Marili told The Los Angeles Times that she didn’t want to send her two children across the U.S. border alone, but she was left with no other choice: the family’s next immigration hearing isn’t until March, the border camp they are living in is squalid, and her three-year-old daughter, Madeline, is losing weight. So last month, Marili gave her eldest, 5-year-old Josue, a backpack containing important documents and then watched them cross into a port of entry alone. “It was the hardest decision I had to make in my life,” she said. “But it’s the position the U.S. government has put us in.”
Like thousands of other asylum-seekers, the family has been stranded along the border as part of the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy. While some families have been able to find space in Mexican shelters (which is still no guarantee of safety), Marili, Madeline, Josue, and 2,000 others have been forced to live in a makeshift camp that has turned into a humanitarian crisis: half of the nearly 200 sick patients seen by Doctors Without Borders have been children.
With many also facing court dates months away, the administration has forced desperate parents, like Marili, into a drastic and painful decision. “Children who arrive at the border unaccompanied by an adult are exempt from Remain in Mexico,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “In recent weeks, the exemption has led Central American asylum seekers at the largest migrant camp on the U.S. border in Matamoros to leave children on the bridge.” As of late last month, officials estimate that 135 kids who were sent to Mexico by the administration have crossed back alone.
Another parent forced into this decision has been Alexis Martinez. He told NPR that he remembers watching five-year-old Benjamin and seven-year-old Osiel holding hands as they crossed alone. "They were sleeping on the ground, in the cold,” he said according to NPR. Benjamin had contracted bronchial pneumonia, and staying longer in Matamoros would have only worsened his condition. “These tents are not good for children because the cold goes right through them,” he continued. “Sometimes you do things not because you're a bad father, but because you want what's good for them, and you don't want to see them suffer.”
Remain in Mexico has become another form of family separation, say attorneys and advocates working with families sent to Mexico. “That haunts me at night," immigration attorney Jodi Goodwin told NPR. "And I'm snuggled in bed and hugging my 7-year-old. I can't imagine, I mean, one mom sent her 3-year-old. How do you push a 3-year-old across a bridge and say, 'Go, mijito, go. This is better for you.'" She worked with families that were forcibly separated under the “zero tolerance” policy, but she says Remain in Mexico is a whole different level of cruelty. “But when a parent decides, 'My child is better off without me,’ that's so much worse,” she said.
None of this has to be happening. Asylum-seekers could be released in the U.S. to relatives and sponsors while they pursue their cases (contrary to lies from the president, asylum-seekers do show up for their court dates), but this policy has instead sent 60,000 people into dangerous and inhumane conditions, and has been a policy so cruel and antithetical to asylum law that an asylum officer publicly resigned over it. Remain in Mexico, said former asylum officer Doug Stephens, is “clearly designed to make individuals fail and send everyone back without really giving them a fair shot.”
Alexis and Marili are still at the camp. She remembered from that day last month that Josue was convinced he was being punished because he was being sent to the U.S. alone, and after arriving at a facility in Texas, asked why Marili had not come to get him. “He’s just 5. Think what he must think of me,” she told the Los Angeles Times. He’s too young to understand that she had no other option. “These parents had to make an impossible, excruciating choice because of Trump’s cruel immigration agenda,” the Congressional Hispanic Caucus tweeted. “They chose to do everything they could to keep their kids safe. Remain in Mexico is creating more family separation and denying asylum seekers safety.”
