not been reunited with their children.
A recent lawsuit revealed that the US government has been unable to locate around 600 parents who were separated from their children at the border. More than 300 children also cannot be located because they were released to sponsors whose contact information is no longer up to date. Most of the children are believed to be in the United States, while most of the parents were deported.
Xiomara was deported to El Salvador a few months after her daughter was taken away. Unable to sleep, she began hallucinating. “I thought my daughter was talking to me,” she said. “I listened to her just calling me: ‘Mummy, Mummy’.” She learnt that Sofia, now 11, was sent to relatives in California and she is able to do daily video calls, but the pain of separation is constant. The job of tracking down parents like Xiomara has been taken up by NGOS and migrant advocacy groups.
It is painstaking work. “It’s really all over the map with what information we’re given,” said Cathleen Caron, from Justice In Motion, a non-profit organisation. In some instances, Ms Caron says her colleagues have little more than a misspelled name and a village to inform their searches. Ms Caron said the work has been complicated by the pandemic and two recent hurricanes in Central America.
Joe Biden, the president-elect, has called the family separation policy “criminal” and pledged to create a task force dedicated to reuniting families, but has yet to reveal any details.
Parents who have been tracked down often face an impossible choice: do they agree to have their child deported back to danger and poverty, or remain separated?
It is a question that Noel, a 42-yearold labourer from Honduras, has been battling with since his teenage son Mateo was separated from him in May 2018. Noel travelled to the US with his 16-year-old to claim asylum and escape criminal gangs that were attempting to recruit Mateo. Instead, Noel said he was taken into custody, then put in a federal prison before being taken to another migrant processing centre.
“The immigration officer came to me one day and said ‘you’re leaving, get your things ready’. I thought maybe I would be with my son or maybe we would be deported together,” he said.
In fact, it would be just Noel who was deported. His son, he later discovered, had been released by immigration officials to the care of an uncle who was living in Maryland.
“The uncle abandoned him because he didn’t want to go through all the paperwork and processing and my son actually had to find another friend to live with,” Noel said.
He knows the ordeal has severely effected Mateo – he struggles to focus in school and has developed mental health issues. But Noel is reluctant to have Mateo return to Honduras, as the stranglehold the gangs have on communities is hard to escape.
“He would like to come home. But I’ve told him I really want him to make this sacrifice because things are very difficult here,” he said.
Some more fortunate parents have been reunited with their children in the US. Lisbeth, 33, a Salvadoran, was reunited with daughter Isabella in April 2019 after 16 months apart.
With the help of Al Otro Lado, a legal aid non-profit group, Lisbeth fought to return to the US while her asylum case is given a full hearing, but it is clear to her that Isabella also suffered during her time in a detention centre.
“She’s very anti-social now, she wasn’t like that before,” she added.
Back in El Salvador, Xiomara too is hopeful that one day soon she will be back with her daughter.
“I lost my child, but I also lost my faith,” she said. “I want to say that what happened to me is not part of the past.”