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For Migrant Children, A Fleeting Taste Of The American Dream

For Migrant Children, A Fleeting Taste Of The American Dream

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

 

Christmas wasn’t going to be much this year at the Maldonados’ tiny home in eastern El Salvador. Then 6-year-old Wilder arrived, lugging a duffel bag fat with the brightly colored remnants of his brief life in the United States — time he’d spent separated from his father by immigration authorities.

Suddenly, the two shabby rooms with dirt floors and drab adobe walls turned festive. As a pot of chicken stew simmered on a wood-burning stove, a group of barefoot children rummaged with glee through the big black bag, pulling out treasures.

Two-year-old Kevien claimed the Spider-Man pajamas and the talking Spider-Man mask that said things like, “Look out, it’s web-slinging time!” Darwin, a neighbor’s kid, posed in a pair of red Spider-Man glasses with silvery-white webs and blinking lights on the frames.

Yohana, 14 and wispy like a ballerina, picked up a glossy soccer ball that had “USA,” emblazoned on one side and called Darwin outside to play. Meanwhile, the baby, MiLeidi, 8 months old, squealed in delight at a stuffed Olaf, the snowman from “Frozen,” that was bigger than she was.

The only kid who didn’t seem to care much about the contents of the duffel bag was Wilder. He sat by himself on the only bed in the house, apart from the commotion, engrossed in games on his mother’s old cellphone. Kevien offered Wilder the talking mask, trying to entice him to come play. But, without looking up from the cellphone, Wilder shook his head and turned away.

The toys in the duffel bag were all he had left from a seven-month journey to the U.S. with his father, Hilario Maldonado, that had taken him a world away from El Salvador and his family’s impoverished existence, to a place with television sets and hot showers, where he’d slept in a bunk bed and ate as much pizza as he wanted. They’d traveled there in a succession of trucks so crowded with other immigrants that he’d nearly suffocated, and they had reached their goal only to be separated for months in a uniquely American limbo. When he and his father were finally reunited, it was only to be put on a government airplane and flown back to El Salvador, undoing an effort that cost months of hardship and thousands of dollars.

Wilder is one of the nearly 3,000 migrant children who were affected this year by the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. His separation from his father first became public when he appeared alone in court in late November wearing a hat with googly eyes and a red yarn mohawk. Under the unprecedented crackdown, immigration officials were required to prosecute everyone they caught illegally crossing the border and to seize any children they brought with them.

Wilder’s father, a struggling 38-year-old farmer, was not aware of the policy when he set out from El Salvador, seeking decent work for himself and a brighter future for his son. He surrendered himself and his son to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers as soon as he crossed the Rio Grande into Texas. But after five days in CBP custody, agents took Wilder away from Maldonado, sending the boy to a temporary foster home in San Antonio and his father to a detention center about an hour’s drive away.

The zero-tolerance crackdown ended — at least officially — a short time later, when a storm of international outrage forced the administration to rescind it. A federal judge ordered authorities to reunite all the affected children with their families, an effort that took months and tens of millions of dollars because immigration officials hadn’t kept complete records of which children belonged to which adults. Wilder, pudgy, with a buzz cut and missing most of his front teeth, was one of the last cases to be resolved.

Dec. 21 was Wilder’s first morning back home. And his mind seemed somewhere else.

When asked how he was doing, Wilder answered in English, without taking his eyes off the phone. “I’m fine.”

He didn’t respond at all when asked whether he was happy to be back. His mother, Maria Elida Cabrera, nudged him. “Wilder, you’re happy to be home with me, right?” she said in Spanish.

Wilder looked up for a couple of seconds and forced a smile. “Yes, I’m happy,” he said, again in English, then returned to his game.

Cabrera, 35, her straight black hair in a messy ponytail, walked out the backdoor of the house and lowered her voice so that Wilder couldn’t hear her. “This has to be hard for him,” she said. “It’s been hard for all of us.”

Back with his family, Wilder didn’t want to talk much about his experiences, not that he’s old enough to make sense of them. Except for the immigration officials who separated him from his dad, he’d been a victim of a lot of people’s good intentions. There was his father’s desperate attempt to lift his family out of misery; a Texas foster family’s eagerness to provide him a comfortable, and comforting, life; and a federal court’s decision to end zero tolerance and send Wilder back to his family in El Salvador.

For now, the best insight into what might be going on in Wilder’s young mind comes from the adults who shared his ordeal. They sound sad and whiplashed.

“I don’t know what it was about him, but it was hard to let him go,” said Erica Gallegos, the San Antonio woman who took care of Wilder during his time in the U.S. She cried for most of a 45-minute phone call. “In a very short time, he became a part of the family.”

To Cabrera, Wilder’s mother, his time away seemed an eternity. He had changed in so many ways that she described feeling dizzy just looking at him. None of his old clothes fit because he’d been much thinner when he left. And his smile was filled with gaps from all the baby teeth he’d lost. He’d also ridden on an airplane and a ferry, swam in the Gulf of Mexico, let a barber cut his hair, gotten vaccinations, had his first crush on a girl, gone to a movie theater, and learned to tie his shoes, write his name and ride a bike. His vocabulary had grown. He can count to 20 in English. And he doesn’t bark commands at her anymore, she said. He now says “please” and “thank you.”

“There are things he tells me, and I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Cabrera said. “What’s a Grinch?”

Migrating to the U.S. was not new to Wilder’s father. Maldonado had lived in the U.S. through the late 1990s and early 2000s, first immigrating illegally, then gaining temporary protected status in 2001. El Salvador had suffered a series of deadly earthquakes and the Bush administration agreed to let 150,000 Salvadoran immigrants stay and work in the U.S., hoping the money they’d send back to their families would help the Central American country recover.

Maldonado was a single man back then. He worked restaurant and construction jobs up and down the East Coast, from Tampa, Florida, to Long Island in New York, to help take care of his mother in El Salvador. But in 2003, Maldonado said, he returned home when his mother fell ill, using some of the money he’d made to get her medical attention. Shortly afterward, he met Cabrera — who is related to the wife of one of his brothers — started a family, bought a few head of cattle to breed and sell, and built their simple home with his own hands. It’s located on a patch of his wife’s family’s property outside a quaint Salvadoran town called Lislique.

“My intention was to stay in El Salvador,” Maldonado said. “I only left because I started to have problems.”

Cabrera and Maldonado said the cattle business began failing about four years ago. Maldonado had attempted an expansion, borrowing several thousand dollars to grow his herd. But the country’s violent street gangs began moving into Lislique and demanding a cut of Maldonado’s profits. Cabrera said her husband started looking for odd jobs to supplement his income to pay both his debts and the money the gangs demanded.

Each month, there was less money to cover the family’s needs, Cabrera said. And when Maldonado told the gangs he couldn’t afford to pay them anymore, she said, they beat him up and threatened to kill him.

In May, Cabrera said, her husband decided to gamble one more time. He borrowed $5,500 to pay smugglers, known as coyotes, to take him to the U.S. to seek asylum. The plan was to earn enough money to provide for her and the kids left behind, and then, once his status was secure, bring them to the U.S., too.

The coyotes, she said, warned Maldonado that crossing the border wasn’t as easy as it was the last time he migrated. Rather than sneaking into the country, they told him he should turn himself in immediately to border authorities. And they suggested that he bring along one of his kids because he’d spend less time in detention if he had a child with him.

“I didn’t want to let Wilder go,” Cabrera said. “But Hilario said it was the only way. He promised he would take good care of Wilder. He said Wilder would have opportunities that don’t exist here in El Salvador.”

Maldonado said the trip across Central America and Mexico, mostly in the back of pickup trucks and packed tractor-trailers that were not equipped for human cargo, was grueling for him and nearly fatal for Wilder. “I was trying to give him a better life,” Maldonado said of his son, “and he almost died, twice.”

