The search for humanity
Keven Sieff talks to the human rights lawyer combing the Guatemalan jungle to reunite families America split apart
The missing family on Eriberto Pop’s list had to be around here, he thought.
He had spent eight hours in a car and several more on a motorcycle to get to this remote hamlet in the western Highlands of Guatemala. Now he looked up at the muddy slope rising before him, the road disappearing into the hillside. This last stretch he would have to do on foot.
He stuffed the US government records in his backpack. There was a note printed at the bottom of the first page, a dispatch from the Biden era that had made its way here: “Do whatever you can to find the family.”
More than four years after the Trump administration began separating migrant families at the border, Pop is among a handful of searchers trying to find the parents deported alone to some of the farthest-flung corners of Central America. Two hundred and seventy-five of them are still missing.
Most of their children remain in the United States with relatives or foster families. Some were babies when Border Patrol agents took them from their parents; they’ve now lived most of their lives apart from them.
The Biden administration has agreed to reunify those families in the United States – a reparation for the most controversial US immigration policy in decades. The hardest part has been simply locating the parents.
The Trump administration kept little data on the families that were separated. In many cases, only scraps of information remain: a deported parent’s name, a village in Guatemala or Honduras, a phone number that may no longer work.
That information makes its way from the US government through a chain of legal organisations and eventually to people such as Pop, 33, a human rights lawyer in Guatemala’s Alta Verapaz department who is crisscrossing the country in search of the missing parents.