Tears, then giggles: Honduran baby is back in parents’ arms
1-year-old who appeared in U.S. court in diapers grabbed world’s attention
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — For months, a Honduran couple watched their only son grow up in videos while he was kept in U.S. government custody. That’s where he took his first steps and spoke his first words.
The parents got to embrace the 15-month-old boy again Friday, five months after U.S. immigration officials took the baby from his father at the Texas border.
Johan, who grabbed the world’s attention when he appeared in a U.S. courtroom in diapers, at first didn’t recognize his mom and dad after he was flown to San Pedro Sula.
“I kept saying, ‘Johan, Johan,’ and he started to cry,” said his mother, Adalicia Montecinos.
She broke down in tears as she talked about how her son had become a poster child for outrage over the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“He suffered everything that we have been suffering,” she said.
His father soon won him over by playing ball. Within an hour, the tiny boy in an orange tank top, blue shorts but no shoes laughed as both parents kissed him outside a center where they finished final legal paperwork before heading home. “I feel so happy,” Adalicia said. And so ended the extraordinary journey of a baby whose short life has ranged from Honduran poverty to a desperate dash across the U.S. border to the front pages of the world’s newspapers.
Captured by Border Patrol agents almost instantly upon arrival, Johan’s father was deported — and the 10-month-old remained at an Arizona shelter, in the custody of the U.S. government. Over the next five months, he spoke and walked for the first time and had his first birthday; his parents, hundreds of miles away, would miss it all.
In early July, Johan went before an immigration judge. An Associated Press account of that court appearance — of the judge’s befuddlement over how to deal with this tiny detainee in diapers, sucking on a bottle — set off an international furor.
“I never thought they could be so cruel,” said his father, Rolando Antonio Bueso Castillo, 37.
Rolando said he thought his plan was a beautiful one. He would escape his hard life in the tiny town of Libertad — Freedom, in Spanish. His children would not grow up in the same poverty that he had endured.
In the Mexican border city of Reynosa, the father and son boarded a makeshift raft and floated across the Rio Grande. They trudged through the Texas brush. They had made it. Then their beautiful plan started to unravel. A Border Patrol agent spotted them. “Where are you going?” the agent asked.
Rolando said his response was simple: “We’re going to search for the American dream.”
The agent told him he was taking them to a detention center. Still, Rolando did not doubt his beautiful plan. He figured, at worst, the two would be deported together back to Honduras.
On the fifth day, immigration officers told Rolando they needed to take him to an office for questioning. One agent removed Johan from his arms. As they walked away, Johan turned, reaching for his dad.
It would be the last time they would see each other for five months.
Rolando spent 22 days locked up in various detention centers along the Texas border. He knew nothing of his son.
He had no money to call his pregnant wife in Honduras and tell her what had happened. Instead a social worker from the Arizona shelter holding Johan contacted her and asked if she was Johan’s mother. She told her to send his birth certificate and other documents to prove it.
Rolando said he had first been told by authorities that the two would be deported together, so he agreed to go home. Then, they told him his son would follow in two weeks. But months passed.
Rolando called lawyers, the Honduran consulate and U.S. authorities to find out when his son was coming home.
The social worker in the United States started sending weekly videos and making video calls. At first Johan would reach for his mom. But as time passed, he grew distracted. He is forgetting me, Adalicia thought.
In the end, Johan was granted a voluntary departure order that would allow the government to fly him to Honduras.
The father who awaited him Friday was overwhelmed by guilt over the dismal failure of his beautiful plan. Someday, he knows, his son will ask what happened, and why he had left him in the United States. “I’ll tell him the truth,” he said. “We thought we had a good plan to give him a better life.”