One of the trailers, Maldonado said, was so overcrowded and tightly sealed that Wilder passed out. He scrambled to find an opening in the trailer’s hull, he said, shoving aside the men standing next to it and pushing Wilder’s mouth and nose against the hole until he opened his eyes.

On another leg of the trip, Wilder fainted again as he and his father rode in the back of a pickup truck in a driving rainstorm. When asked why he would take such risks with his son, Maldonado said: “I was desperate. I thought if I didn’t get out of El Salvador, my children would starve or become orphans.”

Maldonado said he thought the hardest part of the journey was over when he and Wilder arrived at the U.S. border on May 31. Then they ran head-on into the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.

“The agents came to me and grabbed Wilder out of my arms,” said Maldonado, a brawny man with a square jaw and metal caps on his front teeth. “He was screaming for me: ‘Papa, papa!’ But I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t run after him. I remember I just watched as they took him. I felt like my heart was going to stop.”

A few days later, the federal government placed Wilder in foster care with the Gallegos family in San Antonio. Erica Gallegos said there were four other foster children in her house during much of the time Wilder was there. One of them was a 5-year-old Central American boy who had also been separated from his parent.

Gallegos said the two separated boys slept in the same room, Wilder on the top bunk.

Wilder, confused and tired, didn’t speak much his first couple of days in her home, Gallegos said. She said she gave him his space, engaging when he wanted to do so and leaving him alone when he didn’t. By the end of the first week, however, she said she managed to win him over by making it clear that he hadn’t been taken away from his family for good. She was only taking care of him until his family was reunited.

“I told him he could call me tía,” Gallegos said, the Spanish word for aunt. She started to cry and sniffle, “I wanted him to feel at home, but I didn’t want him to think I was trying to be his mom.”

From then on, she said, Wilder settled happily into the Gallegos clan; mom, dad and four children, including three who are adults with families of their own. And the family warmed to him. Erica Gallegos enrolled him in first grade and took him to church on Sundays. They had regular pizza and movie nights. She took him home to visit her parents, in the border town of Del Rio. And Wilder joined the family on a beach vacation to Corpus Christi, where he ate s’mores, watched dolphins swim alongside a ferry and marveled at the size of the sea.

Unlike other children she’s cared for, Gallegos said Wilder seemed to crave rules and routine. She said she taught him once how to fold his clothes and put away his shoes and rarely had to remind him again. She said he made his own bed and asked her to inspect it to make sure he’d done it right. And at night, she said, Wilder wouldn’t fall asleep until she said prayers with him.

Gallegos said Wilder enjoyed going with her 13-year-old daughter to baseball and volleyball games. In fact, she said, he’d go with her just about anywhere. “He loved my daughter,” she said, laughing. “He would always stare at her. One time he asked my husband if she could be his girlfriend.”

Other than Spider-Man and pepperoni pizza, Gallegos said that Wilder’s favorite thing was a long, hot shower.

“Do you want me to tell you how long his showers were?” she said. “Thirty minutes. I’d go in to get him, and the room would be hot and steamy.”

Gallegos started to sniffle again. “I didn’t ever want him to go. I remember telling the social worker to let me call his mom and ask her to let me take care of him. My husband would tell me, ‘Remember, he’s not ours.’”

At the same time, Wilder’s family was in crisis. Maldonado was stuck in detention. He had failed to pass his credible fear interview, the first crucial step in the asylum process in which an officer affirms that an immigrant has a justifiable fear of harm in his home country. And it would be months before he’d get a hearing before a judge. Meanwhile, back in El Salvador, Cabrera struggled on her own to care for their other three children.

Kevien, the 2-year-old, developed parasites in October. He was vomiting, had diarrhea and, Cabrera said, his abdomen swelled like a basketball. She had no money for food and medicine, until an immigrant advocacy organization, established to help families affected by zero tolerance, learned about Cabrera’s troubles and sent money. “Without that help, who knows what would have happened,” Cabrera said. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

By December, Maldonado was tired of fighting. An immigration judge had ruled against his asylum petition, and while he could have appealed, that would have kept him in detention several more weeks. He felt the odds of winning asylum were against him, he said, and his family was falling apart. He agreed to plead guilty to illegally entering the country and be deported. He also asked to take Wilder home with him.

This time, the choice was Wilder’s. When authorities physically separated him from his father, they separated his asylum petition as well. Therefore it was up to him, not his father, to decide whether he would give up the claim and go home. Wilder initially appeared in an immigration court without a lawyer. Afterward, his father’s attorney, Thelma O. Garcia, stepped in to represent him. A transcript of the interview between Wilder and Garcia suggests that the gravity of the decision was lost on him.

Attorney: “Hello, Wilder, do you wish to return to your home?”

Wilder: “Yes.”

Attorney: “Do you understand what I’m asking you?”

Wilder: “Yes.”

Attorney: “Do you want to return to court?”

Wilder: “No.”

Attorney: “Do you want to return with your dad, and your mom and the rest of your family?”

Wilder: “Yes, I want to return to my family and see them.”

Attorney: “OK, we are going to help you return with them very soon.”

Wilder: “Spider-Man is my favorite superhero.”

Still, the statement was sufficient for an immigration judge to order that Wilder be reunited with his father and sent back to El Salvador.

Gallegos said that when Wilder realized he was going to be sent home, he began to withdraw again. She said there’s a Christian song they used to sing on their way to school every morning called “Tuyo Soy,” Spanish for “I Am Yours.” But when she put it on one morning, as his departure day approached, she said, Wilder began sobbing.

“I don’t want to go,” Gallegos said he told her. “I don’t want to leave you. I’m going to miss you so much.”

She said she tried to reassure Wilder that things would be OK, burying her own fears. “He had everything he wanted here,” she said, “and he knew that when he went home, he wasn’t going to have that.”

Before Wilder left, Gallegos and her husband rented “Rambo” and ordered pizza. They woke him before dawn and brought him downstairs to get dressed so that he didn’t disturb his bunkmate. Wilder noticed that Gallegos had packed all his things in a big black duffel bag and asked, “I’m not going to school today?”

“No, you’re going back to your family today,” she answered.

His face went blank, she said. And he stopped talking, barely saying a word throughout breakfast and the car ride to meet his social worker. “He was silent,” Gallegos said of Wilder. “I tried not to cry because I didn’t want him to feel bad.”

When he got out of the car, Wilder wrapped his arms around Gallegos’ waist. In the six months they had been together, she said she’d watched him grow from a size 4 to a size 8 and lose most of his baby teeth. She cried, too, as he walked away.

Wilder was reunited with his father at the airport in Laredo, Texas. They were loaded onto a government plane filled with about 100 other Salvadoran deportees. They landed in El Salvador before lunch. Wilder’s size was not the only thing that distinguished him from the rest of the bunch. The men, including Wilder’s dad, wore tattered T-shirts. But Wilder arrived dressed in black suede Timberlands, a red flannel shirt, a hat with Spider-Man eyes and a frown.

There was another 6-year-old boy on the flight with his mother. They had been separated from each other in September, months after a judge ordered the government to stop the practice, and were reunited that morning. The boy, named Esteven, was chattering away with his mom, as if filling her in on all she’d missed. But Maldonado said Wilder barely spoke to him as officials registered their return and advised them of the government programs available to provide assistance.

His face finally lit up when he saw his mother. She cried as he rushed into her arms. Cabrera said that Wilder told her he was glad to see her, telling her: “Mama, when I was away, I didn’t know when I’d ever see you again. I missed you, Mama.’“

But by the time they had gotten home, Wilder had shut down again. And it was Cabrera trying to win him over. He told her he had changed his name to Peter Parker, but she didn’t know that was Spider-Man’s alter ego. He wanted to watch television, but theirs had died. The tortillas weren’t prepared to Wilder’s liking, so he was feeding his to the cat. He wanted to show her that he could ride a bicycle. Cabrera said with her husband out of work and $5,500 in debt, a new bike was far beyond their means.

