Desperate families with credible asylum claims have fled to our southern border, but rather than to live up to our reputation as a beacon of hope, the Trump administration has been separating parents and kids already facing immense trauma. This idea to use separation as a deterrent was originally concocted by former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary John Kelly, though he “quickly walked back his comments after they triggered public outrage,” reports the Washington Post.
But while DHS claims it “does not currently have a policy of separating women and children,” it is carrying out the cruel practice anyway, now under the watch of Kelly’s successor, Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen. These families include a Salvadoran mother and children who fled their home after a gang threatened to kill her teenage son. They traveled nearly 3,000 miles across three nations, hoping their nightmare would be over after reaching our border. It continued:
But now, in a frigid Border Patrol facility in Arizona where they were seeking asylum, Silvana Bermudez was told she had to say goodbye.
Her kids were being taken from her.
She handed her sleeping preschooler to her oldest, a 16-year-old with a whisper of a mustache whose life had been baseball and anime until a gun was pointed at his head.
“My love, take care of your little brother,” she told him on Dec. 17.
“Bye, Mommy,” said her 11-year-old daughter, sobbing.
And then her children were gone.
They aren’t alone. Just days ago, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued for the release of a Congolese mother and child detained thousands of miles apart from each other. The Women’s Refugee Commission estimates that “at least 426 immigrant adults and children who had been separated by authorities since Donald Trump took office,” with parents getting detained on their own and their children at other facilities, boys separated from girls, no matter how young or the circumstances.
”At one point, the 11-year-old’s only roommate was a 4-year-old,” the Washington Post reports. “Shelter employees asked her to help care for the girl by warming up her bottle and putting her to sleep. ‘She was alone,” Silvana’s daughter said. ‘Without her mom. Without anyone.’”
Separated from Bermudez for months, the three children—not named by the Washington Post for their protection—spent Christmas and New Year in federal detention. Their dad, Yulio, had fled to the U.S. before them after a gang threatened his life as well, when he refused to let them use his taxi to escape the police. That same gang was the one to later threaten the teen boy’s life. Now in the U.S., officials did nothing to help connect Yulio with his children, not even letting the teen access Facebook in an attempt to locate his dad:
Christmas arrived without word from their parents. Instead of dinner with family and fireworks in the streets of San Salvador, there was pizza and a shelter employee dressed as Santa Claus dispensing winter hats and plastic yo-yos. When Silvana’s daughter began shimmying to Latin music like she had in her dance troupe in El Salvador, she was told to tone it down. And a no-touching rule meant she wasn’t allowed to hug her older brother, even when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.
The 11-year-old began to despair.
“At first I thought it’d only be a few days before I saw my dad,” she recalled. “But after a month there, I was going crazy, thinking, When? When? When?”
For Silvana, the days after the separation were a blur. She was taken to U.S. District Court in Yuma, where she pleaded guilty to illegal entry, a misdemeanor.
She was sent to a detention center in San Luis, Ariz., to serve a five-day sentence, and then transferred back to the same hielera. The officers told her they didn’t have any information on her kids. She says she wasn’t allowed a phone call.
“The first week was torture,” Silvana recalled.
The children were finally released after six weeks, when Bridget Cambria, an immigration attorney in Pennsylvania, came across a plea for help on Facebook from Yulio’s relatives. “Her office helped Yulio locate the children. On Jan. 7—21 days after they’d been separated from their mother—he was able to call them”:
On Jan. 31, after six weeks at the shelter, the kids were told to pack their things. Within hours, they were on the first flight of their lives. When they touched down in Houston, Yulio was waiting for them at the airport.
But Silvana was not. She remained in detention, where she’d been prescribed pills for her anxiety and pills to help her sleep. She met eight other women at the facility who had been separated from their children, she said.
After a month at the detention facility, Silvana finally had a chance to tell immigration officials about the gang and death threats in El Salvador. They determined she had a reasonable fear of persecution if she returned — the first step toward being able to stay in the United States.
Bermudez was finally released after spending 12 weeks total in detention, separated from her family. They reunited at a Houston bus station. Research has shown that “children who have been separated from their parents frequently show signs of trauma, including anxiety, depression, frequent crying, disrupted eating and sleeping, and difficulties in school.” Bermudez was worried about how her children would react to seeing her. While it was clear the two older children would recover quickly, she appeared to be concerned about her youngest:
Would the 16-year-old be angry? Would the 11-year-old forgive her? Would her youngest even recognize her?
The taxi door barely slid open before the teenager was upon her.
“I love you,” she whispered into his ear, tears streaking down her face.
“I love you, too,” he answered.
As Silvana hugged her eldest, she felt a gentle tug on her ponytail.
“I like your braids,” her daughter said softly of the cornrows she’d acquired in Buffalo.
Silvana’s 3-year-old hovered at the edge of all the embraces until she lifted him up.
She knew that much about their future remained uncertain. There would be immigration check-ins and asylum hearings and a judge’s ruling to decide if they could have the life they’d come so far — and endured so much — to build.
But in this moment, all she cared about was seeing recognition in the eyes of the son she hadn’t held in three months.
“Who am I, my darling?” she asked in Spanish. “Who am I?”
The boy rubbed his eyes, looking elsewhere.
“What’s my name?” Silvana said.
The boy put his fingers in his mouth, saying nothing.
“Mommy,” she answered for him. “I am your mommy.”
“Separations at the border have soared under Trump,” tweeted David Leopold, an immigration attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Families fleeing horrific violence deserve protection not separation, jail and punishment.”