#separated children

By Rosa Flores, Sara Weisfeldt and Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN The mother's mind raced as she watched her sons from the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.

The mother's mind raced as she watched her sons from the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.

The two boys were crying and holding hands as they crossed the border alone.

After all they'd been through together, it was shocking to see the boys -- aged 12 and 16 -- slip out of sight so quickly. With just a wave, they were gone. And she was left wondering if they'd made a terrible mistake.

"I felt like I was dying," she told CNN. "I didn't want to separate from them."

But her family felt splitting up was their only option, she says, after they tried to cross into the United States and got kicked out -- twice.

We met this 31-year-old Salvadoran mother when we recently visited a shelter for deported migrants in the Mexican border city of Reynosa. She shared her story but asked not to be identified out of fear for her family's safety. While she waits for word on her older sons' fate, she's taken refuge in this shelter with her younger son -- a 7-year-old with special needs. She isn't sure what they'll do next.

Her story highlights a troubling trend at the border that advocates have criticized as another kind of family separation fueled by US government policies.

A top Border Patrol official told CNN last week that more than 400 children who were taken into US custody as "unaccompanied minors" in south Texas had previously tried to cross with their families. Chief Patrol Agent Brian Hastings, who leads the busiest Border Patrol sector in the United States, says it's a phenomenon his agents are seeing more and more.

We saw this happening during the Trump administration, too, after US policies made it harder for families to cross together. Now advocates warn that once again desperate parents and other adult family members are choosing to send children across the border alone, as US officials expel more migrant families to Mexico under pandemic travel restrictions.

"This comes with great sacrifice. I don't think it's lost on any of these parents," Hope Border Institute Deputy Director Marisa Limón Garza told CNN last month. "This is a grim choice."

How do families make such devastating decisions?

Here's what this mom we met told us about how -- and why -- her family ended up on opposite sides of the Rio Grande.

She says she left El Salvador to save her sons

It's been more than a month since her family fled El Salvador, where she says her oldest son was beaten up when he refused to join a gang and sell drugs.

"We couldn't stay there because of the maras," she says, using a Spanish term commonly used to describe transnational gangs.

What's more, she says, the boys' father left when they were little, and she'd long struggled to make ends meet. Most recently she worked selling vegetables at a market.

"I was earning $5 a day, and that was just enough to pay for food," she says. "I never even had enough to get them a pair of shoes." 

Heading to the United States seemed like the best way to save her sons. They made the long journey together. The mother says she never imagined they'd end up apart.

Why her oldest son decided they had to split up

But at the border, she says US authorities sent a clear message when her family tried to cross.

"They said that because of Covid, nobody is allowed in," she says. "I begged them to help me because we can't go back to El Salvador."

Soon, they were expelled to Mexico and found themselves on the banks of the Rio Grande, at a loss for what to do next. That, she says, is when her oldest son made a startling proposal.

"We can't go back to El Salvador. They'll kill us," the 16-year-old said.

Instead, he said, he'd cross the border with his 12-year-old brother, leaving their mom and younger brother behind.

"It's the only way we can get across," he told her.

It wasn't what she wanted, but she knew it was for the best. Weeks later, she still struggles to talk about that moment when she watched her older sons cross the border alone. As she tells us the story, she holds her 7-year-old son tight and wipes away the tears streaming down her face.

"It was the only choice...so they could have a better future," she says.

She panicked for days, worried she'd lost her sons forever

Days passed with no word from her older children. The mom panicked that they'd been deported back to El Salvador -- that she'd lost them forever that day when they split up.

Then finally, she got an update. Her oldest son called from a shelter in New York.

"They are treating us well. They are giving us food," he told her.

The son tried to reassure his mother and reminded her to take her medicine. Since their family separated, she says she's been feeling ill, and her blood pressure has been shooting up.

"Everything is going to turn out OK," the 16-year-old said.

But their future is far from certain.

The shelter where we met this mother is in a Mexican border state that's notoriously dangerous for migrants.