Wilder, she said, has told her he has a plan.

“He told me that when he gets older, he wants to go to the United States to work,” she said. “He says he’ll get a good job and send money to take care of me.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

 

Trump Still Separating Families At Border

Trump Still Separating Families At Border

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

The Trump administration has quietly resumed separating immigrant families at the border, in some cases using vague or unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing or minor violations against the parents, including charges of illegally re-entering the country, as justification.

Over the last three months, lawyers at Catholic Charities, which provides legal services to immigrant children in government custody in New York, have discovered at least 16 new separation cases. They say they have come across such instances by chance and via their own sleuthing after children were put into temporary foster care and shelters with little or no indication that they arrived at the border with their parents.

ProPublica stumbled upon one more case late last month after receiving a call from a distraught Salvadoran father who had been detained in South Texas, and whose 4-year-old son, Brayan, had literally been yanked from his grasp by a Customs and Border Protection agent after they crossed the border and asked for asylum. Julio, the father, asked to be identified only by his first name because he was fleeing gang violence and worried about the safety of relatives back home.

“I failed him,” said Julio, 27, sobbing uncontrollably. “Everything I had done to be a good father was destroyed in an instant.”

ProPublica tracked down Brayan, who has reddish-blond hair and an endearing lisp, at a temporary foster care agency in New York City, and reached out to the lawyer who represents him. Until that phone call, the lawyer, Jodi Ziesemer, a supervising attorney at Catholic Charities, had no idea that Brayan had been separated from his father. The chaos, she said, felt disturbingly like zero tolerance all over again.

“It’s so disheartening,” Ziesemer said “This was supposed to be a policy that ended.”

Officially it has. On June 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order retreating from his so-called zero-tolerance immigration enforcement policy, which called on authorities to criminally prosecute adults caught illegally crossing the border and separate them from any children they brought with them. A week later, a federal judge, Dana M. Sabraw, issued an injunction against the separations and ordered the government to put the thousands of affected families back together.

Sabraw, however, exempted cases in which the safety of the child was at risk, and crucially, imposed no standards or oversight over those decisions. As a result, attorneys say, immigration officials — taking their cues from an administration that has made it clear it still believes family separations are an effective deterrent — are using whatever justification they can find, with or without substantiation, to deem immigrant parents unfit or unsafe.

“If the authorities have even the most specious evidence that a parent was a gang member, or had some kind of blemish on their record,” said Neha Desai, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, “anything they can come up with to say that the separation is for the health and welfare of the child, then they’ll separate them.”

In an email, a senior CBP official acknowledged that immigrant families are still being separated, but said the separations had “nothing to do with zero tolerance.” The official added that “this administration continues to comply with the law and separates adults and children when required for the safety and security of the child.” The official declined to say how many children have been taken from their parents for what was said to be their own protection.

CBP officials explained that Brayan was such a case. One official said that the agency had conducted a routine background check on Julio, and that it “confirmed his gang affiliation with MS-13.” Spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer declined to provide the evidence the agency had to support the allegation, saying only that it was “law enforcement sensitive.” Nor would she say why CBP believed Julio was a danger to his child. But Sabraw’s order, she said, “did not prevent these separations, in fact it explicitly allows DHS to continue with this prior practice.”

CBP has also not shared any evidence supporting its assertion of Julio’s gang ties with his lawyer, Georgia Evangelista, who said she wonders whether it exists.

(On Tuesday, a government lawyer repeated the allegation to an immigration judge in South Texas but said he could not provide documentation to the court because it was “confidential,” according to Evangelista. She said the immigration judge did not press for release of the evidence but freed her client on an $8,000 bond. Evangelista was frustrated by the outcome, saying, “How can we fight these charges when we don’t know what they are.”)

According to Evangelista, Julio arrived at the border in mid-September, carrying a letter prepared by a Salvadoran lawyer that explained that he had fled El Salvador with his son because he had been attacked and threatened by gangs there for years. At Evangelista’s request, the Salvadoran lawyer and Julio’s former employer sent sworn statements vouching for Julio’s character, and stating that he was never involved in criminal activity.

“I’m furious about this. They aren’t playing by the rules,” Evangelista said, referring to U.S. immigration authorities. “They’re treating him like a criminal so they can justify taking away his son. Where’s the proof? It’s his word against theirs. It sickens me.”

Susan Watson, a civil rights and family lawyer, said this kind of action could not be done without a judge’s review in custody cases that do not involve immigration issues. “Constitutionally, before a parent is separated from a child, you are entitled to due process,” she said. “Some decision in a dark corner by the Border Patrol doesn’t meet that standard.”

In New York, Ziesemer says the new separations identified by her organization involve children between the ages of 2 and 17, including Brayan. All of them arrived in New York City without any records indicating they had been separated from their parents at the border and why. A few weeks ago, the ACLU, which brought the lawsuit over the first round of family separations, sent a letter to the Justice Department raising concerns about the new cases, specifically about the grounds for the separations and why the ACLU hadn’t been notified about them.

Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who led the organization’s lawsuit against family separations in the spring, said, “If the government is still secretly separating children, and is doing so based on flimsy excuses, that would be patently unconstitutional and we will be back in court.”

Lawyers at the ACLU and Catholic Charities said that the DOJ responded that it wasn’t obligated to report the new separations to the ACLU because they hadn’t been done as a part of the zero-tolerance policy. The DOJ said that in 14 of the 17 cases flagged in the ACLU’s letter, the children were removed from their parents’ custody because authorities suspected the parents had some kind of criminal background that made them unfit — even dangerous. But the agency would not specify what crimes the parents were suspected of committing and what evidence authorities had to support these allegations.

The ACLU and other groups representing immigrant children said the DOJ’s secrecy is highly troubling on several counts. They worry that the Department of Homeland Security has allowed authorities without formal training in custody issues — primarily Border Patrol agents — to make decisions using standards that could violate the spirit of the court order and that would never hold up in non-immigration cases. Ziesemer has talked to relatives and social workers and says she suspects that at least eight of the cases involve parents whose crime is illegally re-entering the country. Illegal re-entry is a felony, although previous administrations did not typically separate families in such cases. Ziesemer said the allegations the government has advanced to justify separations in eight other cases were either vague or unsubstantiated. The final case she identified involved a parent who was hospitalized.

“The government’s position is that because these are not zero-tolerance cases, they don’t have to tell us, or anyone, about them,” Ziesemer said. “Our position is that when children are separated from their parents, there needs to be some oversight.”

Brayan’s case is a vivid example of how government officials are interpreting the court order to allow separations of families.

I found out about him by accident. Early last month, after the government reported that of the more than 2,600 immigrant children separated under the zero-tolerance policy, only one child under the age of 5 remained in their care. I decided to try to find that child, thinking the case might make a compelling bookend to a story I’d written this year about a girl named Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, whose cries were recorded inside a Border Patrol detention facility in June. The recording ignited a storm of outrage that tipped the political scales against the Trump administration’s family separation policy.

An attorney on the border, Thelma O. Garcia, said she represented a 6-year-old Salvadoran boy named Wilder Hilario Maldonado Cabrera, who was in a temporary foster home in San Antonio. Wilder had been separated from his father in June, Garcia said, and hadn’t been reunited because the father had a 10-year-old warrant for a DUI charge in Florida.

The father, Hilario Maldonado, called me from the South Texas detention facility in Pearsall and said he’d tried to keep in touch with Wilder by phone, but his social worker didn’t always pick up. When they did connect, he said, Wilder, pudgy, precocious and missing his two front teeth, scolded him for not coming to take him home.

I told Maldonado that it appeared he would be one of the last parents to go through such a separation because the government had agreed to stop them.

Maldonado, 39, said that wasn’t true. The separations are still happening, he said, and he knew of one.

