The clown who plays king can’t overthrow the bedrock values this nation was founded on 242 years ago today
Immigrant in joyful reunion with kids thanks to Queens activists
Guatemalan mom Yeni Gonzalez dropped to her knees and held her three kids tight Tuesday during an emotional reunion in Manhattan.
“Thank God I found them in good conditions. They were happy to see me. When they saw me they hugged me and they cried. They told me they want me to take them home soon,” the immigrant mom said after the private meeting at the Cayuga Centers facility in East Harlem.
“The day they took them away from me I told them, ‘I promise I’m gonna fight for you and I’m gonna find you,’ ” Gonzalez said in Spanish.
“When I saw them, I got on my knees and I hugged them and I said, ‘I promised I would come get you — and I’m here,’ ’’ she said.
With tears streaming down her face, Gonzalez said her 9-year-old daughter gave her a blue lollipop to celebrate their reunion.
“I want this process to be over because it hasn’t been easy for them or for me,” she said of the six-week separation that left her desperate for answers.
Gonzalez was torn from her daughter and two sons, ages 6 and 11, on May 19 after the family was detained near the U.S. border with Mexico.
Under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy for undocumented arrivals, Gonzalez was sent to a facility in Eloy, Ariz., while her kids were shipped some 2,400 miles away to New York.
Gonzalez was released from detention Thursday after Queens resident Julie Schwietert Collazo and a group of local parents and artists raised her $7,500 bail through a GoFundMe campaign.
Schwietert Collazo also helped organize Gonzalez’s four-day journey to New York by car.
“We started something a week ago yesterday and this is really just the first hurdle. The bonding her out, the getting her across the country, through a network of amazing people — who, many of us didn’t know each other a week ago — it took a lot of faith and it took a lot of 18-hour days in coordination,” Schwietert Collazo said.
“I’m just so relieved and gratified that she’s made it here, but we also know that we have a long way to go and she’s not the only one,” she said. “We have to keep going. We have other parents that need to be reunited with their kids.”
Gonzalez will be staying in Queens pending the release of her kids, supporters said.
The children were not immediately put in her custody due to fingerprinting delays that could take two months to resolve.
Gonzalez can visit them daily until then.
A relative in North Carolina is expected to submit a parallel sponsorship application to host the kids in the hope her paperwork may clear faster than Gonzalez’s application, supporters said.
“Whoever gets through the process first will get the children,” Gonzalez’s lawyer Jose Orochena said.
Every adult in the household the kids are released to — even biological parents—must be fingerprinted, according to the lawyer. The outside agency processing the prints has been flooded with requests, he said.
“That separate agency has been inundated,” Orochena said. “Fingerprint results that initially took weeks are now taking up to two months.”
He lamented the likelihood Gonzalez won’t be able to live with her kids again for many more weeks.
“We are trying to expedite this process. We are trying to use the fingerprints that were taken at Eloy Detention Facility for mom to cut the red tape. I’m hoping to be successful,” he said.
Rep. Adriano Espaillat (DN.Y.) said Gonzalez was fleeing targeted violence in Guatemala when she arrived in the U.S. seeking asylum.
“(Gonzalez) told me personally her story, about what happened in her native country and how she was being threatened and accosted — people knocking on her door. She had to put a sofa, a piece of furniture to block the door, and that’s why she’s here with her children,” the lawmaker, who
represents Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood and parts of the Bronx, said.
“Tomorrow we will be celebrating Fourth of July — America will not be free and independent if we don’t hold to our tradition of being a nation with a good, big heart that welcomes asylum seekers from all over the world,” he said.
A judge in California ruled last week that federal officials must reunify all separated families within 30 days.
State Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Queens) questioned the viability of the order considering the seeming disorganization of the Trump administration’s response to the crisis.
“There is a court order that says we have 30 days to get parents reunited with their children; what good is that if the fingerprints take over two months to get processed? The court order is basically not even relevant at this point,” Gianaris said.
He said the borough of Queens will look out for Gonzalez in the meantime.
“Yeni will be staying in Queens with a family that cares for her, and those of us who live in Queens will make sure she’s safe and protected in our community,” he said.
Gianaris pointed to Schwietert Collazo and other volunteers as he expressed gratitude for their work.
“These are the people that represent our values—not this federal government and not this President, who is establishing a brutal policy of taking parents and children and separating them and having this broken policy that we have to fight,” he said.
Gonzalez said Tuesday she is still worried about the other moms she met in detention.
“I want to send this message to the women who were detained at Eloy with me. Where I was, there was 400 other mothers. We shared a lot of sorrow together. We suffered so much there,” she said, crying.
“If you see this message,” she said, “there’s a lot of people with good hearts who are willing to help reunite you with your children.”
She said the women supported each other during the darkest moments of their lives.
“They shared this pain with me. Thank you to them. I wish them all of the luck that they see their children soon.”
Orochena said he’s representing a dozen moms separated from their kids.
He shared photos of them Tuesday and said they “begged” for help finding their kids.
“We have to reunite these families,” he said.