Just an hour away from here, 16 Guatemalan migrants were killed in a January massacre that made international headlines. Local police have been charged in the slayings.

And the number of families arriving is on the rise.

She doesn't know when they'll see each other again

As political pressure mounted last month amid an influx of migrant children at the border, President Biden said migrant families who've just arrived in the United States should be expelled to Mexico under a pandemic public health order.

"They should all be going back, all be going back," Biden said. "The only people we're not going to let sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande by themselves with no help are children."

Attorney Jennifer Harbury has been representing migrants in the area for years. She says the Biden administration needs to consider the true impact of these policies.

"People are being hurt, raped, attacked and killed in northern Mexico because we have sent them back," she says. "That's not humanitarian."

A plaza near the border bridge in Reynosa is packed with desperate migrant families -- many who say they were recently expelled from the United States and are unsure of where to turn. This Salvadoran mother we spoke with said she was terrified when she arrived.

"When I saw all the mothers crying in the park, I got scared," she says. Rumors of kidnappings and extortion ran rampant. She knew she needed somewhere safer to go.

She found this shelter and a lawyer who's trying to help her with her case.

And she's turning to her faith to keep her going. She's praying that her older sons will have a better future, and that no one will harm them now that they've made it across the border. She's also praying for what she calls a miracle -- that somehow, she and her younger son will find a way to join them.

Paisley Elliott’s family and friends are throwing her a drive-by parade Tuesday to celebrate the achievement.

By Anna Caplan

10:52 AM on Apr 12, 2021

Paisley Elliott turns 8 this week, but her birthday is not the only thing her family is celebrating.

The Grapevine girl, who has been protesting outside her home every week for the past six months to draw attention to families who have been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border, has been nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize, what is commonly referred to as the junior version of the Nobel Peace Prize.

“This is an all-consuming thing for her — she just wants to help families,” mom Tali Jones says of her daughter’s advocacy.

Paisley was nominated by an outreach group she works with, Switzerland-based Ariel Foundation International. Only 142 children worldwide were nominated for the honor last year. 

Friends and family are throwing a drive-by parade Tuesday to celebrate the achievement, even if it might be in name only. Currently, Paisley is too young to meet the age requirements (12 to 18) for the prize. Jones says the Ariel Foundation is looking into whether an exception can be made.

Jones is used to her precocious daughter leading the way, which dates back to when she was 3 and learned about refugees at her Catholic preschool. She wanted to know where the children were from and where they were trying to go, Jones recalls, but the teachers wouldn’t show Paisley on a map.

“She came home, and she was really mad,” Jones said.

Paisley began to channel her enthusiasm after her mom explained (as best she could, she laughs) the issues at stake. 

“It’s not being driven by me,” Jones said. “Some days I wish she would go ride her bike and get a skinned knee, and that’s all she would worry about.”

In the last four years, her daughter’s interests have “snowballed,” Jones said. She watches the news and reads everything she can about the issue. 

The Cannon Elementary second-grader’s new goal, to mark her 8th birthday, is to write 88 letters to national and state leaders, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, to ask for their help addressing the refugee crisis.

And her voice is already being heard. Recently, when Paisley found out that Grapevine’s public library had only one child-appropriate book about the border crisis in its system, she sent them a list of 10 of her favorite books. They’ve since purchased the titles, Jones said, so other kids in the area can learn more.

“She’s done more in her eight years than I’ve done in 37,” Jones said.

The parents of 61 migrant children who were separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration have been located since February, but lawyers still cannot find the parents of 445 children, according to a court filing on Wednesday.

In the filing, the Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union indicated slow progress in the ongoing effort to reunite families that were affected by a policy to prosecute all undocumented immigrants in the United States, even if it meant separating children from their parents.

The update in the reunification efforts comes as the Biden administration struggles to address a growing number of migrants seeking entry into the United States at the border with Mexico, including many children being held in jail-like facilities for longer than the law permits because of overcrowding.

Of the 445 remaining children, a majority are believed to have parents who were deported, while more than 100 children are believed to have parents currently in the United States, according to the court filing. The government has yet to provide contact information that would help locate the families of more than a dozen children.