A few minutes later, I got a call from Julio, who was at the same detention facility. He sounded desperate, crying and pleading for answers. He said he’d turned himself and Brayan into the authorities as soon as they’d crossed the border, asked for asylum and told immigration agents that his mother, who lives in Austin, Texas, was willing to help him get on his feet. Seven days later, a Border Patrol agent took Brayan, dressed in a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, away, screaming.

Julio said all he knew was that his son was somewhere in New York. As soon as we hung up, I called Ziesemer at Catholic Charities, which has a government contract to provide legal services to the unaccompanied minors in the city. I asked whether she’d heard of Brayan.

“We do know this kid,” Ziesemer quickly responded, “but were not aware he was separated from his father.”

Ziesemer was audibly shaken. “Until you called, all I had was his name on a spreadsheet,” she said.

Ziesemer immediately arranged to have Brayan, who had been placed in a temporary foster home, brought to her office. Her experience told her not to expect much from their first interaction, partly because Brayan was likely to be afraid, and partly because he was only 4. So she tried putting Brayan at ease by opening a box of crayons and a Spider-Man coloring book.

He warmed up to her quickly, putting down his crayons to show her his Spider-Man moves and squiggling lines on a piece of paper when she asked whether he knew how to write his name. But, as Ziesemer expected, he was too young to make sense of what had happened to him on the border, much less explain it to an adult he’d just met. And his lisp made it hard for Ziesemer to understand the few things he could tell her.

After the meeting, she sounded both exasperated about having to grill a tiny child and terrified that there might be other children like him buried in her spreadsheets.

“We, and the caseworkers and the consulates, do what we can to fill in the gaps and figure out where these kids came from,” she said. “But that means days and weeks go by with a child not knowing where his parents are and vice versa. And it doesn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way.”

After Ziesemer’s meeting with Brayan, I traveled to Pearsall to meet Julio. He said he’d fled the country with Brayan because street gangs had threatened to kill him after finding out that he reported one of their members to the police. His wife and stepson stayed behind because there wasn’t enough money to pay for everyone to come. I spoke to his wife, who told me she was hiding out at her parents’ house because she didn’t want to be home if gang members came looking for her husband.

In photos his relatives sent, Julio looked sort of like a cop, stocky with a crew cut. But after a month in detention, he looked pale and deflated. He wore navy blue detention garb and his dark brown hair was wet, though neatly combed. He didn’t have any tattoos, which are common among Central American gang members.

Through tears, Julio told me he’d replayed the days since his arrival at the border in his mind, trying to make sense of why authorities took away his son. Julio and Brayan had been taken to the “ice box,” a notorious air-conditioned cellblock that is the first stop for most immigrants intercepted at the border. Brayan developed a high fever and had to be taken to the hospital for treatment. A Border Patrol agent who drove Julio and his son scolded Julio for bringing a small boy on such a harrowing trip. Could that be the reason they took his son away? Was it because the agents had looked at the color of Brayan’s hair and didn’t believe he was the boy’s father?

Julio wonders whether he had been fooled into signing a document at the hospital — they were all in English — surrendering his rights to his child. Was it because he’d once been arrested for a robbery in El Salvador, but exonerated two days later when authorities realized they had the wrong person? Why would they consider him a danger to his child?

It wasn’t until I told him that Julio learned his child had been taken from him because Border Patrol agents suspected he was a gang member. The news hit him hard, and it was confounding because at the same time the CBP had deemed him a gang member, another agency within DHS had found that his asylum petition, in which Julio claims he was a victim of gang violence, was persuasive enough to be heard by an immigration judge.

In early October, Julio had met with an asylum officer for what’s known as a credible fear interview. According to the report of that interview, which Julio provided to ProPublica, the asylum officer not only asked him why he fled El Salvador, but whether he had a criminal record. Among the questions were: Have you ever committed a crime in any country? Have you ever harmed someone for any reason? Even if you did not want to, have you ever helped someone else harm people? Have you ever been arrested or convicted of a crime? Have you ever been a member of a gang?

Julio answered no to all of them. The asylum officer who conducted the interview deemed Julio’s account credible, and, even more significantly, indicated that she had been provided no derogatory information or criminal records that would automatically bar Julio from winning asylum.

The discrepancy reflects differences in the legal standards for asylum and family separation. While the asylum officer’s decision is subject to review by a judge, the Border Patrol’s decision to take away Julio’s child was not.

“I don’t know what information, if any, they really have on Julio,” his attorney, Evangelista, said. “They have total discretion when it comes to separating him from his child. They can do what they want. And they don’t have to explain why.”

Julio said his own father had abandoned him when he was about Brayan’s age. Then his mother left for the United States when he was 7. He said he vowed never to do the same thing to Brayan, which is why he didn’t leave the boy behind in El Salvador. He wonders now whether that was a mistake. In every phone call with Brayan, Julio says, he feels his son slowly slipping away.

“He tells me: ‘You’re not my Papa anymore. I have a new Papa,’” Julio said of his son, adding: “He doesn’t even call me Papa. He calls me Papi. I never taught him that word.”

Back in New York, Ziesemer said she worries family separations may be beginning all over again.

Sitting with Brayan in her office, she said, brought back the faces of the 400 or so separated kids who had shuffled through over the summer. As Catholic Charities’ point person during the crisis, she said she came to know every single one of those kids by name. One 9-year-old girl went into a full panic attack when she was asked to step into a room without her sister because she thought Ziesemer was going to take her sister away like officials had taken her mother. “At one point, we had to have a meeting with the entire office to explain why the conference room was full of all these wailing kids,” she said.

Catholic Charities, the ACLU and several other large immigrant advocacy groups took the lead in putting the families together again; working the phones to find parents who were still in immigration detention and dispatching colleagues to Central America to track down parents who had already been deported. In addition to the “huge, heavy lift” of reunification, Ziesemer said, there was a crush of calls and emails from Congress, consulates and the media — all seeking information about the separations.

Ziesemer said she and her team worked around the clock for months, and though there are still several dozen kids awaiting reunification, she thought things were winding down. That’s when she began seeing new cases, like Brayan’s, which had some of the same hallmarks of the old ones.

Ziesemer didn’t know much about Brayan, except the little bit of information she’d gotten from him during their meeting. So I shared with her some of the things I’d learned about him from his family: that he could eat four hard-boiled eggs in one sitting; that he loved Lightning McQueen, a character from the Pixar movie “Cars”; and that he had a dog, Lucky, whom he insisted on seeing during every WhatsApp video call with his mother. His grandmother in Austin had fixed up a bedroom for him, filled with Mickey Mouse dolls, remote-control cars and winter coats. I told Ziesemer how distraught Brayan’s father was that his son called him “Papi.”

“A couple of weeks is a long time for a kid his age,” she said about Brayan. “They start losing attachments to people, even their parents.”

IMAGE: Relatives separated by deportation and immigration hug at the border during a brief reunification meeting at the banks of the Rio Bravo, a natural border between U.S. and Mexico, October 29, 2016. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez/File Photo

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Justice Probing DEA Program Linked To Mexico Massacres

Justice Probing DEA Program Linked To Mexico Massacres

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

The Justice Department’s inspector general announced on Tuesday that his office would investigate a Drug Enforcement Administration program linked to violent drug cartel attacks in Mexico that have left dozens, possibly hundreds, of people dead or missing.

In a letter to senior congressional Democrats, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said that an internal review had flagged the DEA’s Sensitive Investigative Units program as “an area of high risk.” His office, he wrote, would examine the drug agency’s management of the program and whether internal controls are in place to ensure that “DEA operations, information and personnel are protected from compromise.”

