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A seven-year-old boy and his migrant mother separated a month ago were reunited Friday after she sued in federal court and the Justice Department agreed to release the child.
The two were reunited at about 2:30 a.m. at Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Maryland, hours after a Justice Department lawyer told a U.S. District Court judge the child would be released.
The mother, Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia, had filed for political asylum after crossing the border with her son, Darwin, following a trek from Guatemala. She said she started crying when the two were reunited and that she’s never going to be away from him again.
Other immigrants who remained locked up and separated from their families struggled to stay in touch with children who are in many cases hundreds of miles apart.
Immigration enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border was plunged deeper into chaos over U.S. President Donald Trump’s reversal of a policy separating immigrant children from parents, causing uncertainty for both migrant families and the federal agencies in charge of prosecuting and detaining them.
A senior Trump administration official said that about 500 of the more than 2,300 children separated from their families at the border have been reunited since May. It was unclear how many of the children were still being detained with their families.
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Federal agencies were working to set up a centralized reunification process for the remaining separated children and their families at a detention centre just over the border in Texas, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
There were also signs that the administration was dialling back its “zero-tolerance” policy, for now, but the president showed no sign of softening in public remarks, even as Congress failed again to pass immigration reform.
Even if we get 100% Republican votes in the Senate, we need 10 Democrat votes to get a much needed Immigration Bill – & the Dems are Obstructionists who won’t give votes for political reasons & because they don’t care about Crime coming from Border! So we need to elect more R’s!
—@realDonaldTrump
Trum also chided Republican lawmakers for “wasting their time on immigration” while imploring them to wait until after the midterm elections in November when he hopes a “red wave” will take over the House and Senate.
Republicans should stop wasting their time on Immigration until after we elect more Senators and Congressmen/women in November. Dems are just playing games, have no intention of doing anything to solves this decades old problem. We can pass great legislation after the Red Wave!
—@realDonaldTrump
In Washington, the House killed a hard-right immigration bill Thursday and Republican leaders delayed a planned vote on a compromise GOP package, with party members fiercely divided on the issue.
Democrats oppose both measures. The rejected bill would have curbed legal immigration and bolstered border security but would not have granted a pathway to citizenship to “Dreamers” who arrived in the country illegally as children.
The delayed vote was on a compromise bill between GOP moderates and conservatives that would offer Dreamers a pathway to citizenship and provide $25 billion US for Trump’s border wall, among other things.
Mixed signals at the border
Immigrants like Ever Castillo and Diva Funes were among those affected by the mixed signals from the U.S.
The couple from Comayagua, Honduras, arrived at the border Thursday and presented themselves for asylum with their five children, ages one to 12 years. Castillo said they did not know about the family separation policy when they began hitchhiking to the U.S. two weeks ago.
He said Border Patrol agents told them they would be separated if they entered the U.S., and they opted to walk back across the international bridge into Reynosa, Mexico. Rather than be separated from his children, “I said, ‘better that we head back to my country,”‘ said Castillo.
After Trump’s executive order, a host of unanswered questions remained, including what will happen to the children already separated from their parents and where the government will house all the newly detained migrants in an already overcrowded system.
A 31-year-old Brazilian man held in Cibola County Correctional Centre in Milan, New Mexico, said he didn’t know when he would see his nine-year-old son again.
The father told the AP in a phone interview Thursday that he spoke to his son once by phone since they were separated 26 days before.
The man, who is seeking asylum, spoke on condition of anonymity because he said in Brazil he is sought by a criminal gang for failure to pay an $8,000 US debt, and fears retribution.
The man said he worried about his son, who only speaks Portuguese.
“He cried. He was so sad,” the father said. “I had promised him it would only be three to five days.”
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