Immigrant parents struggle to find separated children amid chaos on the border

BROWNSVILLE — She crossed the border illegally in May with her four children, one of whom was still breastfeeding and was the progeny, along with another, of her rapists. She was seeking asylum, afraid for her life in her home country, where her attackers, police officers, threatened to kill them all because they were evidence of the crimes.

Instead of the refuge she sought, the mother was arrested, imprisoned and her children taken away. She had no idea where they were when she tried to convince an asylum officer of the veracity of her claim. The bureaucrat denied it.

Last week, appearing without an attorney in a small cavernous courtroom in the sprawling Port Isabel detention center, the woman made one last-ditch appeal to a harried, over-worked immigration judge that she be allowed to stay in the United States, and that her children be returned to her.

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“Forgive me for having crossed illegally,” pleaded the mother, whose identity and country of origin are being withheld for her safety. “But I had to protect my life and my children.”

When she left her Central American country and embarked on the journey north, the woman likely had no idea she would be caught in the maelstrom of an impassioned debate over U.S. immigration policies. She had been here years ago and was deported, but that was in a very different climate.

When Border Patrol agents apprehended her last month, President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, resulting in the separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents since May alone, had not yet been rescinded. The government was cracking down on claims for asylum — ruling that the fear of violence in one’s home country did not meet the grounds for protection.

But now, in light of a federal judge’s order that all children be reunited with their parents in 30 days, and the Trump administration’s determination that families be detained together, confusion over conflicting directives has sparked chaos across the border. No place is ground zero more than this South Texas detention center, which the government designated as the “primary family reunification and removal center.”

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Lawyers, politicians and human rights advocates have descended en masse on this mostly rural border community. They described a Byzantine process to find parents and children among three federal agencies in charge of their care while frantically trying to prepare those with potential asylum claims before they are deported. They are racing against the clock.

It remains uncertain how the government will comply with the judicial ruling, though in court filings late Friday it requested permission to detain families together, likely until their cases are decided in a process that can drag on for months. It has sought to overturn a decades-old legal settlement that generally prevents the detention of children for longer than 20 days and has requested the Defense Department help in holding up to 12,000 immigrants, including in Texas.

The administration has declined to say how many separated children have thus far been reunited with their parents, or how many have been deported alone. Not knowing where their children are complicates a parent’s claims for asylum, lawyers said. Federal agencies struggled under unclear guidance and protests around the nation mounted against a practice that has stirred outrage across political and religious lines.

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The Texas Civil Rights Project, which has filed an international human rights complaint against the administration’s practice, interviewed more than 380 separated parents, finding at least five have been deported without their children and about another 100 are no longer in immigrant detention, suggesting they may have been removed.

Many detained parents have been unable to secure lawyers or find their children before having to fight for asylum or face deportation. Last week, women filed into the Port Isabel facility’s immigration court in blue jumpsuits, tearfully asking the judge to reconsider. Some mentioned their children. Others rubbed red eyes in silence.

“I have read the asylum officer’s decision and reviewed his written interview notes,” Judge Robert Powell told one after another. “You do not have a significant possibility of asylum … I wish you good luck in your home country.”

The Central American mother who had been raped told the judge that she has four children, two of whom are the products of the assaults.

“I have two names of officials and a (plate) number of the (government) car that was involved,” she said. “They know that I have filed complaints against them.”

When the men discovered she had borne the children, she said they went to their school and threatened them. Armed strangers showed up at her house. Relatives were killed.

The judge, who according to federal statistics analyzed by Syracuse University has denied about 80 percent of asylum claims in the last five years, sternly questioned why the mother did not include all of those details to her asylum officer.

“I was scared. They might have recorded me or this might reach my country,” she said. “I was waiting to appear in front of a judge.”

She was consumed with worry about her children’s whereabouts.

“At that moment I had immense pain, and I still have pain, at the separation of my children,” she said.

Eventually Powell said he did not think the woman was likely to succeed in her asylum claim unless she came up with “corroborating evidence.”

“But I’m going to give you that opportunity to prevail in court,” he said.

It was the only denial of credible fear, the first step to obtaining asylum, that the judge reversed that morning.