Under the program, the DEA vets and trains teams of Mexican federal police officers, known as SIUs, that conduct DEA-led operations in Mexico. Last year, ProPublica and National Geographic reported that at least two such operations were compromised and triggered deadly spasms of violence, including one that occurred less than an hour’s drive away from the Mexican border with Texas. A June 2017 story revealed that an attack on the small ranching town of Allende in the Mexican state of Coahuila in 2011 was unleashed after sensitive information obtained during a DEA operation wound up in the hands of cartel leaders, who ordered a wave of retaliation against suspected traitors.

A second story in December investigated a 2010 cartel attack on a Holiday Inn in Monterrey, Mexico, and found that it, too, was linked to a DEA surveillance operation. Four hotel guests and a hotel clerk, none of whom were involved with the drug trade, were kidnapped and never seen again.

Both operations involved the DEA’s Mexican SIU. ProPublica’s reporting detailed that the Mexican SIU had a yearslong, documented record of leaking information to violent and powerful drug traffickers. Since 2000, at least two supervisors have been assassinated after their identities and locations were leaked to drug traffickers by SIU members, according to allegations by current and former DEA agents who worked in Mexico.

Last year, another SIU supervisor, Iván Reyes Arzate, flew to Chicago and surrendered to U.S. authorities, who charged him with collaborating with drug traffickers. Arzate pleaded no contest to the charges in May and faces 25 years in prison. He is scheduled for sentencing this year.

The DEA, ProPublica found, had long been aware of this corruption and failed to address it, even when innocent lives were lost. In an email, a DEA spokeswoman, Katherine M. Pfaff, said the agency declined to comment on the inspector general’s investigation. The DEA considers the SIU program an “effective international program,” she wrote.

The agency has similar units in at least 12 other countries.

The Justice Department’s decision to investigate the SIUs marks the culmination of a campaign started by several leading Democrats in Congress after the publication of ProPublica’s stories. In a series of letters, the ranking members of three powerful committees — judiciary, appropriations and foreign affairs — began pushing for the Justice Department and the DEA to investigate. “These operations raise serious questions about the practices of DEA-trained and funded SIUs,” the legislators wrote in February, “and point to the need for greater accountability for these vetted units.”

That letter was signed by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who has long pursued accountability for the DEA’s operations abroad, as well as Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and one of the country’s leading authorities on national security matters, Rep. Eliot L. Engel, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the leading Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. The two representatives are from New York, and their committees oversee the State and Justice departments.

“In light of these incidents,” the legislators wrote, referring to Allende and Monterrey, “we believe that a thorough investigation into the practices of the DEA’s vetted units is essential.”

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Video: Audiotape Girl Finally Reunited With Immigrant Mom

Video: Audiotape Girl Finally Reunited With Immigrant Mom

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

Watch the 6-Year-Old Salvadoran Girl Heard on a Secret Recording Out of a Border Patrol Detention Facility Finally Being Reunited With Her Mom

HOUSTON — Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid walked out of a Houston airport early this morning to cheers, holding her mother’s hand, one month after they were separated at a Border Patrol detention facility and the 6-year-old’s voice was captured in an audio recording, begging for a phone call. A van pulled up, and Jimena sat on her mother’s lap in the backseat. She looked out through a window and waved at a handful of reporters, beaming.

It was a whirlwind government handoff as improvised and clandestine as their separation. Jimena was bundled out of a shelter in Phoenix on Thursday evening, loaded onto an airplane at supper time and flown three hours to Houston, where she kept herself awake all night in a passenger lounge in Terminal A with crayons and coloring books. Meanwhile her mother, Cindy Madrid, fresh out of a detention facility in south Texas, got word about the government’s plans too late to catch a flight, and barreled with her lawyer six hours down the highway to reach the little girl.

Both were too exhausted to answer questions upon leaving the airport at 3 a.m. Madrid’s lawyer said that Jimena had a bit of an emotional meltdown at the first sight of her mother. When asked in an earlier interview what she’d feel once she had her daughter back in her arms, Madrid said, “I’ll be the happiest woman in the world. It’s been very painful to be apart.”

Their exhausting, exhilarating reunification gives a window into the government’s handling of the nearly 3,000 others still pending. After a federal judge in San Diego set a deadline for the government to reunify the families that had been separated by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, the government promised to comply and asserted that it had a “well-coordinated” plan for doing so. A recent statement from the departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security said, “The Trump administration does not approach this mission lightly, and we intend to continue our good faith efforts to reunify families.”

However, in the weeks since the reunifications were started, there’s been little evidence of a plan. On Tuesday, authorities fell short of the court’s first deadline, which ordered them to reunify 103 children under 5, saying that several parents were ineligible because of criminal records. But they offered no evidence to support those assertions. They deemed other children ineligible for immediate reunification because their parents had been deported without them.

With every administration pronouncement and media call, the most fundamental facts and figures about the reunification effort change, including how many children have been separated under the new enforcement policy, how many have been reunified and what measures are being taken to match parents with their children.

Plans for reunifying Jimena with her mother seemed to change by the hour.

When Cindy Madrid, 29, was released from detention on Wednesday, authorities told her that she and the relatives who had agreed to serve as sponsors would have to undergo rigorous background checks before Jimena could be released to them, and that the process could take 10 days. By Wednesday night, the authorities were saying they might be able to waive the background checks and release Jimena based solely on the results of their DNA exams, which would take five days. Then authorities offered to allow Madrid to visit Jimena in Phoenix, raising the possibility that the child could be released to her in Arizona. With help from her lawyer and donations from a Salvadoran woman in Houston who learned of the situation from news accounts, Madrid scrambled to arrange to travel to Phoenix, and wait there for her daughter to be released. But on Thursday evening, the government’s plans for Jimena changed again, and at 5 p.m., Madrid was abruptly summoned to Houston instead.

Madrid said she’d do whatever the government asked to get her daughter back so that she could focus on fighting for asylum and starting a new life here. Madrid said she left El Salvador fleeing gang violence. The Trump administration, however, which derides asylum as a “loophole” that is used by undeserving immigrants seeking access to this country, has sought to shrink the program by narrowing grounds for relief. As part of that effort it has said it would not count either gang violence or domestic violence as sufficient for demonstrating persecution, potentially shutting the border to hundreds of thousands of people from Central America. Still, Madrid managed to pass her initial credible fear interview and has been released on bond until her case is heard in court, which could take years due to tens of thousands of backlogged cases.

For her daughter’s sake, Madrid says she won’t dwell on their monthlong separation. In an interview, however, she wondered aloud whether anything had been accomplished by it.

“It’s unfair what they are doing to the adults,” she said. “But what they’re doing to children is worse. They’re harming them, possibly for life. What’s the point of that?”

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Audiotape Immigrant Girl, 6, Still Separated From Mother

Audiotape Immigrant Girl, 6, Still Separated From Mother

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

The 6-Year-Old Heard on Border Facility Audiotape Is Still Separated From Her Mother, Who Must Parent From 1,000 Miles Away

The last time Cindy Madrid Henriquez, a Salvadoran immigrant, spoke to her 6-year-old daughter Jimena on the telephone, the little girl, who is in an Arizona shelter, began by complaining about having to wash her hair with bar soap instead of shampoo. Her scalp was dry and itchy. She had dandruff. Then her questions grew into fears: What if her hair started to fall out? What if her scalp became infected? When, she finally wailed, was her mother going to come and save her?

Madrid, who is in a detention facility 1,000 miles away in south Texas, said most phone calls with her daughter go that way: a relatively mundane dilemma spirals into a crisis. And there’s not much that Madrid can do, except to stay calm and talk her daughter off her emotional ledges.

“She says over and over, ‘Mommy, I want to be with you,’” said Madrid, who is 29. “I tell her, ‘I know. We’ll be together soon. Until then, you have to be strong.’”

Those phone calls, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, are what have kept her strong, she said, in the three weeks since immigration authorities separated her from her only child as part of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance enforcement policy, which called for criminal prosecutions of all people caught illegally crossing the border — including those, like Madrid, who subsequently request asylum. The pair’s plight captivated people around the world when ProPublica released a recording that was secretly made inside a Border Patrol detention facility and captured Jimena’s distraught cries for help after agents separated her from her mother.

