Of the 182 kidnapped migrant children who remain in U.S. custody 60 days past a judge’s reunification deadline, 141 of those kids are still jailed because their parents have already been deported. One such child, Marianita, was finally reunited with her parents in Honduras last week, more than three months after she was ripped from her dad’s arms at the U.S.-Mexico border. “The little girl quietly smiled,” tweeted Yamiche Alcindor of PBS, “as her father wept.”
The child had been in U.S. custody since June, when she was separated from her dad, Misael Ponce Herrera, and sent to a child detention facility in New York. Ponce Herrera told PBS that he had been forced to sign deportation papers and for months struggled to get his daughter back. In this particular case, the Texas Civil Rights Project, which helped reunite the family, said that Alcindor’s reporting was crucial in pushing officials to finally reunite them.
“It’s great for this family, but it is painstakingly slow for the others,” said Efren Olivares, the group’s racial and economic justice director. “The federal government is very bureaucratic and they are not in a rush to reunite any of these families. They are only doing the bare minimum which the court is forcing them to do. They are dragging their feet on purpose because it does not benefit them politically to reunite these families. So they don’t seem to care.”
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They don’t seem to care for migrant families, or for justice, since hundreds of kids continue to remain separated from their families in blatant violation of a court order, and at ongoing risk of permanent trauma. “In fact, even short periods of detention can cause psychological trauma and long-term mental health risks for children,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said.
Marianita seemed shy as she embraced her parents, but there is no telling what the next few days hold as she attempts to readjust to her life yet again. “This is the beginning of the road for them,” Olivares said about family’s reunion. “This is not the end. Now they have to struggle with recovering from everything that they suffered.” Watch video of Marianita returning to her family below.