Though the court filing says that U.S. agencies and the A.C.L.U. continue to work together to reunite the families, the effort has proved to be more difficult as time passes. The initial searches began years ago, under the Trump administration, after the policy of family separation was rescinded in the summer of 2018.

Only a fraction of the roughly 2,700 children who were initially separated under the policy still remain, and President Biden has indicated that reuniting those remaining children with their families is a priority. During his first week in office, Mr. Biden signed an executive order creating a task force led by Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to focus on reuniting families.

Advocates for families separated at the border during the Trump administration continue to pressure the president to move faster to reunite them. Lee Gelernt, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who has waged a lengthy legal battle against Mr. Trump’s separation policy, said some progress had been made but much more needed to be done.

“We and the Biden administration have enormous work yet to do if we are going to fix the terrible abuses of the Trump administration’s family separation practice,” he said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Biden administration said on Wednesday it is examining 5,600 previously unreviewed cases of migrant children to see whether they were separated from parents at the U.S.-Mexico border under former President Donald Trump.

A U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told reporters the review seeks to find any separated children beyond those already identified through litigation. The official said the aim is ultimately to reunite any families who remain apart.

The effort is expected to uncover a small number of additional separations on top of thousands that have already been reported, the official said.

The whereabouts and status of the 5,600 migrant children whose cases are being reviewed remains unclear. DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Joe Biden, a Democrat who took over from the Republican Trump on Jan. 20, issued an executive order in February to create a task force to reunite children and parents still separated by Trump’s “zero tolerance” border strategy.

Thousands of children were separated from their parents at the southwestern U.S. border under the policy, which charged parents with federal immigration offenses and sent them to jails, while children were labeled “unaccompanied” and placed in shelters.

Jeff Sessions, who spearheaded the effort as Trump’s attorney general, defended the prosecutions in an interview with Reuters in March, saying a person traveling with a child “shouldn’t be given immunity.” Sessions expressed regret, however, that the Trump administration could not quickly reunite the parents and children afterward.

A Biden administration task force has yet to reunite any of the still separated families, the DHS official told reporters on Wednesday, requesting anonymity to discuss the matter.

The task force aims to build a comprehensive database of families that were separated under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy and related measures during the four years he was in office, the DHS official said.

The Biden administration is scouring government records to search for additional separations and information that might help unify families, according to the official.

“There is also a lot of misinformation in the files - wrong dates, confusion in names, doubled up cases,” the official said. “Those are just a few of the issues we are discovering.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) through litigation has identified around 4,000 children who were separated from their parents under the zero-tolerance policy.

Some families have already been reunited as part of litigation challenging the separations, while other families remain apart, including some whose parents were deported.

In addition, there were about 1,500 children split apart from parents because the U.S. government found the child might be in danger, the ACLU said.

Parties in the ACLU lawsuit have been unable to reach the parents of about 500 children subject to the Trump-era separations.

Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU attorney in the litigation, said on Wednesday his organization does not know how many children remain separated from parents, but that he believed it was likely more than 1,000.

Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington and Mica Rosenberg in New York; Editing by Howard Goller

The forcible separation of more than 5,000 migrant children from their parents is a stark example of appalling cruelty that comprises a dark aspect of the Trump administration’s legacy — but it is also a fundamental attack on human rights that the Biden White House must rectify.

During the presidential debates, candidate Joe Biden decried as “criminal” the practice of separating children from their parents who attempted to illegally cross the border. He has since ended the Trump-era policies that resulted in separation and recently created a federal task force to reunite these families.

However, these critical first steps should be only the beginning. 

Reunification alone does not soothe the physical and psychological trauma caused to children and their families, and does not restore the parent-child relationship that was violated by border agents.

Under the prior administration’s directives, officers were not allowed to pick up or touch distressed children, even in “tender-age” detention centers. This results in critical emotional deprivation that is necessary for regulating children’s stress responses and normal functioning. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics declared the policy of family separation government-sanctioned “child abuse.”

