Dozens of young children have been prevented from being reunited with their parents after they were forcibly separated at the US border under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.
Officials scrambled to meet a 14-day court deadline to reunite about 100 immigrant children under five with their parents after an outcry over the crackdown.
However 27 young migrant children were said to be “not eligible for reunification”, with some parents still in custody awaiting processing while others were said to have a “serious criminal history”.
Twelve other children’s mothers or fathers have already been deported from the US.
In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Ever Reyes Mejia walked out of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement centre last night carrying his beaming son and the boy’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles backpack.
Another boy and a girl who had been in temporary foster care were reunited with their Honduran fathers at the centre about three months after they were split up.
The three fathers were “just holding them and hugging them and telling them that everything was fine and that they were never going to be separated again,” said immigration lawyer Abril Valdes. The children were “absolutely thrilled to be with their parents again.”
Nearly 3,000 children were split from undocumented adults entering the US. Last month a district judge in San Diego set a two-week deadline to reunite the youngest children their parents and a 30-day deadline for older children.
A Guatemalan man said his six-year-old son feared he was dead after US authorities separated the pair in May in El Paso, Texas. Hermelindo Che Coc, 31, said the boy cried on the phone with him from the shelter and asked whether he still loved him.
“I’m asking God for him to be in my arms as soon as possible,” Mr Che Coc told reporters through tears before attending a required check-in with immigration authorities in Los Angeles, where he was told to get a passport and return in October. “Without him, I can’t be happy.”
Source: News Agencies
