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A Guatemalan asylum-seeker who was separated from his son for over a year is believed to be the first parent affected by the barbaric zero tolerance policy to win his case and be permanently protected from deportation, Texas Monthly reports. Juan and his son, 6-year-old Edwin, “also have the distinction of being separated longer than almost any other family—378 days.”
They arrived at the southern border on May 1, 2018, after violent gang threats against Juan forced him and Edwin to flee their home. Juan had been working for a bus company “that was regularly extorted by a criminal gang and corrupt local police.” They then demanded Juan kill the company bosses—or himself be killed. Left with no choice, Juan and Edwin fled for the U.S.
But instead of finding safety here, they were ripped apart by federal immigration officials. Edwin was sent to one facility, and Juan to another. They would be separated so long that Juan says Edwin forgot how to speak their Mayan dialect. Just as bad, Edwin stopped calling him dad during their weekly phone calls.
“’[Edwin] wouldn’t say ‘papa ‘on the phone with me,’ Juan said. Worse, he’d started calling adults at the shelter ‘abuelo' and ‘abuela’—grandfather and grandmother. It was another marker of the toll that being ripped away, quite literally, from his father was taking on the child. ‘I believed I was going to lose my son,’ he said.”
When Edwin was able to speak to his mom on the phone, the extent of the damage was clear: “What are you saying, I don’t understand you. Speak to me in Spanish, I don’t understand you,” Juan says Edwin told her.
But even with Juan winning his case, it’s not a completely joyous situation. While the judge “ruled that returning Juan to Guatemala would violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture, a treaty that prohibits deporting a person to a country where he or she likely would face torture,” his case excludes Edwin, who “will have to win his own asylum case in order to say in the U.S.,” Texas Monthly continues.
Family separation has remained a crisis. The Trump administration just this month identified at least 1,712 children it may have stolen from parents before the zero tolerance policy was officially implemented, and because officials are only partly through their court-mandated examination of documents, there could be even more.
At least right now, Juan says that Edwin is slowly becoming himself again. “He’s changed a little, but bit by bit he’s becoming closer to me. I share a bed with him and we play. And he likes exercising, too, so we work out together. And he is starting to call me ‘papa’ again.”