After a review of multiple psychological evaluations of asylum-seeking family members separated at the U.S. border, experts at Physicians for Human Rights determined the practice meets the international definition of torture. As an example of just one complication, even after reunification children experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that may require considerable, time-consuming and costly therapy. Symptoms of anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder may persist for years. Parents of traumatized children experience feelings of shame, guilt and other psychological effects that meet diagnostic criteria for mental-health disorders.

These aftershocks do not disappear with reunification. 

Beyond development of a family reunification task force, the following are several ways in which the Biden administration can make amends: 

·        Allow separated families to reunite safely within the United States. Many of the parents were deported without their children. They should be allowed to return to the U.S. to seek out their children without fear of deportation. 

·        Provide legal protections to these families. The Biden administration should consider creating a fast-track to citizenship, as reparation for the cruelty with which these families were treated.  

·        Fund psychological treatment and ongoing trauma-informed care for separated children and parents. Due to the purposeful negligence of the Trump administration, many of these children may have been separated from their parents for years. Providing for mental-health treatment is an imperative. 

·        Prohibit any future form of familial separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration, except in cases of proven, irrefutable child endangerment.  

·        Press Congress to investigate the alleged human-rights abuses in immigration policy of the previous administration, such as the reported sexual abuse of immigrant children and hysterectomies performed on women in U.S. ICE detention centers. A congressional investigation could help develop a framework to prevent future such abuses. 

The Biden administration has promised to “finish the work of building a fair and humane immigration system.” That can only come about by addressing the deep injustices these families face while ensuring that forced separation rarely, if ever, happens again.

Tara Pilato  is co-executive director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights in New York City. 

Gunisha Kaur  is an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, co-medical director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights and a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Yesterday, on MSNBC, FWD.us’ Vice President of Advocacy, Alida Garcia, discussed how the Biden administration is processing migrant children at the U.S.- Mexico border and how the U.S. can welcome vulnerable children seeking safety with dignity while keeping our families and communities safe.

“The increase in migration to the Southern border, of recent history, began in the Trump administration. What we’re experiencing right now is a continuance of that; that began before Joe Biden entered office… I’m a mom, and God forbid one day I was separated from my children and they knocked on the doorstep of a stranger seeking help. I would be wanting two things from that stranger: 1) that they do not harm my child, and 2) that they quickly, safely find me to reunite my children with me. And that’s what the Biden administration is trying to do.” 

You can watch the clip here.

BACKGROUND: 

The challenges the Biden Administration is facing to process migrant families and children seeking humanitarian relief at the border is a result of the chaos created by the Trump Administration. The current uptick in arrivals at the border didn’t start with Biden; it started in April of 2020 under Trump. Under Trump we saw the highest year to year increase in border arrivals since the 1940s. In addition to separating families, Trump cut aid to Central America, ended the program that let kids apply for protection near their homes rather than taking a dangerous journey to the border, and dismantled the asylum and processing systems that were in place. 

Currently, the Biden administration is working around the clock with an all-of-government approach to put in place a safe, orderly and humane system. While the borders are mostly closed, and most new arrivals are being apprehended and removed, the main group of people allowed into the United States are children travelling alone as unaccompanied minors. 

These vulnerable children have fled violence and danger in Central America, and have either a parent or close family in the United States who are ready to welcome them into their homes. With FEMA’s help, we urge the Biden administration to quickly reign in facilities and processing challenges to make sure kids are treated with dignity in the best interests of children.

We must draw back the hysteria of this moment at the border and focus on treating children and families with dignity. Restoring vital asylum protections and well-functioning systems to manage migration across the hemisphere and secure our border includes allowing migrants to enter the U.S. to seek asylum when faced with violence and persecution, as is their legal right under U.S. and international law. 

For years a woman named Margaret Katz had a recurring nightmare: From a dark alley, she could hear her young son cry out desperately for her, screaming that he needed help. She’d race toward him, only to wake before reaching the boy.

