San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Hundreds of miles may separate families
Some have no idea where the kids are
Mariana Ibarra was separated from son Max for eight months while she was at an ICE center.
EL PASO — Hours before the federal government vowed to end its policy of separating migrant families at the border earlier this week, Angélica and her 3-yearold granddaughter legally entered the United States at the Paso del Norte bridge to seek asylum protection.
Fleeing violence in Mexico that left several of her family members dead, the 41-year-old woman successfully crossed the border with the help of Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, an El Paso safe house for migrants, after being turned away at the port of entry a month prior.
For two days, Angélica and her granddaughter were held at the port of entry, where she said agents told her she had no right to asylum nor to custody of her granddaughter, despite presenting the Mexican papers she thought showed proof she was the girl’s legal caretaker.
The week before, the girl’s mother had entered the United States at a different port and was staying in California.
On Thursday night, Angélica said her granddaughter had cried, saying she would rather return to Mexico together than stay in America apart. “Don’t leave me,” the girl had pleaded.
It did not matter. The agents, she said, told her the girl would be better off at a children’s shelter, where she would receive food and care.
The next day, Angélica was released alone.
Uncertainty has permeated asylum proceedings along the U.S.-Mexico border in the aftermath of a federal policy reversal last week that didn’t address reunifying the 2,500 immigrant families who already had been separated — or keeping family members together in nuanced circumstances like Angélica’s.
Immigration attorneys and advocates are frantically trying to navigate the complex work of reuniting families. But the process has proved difficult, as the administration has no clear apparatus or plan in place for reunification, attorneys say.
Angélica shared details of her circumstances Friday after arriving at Annunciation House. Garcia, who translated the interview, declined to share some details of Angélica’s case for fear of the woman’s safety and causing her further trauma.
She now is among the thousands of immigrants who remain separated from their loved ones.
Over the past few days, some parents have been released, while others remain detained. Some have been deported without their children, who remain in shelters here. Many still are at a loss as to where their children are or how to locate them.
As a result, some migrant parents have resorted to suing the federal government over the separation from their children.
One, a mother from Guatemala who is being held in the El Paso Processing Center, wrote in a translated handwritten letter submitted in court Friday what it has been like to be apart from her 9-year-old son for more than a month and not know where he is.
Mother and son were separated May 15, a day after crossing the border near Presidio and turning themselves in to immigration officials at a nearby port of entry, according to court documents. The family came here to escape violence in Guatemala, the records said.
The woman suspects her son is somewhere in New York, she wrote, but she doesn’t know exactly where or the name of the facility.
Since their separation, the mother wrote, she has only talked on the phone with her son three times, for about five minutes each call. When they talk, her son mostly cries.
“My son used to be such a happy child who was always joking around with me. Now he just seems depressed — he doesn’t joke with me, he only asks when we will see each other again and begs to be with me,” wrote the woman, who is being identified only by the initials E.F. “He is scared and lonely and desperate to be with me. I try to tell him everything will be OK and that I’ll see him soon, but, the truth is, I don’t know what will happen with us.”
Jerry Wesevich, an attorney for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid who is representing E.F. and two other parents in detention in Texas who cannot locate their children, said he spent hours trying to find the children through official channels.
Unaccompanied migrant children go into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which can place them in federal emergency shelters, such as the “tent city” erected in nearby Tornillo last week, statelicensed shelters, foster homes or with family members already living here.
The situation is complicated by the fact that some of the children are too young to identify their parents, while others may speak only indigenous languages, Wesevich said.
Eventually, Wesevich said, he was faced with no other choice than to try to force the government to provide specific information on the children’s whereabouts. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Washington, argues the separation policy violated his clients’ constitutional right to due process.
Wesevich said he didn’t “have words to describe the pain that they express.” The parents, who already are traumatized by the dangerous situations they left in their home countries and on their journeys to the U.S., now have to contend with a lack of information about what their futures hold, he said.
“They didn’t just inflict forced separation on the families,” Wesevich said. “They inflicted indefinite separation. They’ve never given the families clear information about when they’ll be reunited and how they’ll be reunited.”
Other attorneys and advocates have been trying to coordinate efforts to help parents who have been separated from their children who do not yet have legal representation.
Eduardo Beckett, an attorney in El Paso, said lawyers here have been circulating a list of names of women who have been separated from their children and are being detained at the El Paso Processing Center.
On Friday evening, he said, a group of immigration lawyers, public defenders and representatives from nonprofit organizations planned to meet to exchange information and strategize.
“We’re all trying to help each other out.
We’re all trying to do something, to do our part,” Beckett said.
Meeting with clients who have been separated from their children has been heartrending, Beckett said. Some parents have been hysterical, he said, shaking and crying as he interviewed them about their cases. One mother told him her 3year-old was refusing to eat, while another said her son would not change his clothes or brush his teeth.
Even as attorneys work to address reunification, others worry about the prospect indicated by President Donald
Trump’s executive order — the mass detention of migrant families.
Linda Rivas, executive director and managing attorney for Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, said it would be “horrific” and “completely unnecessary” to detain migrant families together while their asylum cases are pending.
Migrants deserve to be treated with dignity, she said, adding that lessons need to be learned from the 2014 closure of a family detention center in Artesia, New Mexico.
“It is still traumatizing, it is still indefinite detention, it is still children being detained, and we can’t accept it,” Rivas said. “We can’t replace one horror with another.”
In the weeks since the Trump administration’s family separation policy has exploded into a national crisis, protests have occurred across the country, including in Tornillo and in El Paso, where the “zero tolerance” policy that called for the prosecution of all illegal border crossings was piloted.
For some, the upheaval has brought up painful memories of their own brushes with the immigration system.
On Thursday night, Mariana Ibarra stood before a crowd sitting on outdoor benches at Saint Mark Catholic Church for a vigil in support of separated immigrant families. She had just listened to a Brazilian woman tell those gathered about being separated from her 14-year-old son for months before being reunited. It now was Ibarra’s turn to tell her story.
The 24-year-old had arrived in the United States in February 2016 from Ciudad Juárez with her 6-month-old son. She was trying to escape the abuse of her partner, a Sinaloa cartel member who had held her against her will for days in his prison cell as he assaulted and beat her.
She lived with her sister for a month before Immigration and Customs Enforcement called her in for an appointment. For the next eight months, she was detained at the El Paso Processing Center, while her sister cared for her baby.
Ibarra said those months apart from her son — during which she missed his first words and steps — were more painful than the abuse she suffered in Juárez.
She had contact visits with her son twice a month, but the boy had stopped recognizing her, instead referring to her sister as his mother. In detention, she constantly considered returning to Mexico, but she knew she could not go back.
“I was held in jail in Mexico and I lived a worse hell here, because here they separated me from my baby,” Ibarra said through a translator.
Eventually, Ibarra was granted provisional protection under the Convention Against Torture, which allows her to remain in the U.S. because of the danger she would face in her home country.
As she has heard the recent stories of separated parents, she said she could not imagine what it would have been like while she was detained to know that her son was being detained elsewhere, too.
Meanwhile, Angélica said that, ever since she was separated from her granddaughter, all she can think about is how the girl is doing. Was she eating and sleeping? How was she coping with being alone?
She didn’t know. On Friday afternoon, Angélica arrived at Annunciation House, shellshocked. She carried her belongings in a clear plastic bag issued to her by immigration authorities. A tracking monitor encircled her left ankle.
Soon, she plans to join her daughter in California and find an attorney to help find her granddaughter.
After that, it is unclear what is to come.