“I, Mirian,” they read, “make the following declaration based on my personal knowledge, and declare under the penalty of perjury that the following is true and correct. My name is Mirian, and I am a citizen and a national of Honduras, and the biological mother of G.M., who was born on July 4, 2016. G.M. is also a citizen and a national of Honduras. He is my only child.”
More than 30 celebrities and activists, led by Maggie Gyllenhaal and including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chadwick Boseman, Kumail Nanjiani and Lena Waithe, take turns reading a harrowing letter written by Mirian, an asylum seeker who, along with her young child, fled their home country after their home was tear-gassed by the military. "I brought my son to the United States,” the group reads, “so that we could seek protection from violence in Honduras.”
But after crossing the international bridge into Texas—a legal act under U.S. law—Mirian found that under Donald Trump, seeking asylum can mean losing your child. "The US officers then told me that they were taking my son from me,” the group continues. “They said he would be going to one place, and I would be going to another. I asked why the officers are separating my son from me. They did not provide any reason. I had no idea that I would be separated from my child.”
The next day, Mirian was forced to walk her child to a waiting car. “Without giving me even a moment to comfort him,” she described in a later op-ed she wrote, “the officer shut the door. I could see my son through the window, looking back at me—waiting for me to get in the car with him—but I wasn't allowed to. He was screaming as the car drove away.”
Mirian was able to find out her son was being held 120 miles away. She found his social worker, but the boy is so young, he couldn’t talk to her on the phone. ”During the first weeks after my son and I were separated, I was very depressed and quiet,” the group continues. “I did not want to even eat. Now I’m trying to be strong for my son so that I can work hard to be reunited with him and to take care of him once we are together. I’m still sad and worried about him though.”
In April, a judge found that Mirian—who had also become a plaintiff in a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to stop family separation—had a credible asylum claim, and a month after that, she was finally reunited with her child.
"I am proof,” Mirian continued in her op-ed, “that parents who are legally seeking asylum are being separated from their children for seemingly no reason.” While the government has started reuniting some separated children, they account for only a few dozen of the possibly 3,000 children who have been torn from parents at the border.
This remains a humanitarian disaster created by the Trump administration, and a crisis that will not end until every single separated child is reunited, no migrant families are in family jails or military internment camps, and the people who created this crisis in the first place are held accountable, from the top on down. “My heart,” Mirian said, “goes out to the other mothers who are still aching for their children."