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One thing that Elena remembers is the taunting. There was taunting everywhere. Border agents told mothers that “they did not know what they had gotten themselves into.” When she cried after getting to talk to her 12-year-old son on the phone for the first time following their separation, the guards laughed. The mom “learned from the other women at the facility that the officers would frequently laugh as crying mothers spoke with their separated children.”
The Guatemalan asylum-seeker joins “Dania” and four other families in seeking millions in damages after being torn apart at the southern border by the Trump administration. Under the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy, thousands of children were stolen from the most vulnerable, including people fleeing violence. It was state-sanctioned kidnapping that has left children and adults alike traumatized.
During the 77 days she spent apart from Luis, Elena struggled to sleep and couldn’t complete the simplest of tasks. “She had no interest in eating and lost a lot of weight. Sleep deprivation and stress triggered excruciating headaches and pain in her eyes.” None of this stress ended even after she was reunited with the boy at a migrant-family jail in Texas. “Her anxiety was so severe that she vomited regularly,” a legal filing states.
Despite mother and son being reunited, the threats continued. When she and some other moms tried to find out how much longer they would be jailed, they were threatened with more separation: “Stop asking or we will take your kids away again.” Elena would be diagnosed with PTSD before leaving detention. She said Luis doesn’t like to talk about his own experiences when he was detained by himself. She “has noticed that he is much angrier and more rebellious than before the separation.”
Thursday, Feb. 14, marks 203 days since a federal judge’s reunification deadline, but children stolen from families at the border are still in U.S. custody. Family separation remains a crisis.