Her pleas gave voice to the impact the Trump administration’s crackdown was having on the more than 2,300 children who were separated from their parents since the policy was officially launched in March — though recent reports indicate that hundreds more families were swept up in a test pilot of the program conducted last year. Mounting political pressure forced the administration to announce that it would stop separating immigrants from their children and reunify those who had already been affected. Still, there’s been no relief for those like Madrid and her daughter. On the contrary, her case shows that the retreat from zero tolerance could be as messy and painful as the launch, as she and other immigrant families seek to be reunited with their children, while pursuing separate claims for asylum.

The administration’s moves — or lack of them — indicate that it doesn’t want asylum seekers to have it both ways, despite court rulings ordering them to do so. In scathing terms last week, a federal judge in San Diego issued an injunction against the family separations and instructed the administration to reunite immigrant children with their parents by July 26. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have repeatedly asserted that they have a “well-coordinated process,” for fulfilling that order, but so far there’s been little sign of it.

Instead the administration remains committed to the goals that inspired zero tolerance in the first place, deterring people from seeking asylum, which it considers a “loophole” that undeserving immigrants use to gain legal entry into the country. The administration has sought to overturn a decades-old ruling that prohibits immigrant children from being detained more than 20 days. Immigrants already living in the United States who are related to the children being held in shelters and express a willingness to care for them are required to assume exorbitant travel costs, and submit to DNA tests, fingerprinting and other background checks without assurances that the information won’t be used for other purposes. Border Patrol agents have physically turned away people who present themselves for asylum at ports of entry, saying there isn’t enough room to process new petitioners. Meanwhile, immigration judges are setting bonds so high that detainees cannot afford to pay them.

“Their bottom line is they want people to be detained through the asylum process,” said Joan Friedland, a veteran immigration lawyer in New Mexico. “It’s the most punitive. It’s where people are least likely to have access to a lawyer and prevail. It makes people want to give up their claims and return to their home countries.”

Outside of carefully scripted press calls, officials at ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services rarely answer even the most basic questions from the media about the fate of the parents who have been separated from their children, including how many are still being detained, how many have been deported and how many have been reunified. And when they do answer questions, they offer shifting statistics and rationales.

In a media call Thursday, led by HHS Secretary Alex M. Azar, the administration said that it had some 3,000 children in its care — a much larger number than the 2,057 he reported to Congress last week. Authorities, he said, had not determined how many of those children had been separated as a result of zero tolerance and how many had simply gotten separated from their parents during their journeys. His agency has brought on an additional 230 people in order to comply with the San Diego court’s reunification deadline, he said, although he could not say how many children had been reunited with their parents so far. Last week, Azar told Congress that 500 children had been reunited.

By following Madrid and Jimena, I hoped to track the process and its impact on those going through it. But even that’s come up against arbitrary rules and resistance. Over the past week, I have made several attempts to visit Madrid. After agreeing to meet with me over the phone, Madrid declined my official request. She subsequently wrote and signed two letters saying she had made a mistake and expressing an interest in seeing me. But when I shared those letters with ICE officials in Texas, they refused to process a new request. In an email, spokesman Carl Rusnok accused me of “badgering” Madrid, and wrote, “For our already EXTREMELY busy ICE officers to repeatedly ask the same individual about a request from the same media outlet might be construed as coercive.”

As a result, I’ve only been able to speak with Madrid by telephone, which as anyone who has had to rely on detention center phones knows, is a flawed and stressful alternative. For unclear reasons, the sound quality of the calls is terrible: Madrid sounds as if she’s speaking from space — with a blanket muffling random words. I know I miss key phrases and must constantly ask her to repeat herself. I can’t read her body language. She can’t read mine. And the human connection that allows a journalist to gain an understanding of a person’s background and outlook is impossible. It’s a deeply frustrating experience for both of us. Worse, I imagine, are Madrid’s calls with Jimena.

Madrid says she’s been an emotional wreck since the moment her daughter was taken away from her. Her agony only increases as days pass without answers about if and when she and Jimena will be reunited, or even updates on how her daughter is doing. Is she eating well? How’s she sleeping? She hasn’t slept alone her entire life. She’s always slept in a bed with her mother or grandmother.

“In six years, I had only been away from her for two nights,” Madrid said. “And each time, she made me promise never to be away from her again. She hated it. We are incredibly close.”

Would she have made the trip if she had known she’d be separated from her daughter? “No,” she said, “I wouldn’t have come.”

But Madrid said staying in El Salvador wasn’t an option either. In an affidavit that is part of her asylum petition, she wrote that earlier this year a Salvadoran gang leader shot and killed her boyfriend while she was walking hand-in-hand with him. The gang member threatened to kill Madrid too unless she kept quiet, she said. She said she reported the murder to police anyway, but the gang member was never arrested.

The affidavit said that Madrid observed police officers and the gang members “talking and hanging out like old friends.”

Weeks after the murder, Madrid said, the gang member responsible approached her and Jimena in a market. She said he threatened to kidnap her daughter if he ever saw them again.

“We didn’t leave the house after that,” Madrid said. “When a gang member says something like that, they are not playing around. We were terrified.”

Madrid decided to take Jimena to the United States, where Madrid has two sisters, and Jimena has four beloved cousins. On their first try in April, they made it all the way to northern Mexico, where there is rampant cartel violence. She and Jimena were intercepted by Mexican authorities and deported back to El Salvador. They set out again in May and rafted across the Rio Grande into Texas in mid-June.

“It was a long, hard trip,” Madrid said. “But Jimena behaved really well. All her cousins are in the United States. She was really happy about coming to live with them.”

Madrid said they had no idea they were walking into zero tolerance. One of her sisters had immigrated to the United States a couple of years ago, also fleeing gang violence. That sister was only separated from her daughter for a few hours, while she pleaded her case in court. And then mother and daughter were released on bond. Madrid told her attorney, Thelma O. Garcia, that she thought that’s what was happening when a Border Patrol agent took Jimena away.

“Jimena was screaming for her mother,” Garcia said Madrid told her. “When Cindy asked what was happening, the agent told her not to worry. He was only taking Jimena while Cindy went to court. They would only be separated a few hours. Now we know that was a lie.”

Garcia said that authorities have begun reviewing Madrid’s asylum claim to determine whether her fears of persecution are credible. The attorney said that when she first met with Madrid, it was hard getting her to focus on the incidents that drove her to flee El Salvador. “Her only concern was her daughter, and what needed to do be done to reunite them as quickly as possible,” Garcia said. “The rest didn’t seem to matter.”

Weakening Madrid’s case further, Garcia says, is that her and Jimena’s asylum claims are moving along on separate tracks before separate judges who will decide whether their claims merit a full hearing. Madrid has heard about numerous other parents whose claims have been denied and who have been deported without their children. She’s worried the same could happen to her.

“I don’t want to leave without my daughter,” she said.

While their claims are under review, however, Madrid wants her daughter released from the shelter into her sister’s care in Houston. Her attorney said authorities are reviewing the request, but have not indicated when that might happen.

In the meantime, Madrid takes comfort from the dozens of other mothers in the same situation in the Port Isabel Detention Center. There are 75 women in her barracks, she said. And she’s grown close to some of them. They trade advice they’ve gotten from their lawyers to prepare for the so-called “credible fear” interviews that are part of asylum cases. They share cakes and fruit that come in occasional care packages. And they talk about their phone calls with their children. “At night you can hear many of us crying ourselves to sleep,” she said.

Madrid says she tries not to cry when she speaks with Jimena. And she’s come up with a trick to keep Jimena from crying, too: coloring books. Madrid said she told Jimena she’s begun coloring pictures that she’ll either send to her daughter in the mail, or hold onto until they see one another. She asked Jimena to do the same. On the phone, they talk about their latest works of art.

