184 days after federal immigration officials ripped them apart at the border, Adolfo and his two children have been reunited. For 184 days, U.S. officials kept the Salvadoran asylum-seeker in detention and separated from his children, 11-year-old Sofia and 7-year-old Juan, based solely on a lie that Adolfo was in a gang. In reality, the three were fleeing gang threats.
This family should have found safety at our border. Instead, officials pointed their fingers at Adolfo even though he had documentation from the Salvadoran government showing that he had no criminal record. Border officials didn’t care. When he asked for an attorney, they told him no. “You don’t have any rights here,” he says they told him. Then they took his children.
It took a team of lawyers to convince the Trump administration that Adolfo “was not a danger to the community,” CBS Evening News reports. “After 184 days of being separated, he got to hug his children again.” At the airport, Sofia and Juan spotted him at the same time, with the girl saying, “Pa” as the three embraced. “Hi! Hi, Dad!” Juan said. Sofia could be seen wiping away tears as Adolfo playfully tugged at Juan’s mouth. The boy is missing a baby tooth. “Let’s see that Colgate smile,” Adolfo told him.
Sofia told CBS Evening News that “we missed him, and it was unfair that we were separated from him.” The two kids had initially been sent to a children’s detention facility, before being released to their mom, who was already in the U.S. Juan said that being ripped from his dad felt like the “end of the world.” It’s still feeling like that for many other children, because the forcible separation of families at the border has continued.
“Attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project said they've counted more than 40 separated families a month in the McAllen area” since a federal judge’s June 2018 order stopping most family separation at the border, USA Today reported last month. In fact, data from the American Civil Liberties Union indicates the Trump administration has separated at least 389 families since that order. Family separation remains a crisis.