Again and again and again. She could never get to her son. Never wrap him in her arms, lay her cheek against his head, whisper that she was there, that everything would be okay. And for years she woke up from that dream only to remember that the nightmare was real.

In “American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption,” Gabrielle Glaser tells the story of Katz and the boy she could never reach, whom she was forced, as a teenager, to give up for adoption. But really she tells the story of all parents and children torn apart from each other against their will.

Again and again and again. She could never get to her son. Never wrap him in her arms, lay her cheek against his head, whisper that she was there, that everything would be okay. And for years she woke up from that dream only to remember that the nightmare was real.

In “American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption,” Gabrielle Glaser tells the story of Katz and the boy she could never reach, whom she was forced, as a teenager, to give up for adoption. But really she tells the story of all parents and children torn apart from each other against their will.

“American Baby” tracks the unconscionable losses incurred by one woman and child. But it’s a reminder of how routinely and ruthlessly this country has stripped its most vulnerable populations of the things that matter most.

Glaser came to Katz’s story by way of her long-lost son, an adult in need of a new kidney by the time the author met him. It’s not a spoiler to disclose that Katz’s son eventually locates his birth mother. Through interviews with both of them and members of their families, Glaser is able to meticulously re-create their tale.

Katz (born Margaret Erle) was a daughter of Jewish refugees who fled the Nazis and settled in New York. In high school she fell in love with a slightly older baseball player. She was 16 when she found out she was pregnant after having sex for the first time.

Immediately, Katz and her boyfriend, George, decided to keep the baby. He’d forgo his baseball scholarship, they’d get married. But as minors, they needed parental permission to wed, and their parents refused to give it. Instead Katz was sent to a home for unwed mothers, where she was visited routinely by social workers who pressured her to sign papers giving their child up for adoption. Katz was cowed but didn’t sign.

She was sedated against her will during childbirth and not allowed to hold her baby after he was born. For months, while the boy, named Stephen, stayed with foster parents, Katz resisted demands that she formally put him up for adoption.

Finally, when their baby was 51/2 months old, the couple was allowed to meet him for the second time. While they were visiting, a social worker asked Katz to step into a private room. There, the entreaties turned to threats.

“We can put you in juvenile hall,” the woman told her. “Think of how that will look for your parents. First your pregnancy. Want to get locked up now too?”

Katz signed the papers and began a lifetime of longing. All she had left of her baby was a couple of Polaroid pictures her boyfriend had snapped during their visits. “When she felt hopeless or angry,” Glaser writes, “she would pull out Stephen’s blurry little picture and kiss it.”

Throughout the book Glaser deftly pulls back from Katz’s story to set it in a larger context — the history of adoption in America, ideas about gender and feminism. Casual readers, eager to learn the resolution of Katz’s and Stephen’s saga, may find themselves racing through these sections, but it’s here that Glaser proves herself as a relentless researcher. The intimate story of Glaser’s subjects makes her book compelling, but the societal dots she’s able to connect make it important.

Glaser invests deeply in Katz’s experience, and she succeeds in compelling readers to do the same. (The sections that track Stephen’s life — his name was changed to David by his adoptive parents — feel slightly more removed, perhaps because Glaser had less opportunity for first-person interviews.) As Katz makes her way through the world, carrying grief and shame and secrets with her all the while, readers will hope for an easing of her burdens. They’ll hope she finds her boy.

“Sometimes on the subway, or walking down the street,” Glaser writes, “she’d find herself staring at a little boy who caught her eye. Did that one have a dimpled chin? Did this one have George’s ears?”

It wouldn’t be that easy for Katz. Reunion wouldn’t come via a chance encounter for her, just as it won’t for the parents of children who were taken from them at the Southern border. “American Baby” is a bone-deep exploration of the agony felt by parents forcibly removed from their child. It should serve as a reminder of those parents still experiencing that agony. And of the only thing they can offer their children, from such a painful remove.

“At night, after everyone was asleep, and before her nightmares interrupted, she envisioned her love reaching out from her heart to his, and hoped it was received.”