Madrid says she’s working on a picture of a doll with brown skin. She’s wearing a pink dress with yellow trim, and a crown of orange flowers. Jimena is coloring a picture of two bears embracing one another, surrounded by a heart.

“It makes her happy to feel we’re working on a project together,” Madrid said of her daughter. “It keeps us connected, for now.”

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For 6 Year-Old Immigrant Girl, Memorized Phone Number Was Lifeline

For 6 Year-Old Immigrant Girl, Memorized Phone Number Was Lifeline

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

 

For a 6-Year-Old Snared in the Immigration Maze, a Memorized Phone Number Proves a Lifeline

On a hot and steamy Sunday morning, the man smuggling 6-year-old Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid and her mother, Cindy, across the border into the United States told them to be ready to depart soon. Cindy Madrid, exhausted and excited, called her sisters in Houston — the final leg of their month-long journey from El Salvador was about to begin. The sisters whispered a prayer into the phone, asking God to go with them. Then one sister grew serious: Make sure Jimena memorizes my phone number in case you are separated from one another along the way.

“How do you expect me to do that?” Madrid asked in a panic. “There’s not enough time.”

The sisters were firm. “We don’t know how. But do it.”

One whirlwind week later, that number, drilled into Jimena’s head by rote as she and her mother rafted across the Rio Grande, has become the little girl’s lifeline. Shortly after setting foot in Texas on June 13, they were detained and Border Patrol officials separated mother from daughter as part of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance enforcement policy. But Jimena’s ability to recall her aunt’s phone number through the trauma of that separation has, so far, kept her from becoming lost in a system that has taken more than 2,300 immigrant children from their parents.

Jimena’s insistent pleas for a phone call at a Border Patrol detention facility, captured on an audio recording provided to ProPublica, quickly became the searing incarnation of what the Trump administration is doing to children. Almost instantly, Jimena’s voice was everywhere; listened to millions of times in homes, at protests, and even the White House press briefing room. The seven-minute audio crystallized the impact the policy was having on children, stirring outrage.

“After all she’s gone through, her reward is that she’s become the voice for all the children in that situation,” said her aunt, a Salvadoran woman who is seeking asylum and asked not to be identified because she worries about how public attention might affect her case.

The path ahead for both Jimena and her family remains uncertain. Under withering attack from foes and friends alike, President Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to retreat from the policy, saying he had instructed authorities to stop separating immigrant families and start reuniting them. And today, administration officials suggested that they might undo their decision to criminally prosecute every immigrant caught illegally crossing the border.

But thus far, the president has provided no clear plan for implementing his instructions. And, while it only took the stroke of a pen to both create and, perhaps, scuttle the policy, its effects have wrought havoc on an immigration enforcement system already widely recognized as failing. Now that same system faces the daunting task of putting those families back together. Jimena’s case opens a window into how that process will work.

“Whether or not my sister and niece are able to stay in the country, the most important thing is that they are reunified,” said Jimena’s aunt. Speaking of her niece, she added, “What we don’t want is to lose her.”

And she worried about the other children stuck in the same predicament. “It’s really hard,” she said. “I can’t imagine the magnitude of these children’s suffering, the psychological and emotional damage that the older and younger kids there have.”

Memorizing her aunt’s phone number gave Jimena a huge advantage over many of the immigrant children who are illegally brought across the border by their families, and who are not old enough to speak, count, or even know their parents’ full names. Central American consular workers and child advocates report that, under zero tolerance, once children have been physically separated from their parents, their legal cases have been bureaucratically separated as well. The children have been treated like unaccompanied minors, even as their relatives were shipped to other U.S. detention centers. Now that the policy of separating families appears to have ended, the burden of the reunification will depend in large measure on the children’s abilities to provide information that will help authorities identify who, and where, their parents are.

The audio provided to ProPublica last week shows how difficult that will be. In it, nearly a dozen Central American children between the ages of four and 10 wail inconsolably. Consular officials struggle to get the children to stop crying long enough to tell them where they came from, and whether they came with their mothers or their fathers. The children are so distraught, they sound as if they can barely breathe. And they scream “Mami” and “Papá” as if those are the only words they know.

Amid the chaos, Jimena is heard, asking in full sentences for authorities to help her call her aunt. When they do not respond, she presses her point: “My mommy says that I’ll go with my aunt, and that she will come to pick me up there as quickly as possible so I can go with her.”

Jimena’s aunt said the consular official who eventually helped Jimena call her was struck by the child’s ability to stay composed under that kind of pressure. “Of all the children here, she’s the only one who provided information,” the official told her. “Most children here aren’t able to give names, much less a phone number.’”

The aunt said when she first heard Jimena’s voice on the phone “I threw myself out of bed and fell on my knees. I thanked God that she remembered the number. If not, I don’t know what would have happened to her.”

Still, even though the authorities know where her mother is, Jimena has not been given a chance to speak to her mother since they were separated. And while authorities have told the family that Jimena will be reunited with her mother, they have not said when.

A staff member at the shelter in Phoenix, Arizona, where Jimena is being held couldn’t fully explain why the girl had not been allowed to speak to her mother, or even whether her mother had been consulted about vaccinations Jimena has received. The shelter worker, who would not provide her name, said that at one point, when Jimena’s mother called from an immigration detention facility in Port Isabel, Texas, the little girl was in a mandatory “Know Your Rights” workshop and couldn’t be excused to take the call. The shelter worker said the mother, who has very little money to pay for phone calls and spotty access to a telephone, was told to call back.

“I can’t say exactly why we haven’t been able to get Mom to talk to her daughter,” the shelter worker said. “But we are hoping to get Mom on the phone with her soon.”

In the meantime, the aunt passes messages between Jimena and her mother. She talked about her niece’s ordeal during an extensive interview in her tiny, rundown apartment on the southwest side of Houston. Her relief at finding her niece was palpable. She shared dozens of family photos, and showed the outpouring of messages on her Facebook page, joking about how she’s had her own “five minutes of fame,” thanks to her niece’s renown.

During the interview, both Jimena and her mother called the aunt. Madrid came to the United States from a small town outside her country’s capital, fleeing gang violence. She was cautiously optimistic about the prospect of reuniting with her daughter. She said other detainees had told her they heard Jimena on TV. “I’m so proud. She’s a very smart girl, very brave.”

Jimena, now happily connected to her aunt and her mom, sounded almost chirpy when she called, her rapid-fire way of talking making it hard for non-native Spanish speakers to catch everything she said. She organized her thoughts in lists, running through the activities of her day, the meals she likes and doesn’t like, and numbers and locations of vaccinations she’s received. One, she said, playfully pausing as if delivering a punch line, was “right on the very, very bottom of my butt.”

What she talked most about was not where she is, but were she wants to be: with her mother, outside of detention. When she gets there, she said she already knows the pets she wants to buy and the kinds of pizzas she wants to eat. She blew kisses through the phone to her favorite cousin and asked whether they can go to the same school. Then she asked her aunt whether she has a bathtub, warning: “You’re going to have to bathe me, because I’m going to be very dirty when I get there.” And then, her silly tone softened and she asked her aunt when she would see her mother again.

The aunt had no answer. “We don’t know yet, my love,” the aunt told her. “But she told me to tell you to behave yourself and be strong, until you’re back together.”

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Listen To Children In Detention Crying As Border Patrol Agent Jokes

Listen To Children In Detention Crying As Border Patrol Agent Jokes

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

 

Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border

Leer en Español.

The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe. They scream “Mami” and “Papá” over and over again, as if those are the only words they know.

The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”

Then a distraught but determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleads repeatedly for someone to call her aunt. Just one call, she begs anyone who will listen. She says she’s memorized the phone number, and at one point, rattles it off to a consular representative. “My mommy says that I’ll go with my aunt,” she whimpers, “and that she’ll come to pick me up there as quickly as possible.”

