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The odds were already stacked against Elmer and his 15-year-old daughter when they initially came to the southern border last year in search of safety. “Authorities wouldn’t let him talk,” NPR reports, and like many other parents separated from their kids by the Trump administration, he “was forced to sign papers he didn’t understand.” He was deported in July, without Marisol.
Last weekend, Elmer was one of 29 parents who returned to the border in a renewed effort to ask for asylum—and to ultimately reunite with their children. While many of them had originally been forced to navigate an intentionally complicated immigration system on their own, the parents now have the backing of a number of leading immigrant rights advocacy groups.
They hope it will be different this time, for their children’s sake. Elmer, through tears, said that “every day” he thinks about Marisol. She spent four months in U.S. custody before being released to a relative in Wisconsin. “I tell my daughter, please forgive me,” Elmer said. “It was not my intention to leave you here.”
Appearing at the border Saturday, the 29 parents were at first illegally blocked by border officials from presenting themselves. The officials claimed that the Calexico port of entry lacked the capacity to process them. After a public push from advocacy groups Al Otro Lado, Families Belong Together, and Together Rising, officials relented and began processing them. Elmer was among the first to go through.
"Thank you, we don't know how to thank you enough,” he told his attorney. More than 220 days past a federal judge’s reunification deadline, children stolen from families at the southern border remain in U.S. custody. This doesn’t even include the potentially thousands of children that were separated before the official implementation of the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy. Family separation remains a crisis.