An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children. More than 2,300 of them have been separated from their parents since April, when the Trump administration launched its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which calls for prosecuting all people who attempt to illegally enter the country and taking away the children they brought with them. More than 100 of those children are under the age of 4. The children are initially held in warehouses, tents or big box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities.

Condemnations of the policy have been swift and sharp, including from some of the administration’s most reliable supporters. It has united religious conservatives and immigrant rights activists, who have said that “zero tolerance” amounts to “zero humanity.” Democratic and Republican members of Congress spoke out against the administration’s enforcement efforts over the weekend. Former first lady Laura Bush called the administration’s practices “cruel” and “immoral,” and likened images of immigrant children being held in kennels to those that came out of Japanese internment camps during World War II. And the American Academy of Pediatrics has said the practice of separating children from their parents can cause the children “irreparable harm.”

Still, the administration had stood by it. President Donald Trump blames Democrats and says his administration is only enforcing laws already on the books, although that’s not true. There are no laws that require children to be separated from their parents, or that call for criminal prosecutions of all undocumented border crossers. Those practices were established by the Trump administration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has cited passages from the Bible in an attempt to establish religious justification. On Monday, he defended it again saying it was a matter of rule of law, “We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws.” A Border Patrol spokesman echoed that thought in a written statement.

In recent days, authorities on the border have begun allowing tightly controlled tours of the facilities that are meant to put a humane face on the policy. But cameras are heavily restricted. And the children being held are not allowed to speak to journalists.

The audio obtained by ProPublica breaks that silence. It was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who “heard the children’s weeping and crying, and was devastated by it.”

The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable.

The child who stood out the most was the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl with a phone number stuck in her head. At the end of the audio, a consular official offers to call the girl’s aunt. ProPublica dialed the number she recited in the audio, and spoke with the aunt about the call.

“It was the hardest moment in my life,” she said. “Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. She’s crying and begging me to go get her. She says, ‘I promise I’ll behave, but please get me out of here. I’m all alone.’”

The aunt said what made the call even more painful was that there was nothing she could do. She and her 9-year-old daughter are seeking asylum in the United States after immigrating here two years ago for the exact same reasons and on the exact same route as her sister and her niece. They are from a small town called Armenia, about an hour’s drive northwest of the Salvadoran capital, but well within reach of its crippling crime waves. She said gangs were everywhere in El Salvador: “They’re on the buses. They’re in the banks. They’re in schools. They’re in the police. There’s nowhere for normal people to feel safe.”

She said her niece and sister set out for the United States over a month ago. They paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide them through Guatemala, and Mexico and across the border into the United States. Now, she said, all the risk and investment seem lost.

The aunt said she worried that any attempt to intervene in her niece’s situation would put hers and her daughter’s asylum case at risk, particularly since the Trump administration overturned asylum protections for victims of gang and domestic violence. She said she’s managed to speak to her sister, who has been moved to an immigration detention facility near Port Isabel, Texas. And she keeps in touch with her niece, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, by telephone. Mother and daughter, however, have not been able to speak to one another.

The aunt said that Alison has been moved out of the Border Patrol facility to a shelter where she has a real bed. But she said that authorities at the shelter have warned the girl that her mother, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, might be deported without her.

“I know she’s not an American citizen,” the aunt said of her niece. “But she’s a human being. She’s a child. How can they treat her this way?”

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Top Democrats Demand Inquiry Into Deadly DEA-Led Operations

Top Democrats Demand Inquiry Into Deadly DEA-Led Operations

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

 

Top Democrats on both the House foreign affairs and judiciary committees called Thursday for an inquiry into Drug Enforcement Administration-led operations in Honduras and Mexico that resulted in the deaths of dozens, possibly hundreds, of people who had nothing to do with the drug trade.

The letter, addressed to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, drew on a scathing Justice Department inspector general investigationinto a 2012 DEA operation in Honduras — known as “Operation Anvil” — that had targeted drug trafficking networks operating along that country’s Caribbean coast. During one botched operation, members of the agency’s vetted Honduran federal police unit — acting on the DEA’s orders — fired on a water taxi carrying people who were apparently unarmed and not connected to the drug trade. Four people were killed and another four were injured.

The letter also refers to a ProPublica investigation into a 2011 massacre by the Zetas cartel in the Mexican state of Coahuila that was triggered after sensitive information shared by the DEA with its Mexican vetted police unit wound up in the hands of cartel leaders, who ordered a wave of retaliation against suspected traitors.

The massacre left dozens and potentially hundreds of people dead and missing in and around a small, quiet ranching town called Allende, which is a 40-minute drive from the Texas border. The story was published in partnership with National Geographic in June.

“We believe these and other troubling issues merit further inquiry,” read the letter, written by Rep. Henry C. “Hank” Johnson, Jr., of Georgia, and signed by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking member of the judiciary committee, New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the ranking member of the foreign affairs committee, and 11 other representatives.

“Given that both the (IG) review and a recent ProPublica report have revealed deficiencies in U.S.-vetted police units in Honduras and Mexico, are you carrying out a thorough review of our government’s system of vetted units to ensure that improvements are made?” Johnson asked in the letter.

For two decades, the so-called “Sensitive Investigative Unit Program” has been the DEA’s workaround method of battling drugs with a foreign partner it doesn’t trust. The agency sets up a unit under its supervision, culling members from the host country’s police forces. Then it trains these foreign officers — often in the U.S. — polygraphs them, and, in some cases, works alongside them in the field.

The agency has established SIUs in some 13 countries around the world. Administrators at the agency have hailed them as the “bread and butter” of the DEA’s activities abroad.

In Mexico, however, the SIU has been plagued by corruption from the start. Since 2000, at least two supervisors have been assassinated after their identities and locations were leaked to drug traffickers by SIU members, according to allegations by current and former DEA agents who worked in Mexico. Earlier this year, another SIU supervisor, Ivan Reyes Azarte, flew to Chicago and surrendered to U.S. authorities who charged him with collaborating with drug traffickers.

The DEA doesn’t dispute the corruption within their Mexican unit’s ranks. In interviews, several agents said that part of “the game” of working in Mexico involves understanding that the vetted unit — and every other Mexican law enforcement agency — might leak to a specific cartel and reliably help pursue another. The trick, they said, was figuring out which cartel the vetted unit was helping, and then using the unit to pursue that cartel’s rivals.

But the investigations by ProPublica and the inspector general made clear that sometimes there are tragic consequences to the game. And while the DEA is quick to take credit for the times it helps its foreign partners capture drug cartel kingpins, it remains silent or claims innocence when lives are lost as a result of its operations.

In the case of the Mexican massacre, DEA officials failed to conduct an internal review of the agency’s role in the attack, and did not either suspend its relationship with the vetted unit or offer to provide assistance to those victimized by the leak. And in Honduras, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz found that the DEA not only failed to conduct a review of the gunfight, but knowingly misled Congress in an attempt to cover up its role.

Among the revelations in the IG’s report: DEA and state department officials told Congress that their Honduran law enforcement partners fired on a water taxi because passengers on the taxi had fired first, but there was “no credible evidence that the individuals in the passenger boat fired first.” Available evidence “places into serious question whether there was gunfire from the passenger boat at any time,” the report said.

Although the DEA has insisted that it played only a supporting role in the Honduran operation, the inspector general found that it was a DEA agent who ordered a helicopter gunner to open fire on the water taxi.

In a press release, Johnson wrote that the IG report “confirms our worst fears,” and leaves many questions unanswered. “The biggest question of all is: what is our government doing to fix this and make sure that, going forward, any U.S. agent involved in the loss of innocent life abroad is held accountable?”

Ginger Thompson is a senior reporter at ProPublica who writes about the drug war.