Ruby Powers, a Houston immigration lawyer who interviewed separated parents at the detention facility last week, spoke with the mother, who she considers to have an “extremely compelling case.”

To qualify for asylum, applicants must prove they have a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group,” and that their government is unwilling or unable to protect them.

Powers said the mother still does not know where her children are, only that they are in the custody of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which houses unaccompanied immigrant children. The attorney said parents who have been separated from their children struggle through asylum interviews.

“It impacts their ability to focus on the issue,” she said. “You’re seeing them relive their last moments and thinking about their child.”

That concern is compounded by the fact that asylum seekers by definition tend to hail from countries where government officials are often themselves the problem and cannot always be trusted. Many immigrants conduct their initial asylum interviews by phone with an officer hundreds of miles away whose face they cannot see, and with a translator dialing in.

“There is a lot of tension,” Powers said.

The government has directed asylum officers to more narrowly consider who qualifies for credible fear. And in a controversial ruling this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it nearly impossible to gain the full protection through citing claims of domestic abuse or gang violence, a predominant avenue for Central Americans seeking asylum.

“All of these factors combined, including the separations, have made the entire process much more difficult than it was even before, when it was still difficult,” Powers said.

Relatively few people obtain asylum, but Sessions has criticized the procedure for allowing many immigrants into the country while they wait out their cases, which can take years because of a record backlog.

Last week, lawyers also reported that some separated parents have been pressured into signing forms agreeing to deportation to get their children back.

“Parents are for the most part feeling coerced into giving up their claims for asylum or other immigration relief with the expectation that that is the fastest and easiest way to be reunified with their children,” said Manoj Govindaiah, director of family detention services for the San Antonio nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES.

For many parents the most pressing concern is knowing their children are safe.

Angel Funez, a 35-year-old father imprisoned at the Port Isabel detention center, said in a telephone interview that he came here from Honduras with his 13-year-old son. He lost his job and could no longer afford the bi-monthly “tax” gang members in San Pedro Sula had ordered him to pay — in essence, a death sentence.

When Border Patrol agents found the two near McAllen in June, they prosecuted the father for illegal entry. He said he hasn’t heard anything about his son since and that when he called a government hotline, social workers could tell him only that he was in Miami.

“I’m really worried,” Funez said.

Parents have been deported without their children, including one Guatemalan father who had no idea where his 18-month-old was for four months until they were reunited in December. A Salvadoran mother was deported early this year after she was separated from her teenage daughter during a zero- tolerance pilot program the government launched quietly in West Texas last fall.

The girl remains here with her father, a man she hardly knows, while the mother is back in a place where she said gangs terrorized her and her daughter, even cutting off a relative’s ear.

“I will never be OK,” the mother, Elba Dominguez, said in a brief text exchange. “I am here in El Salvador without my daughter.”

Children have also been sent back alone, in some cases even landing in foster care in their home countries.

John-Michael Torres, a spokesman for the La Union del Pueblo Entero, a human rights organization in south Texas, said the group received a frantic call last month from a woman unable to find her stepchildren.

The family is from a violent part of Mexico and the father, who has lived illegally in the McAllen area for years, returned to retrieve his children and bring them here. The father was caught coming back across the border in June and prosecuted for the crime. His two sons, aged 9 and 10, were taken from him.

Eventually the group located the children in the custody of the Mexican public welfare agency. It is unclear what will happen to them as the father and his wife are in the United States illegally and may likely not be able to return if they leave. It is unclear what other relatives remain in Mexico.

In some cases, parents are freed to pursue their immigration cases but struggle to regain custody of their children. Meghan McLoughlin, a New Mexico federal public defender, represented a 32-year-old Guatemalan woman who had her 15-year-old son taken away after she was charged with illegal entry.

The mother is a domestic violence victim, McLoughlin said, and was released to live with her brother in Houston while she fights deportation. But she was not able to find her son. McLoughlin finally tracked him down last month in a Brownsville federal foster care shelter, where she said case workers had no idea that he had been separated from his mother.

Caryl M. Stern, president of UNICEF USA, a branch of the United Nations organization for children, toured South Texas last week and said the agency is “struggling to understand how the current situation is adding to the best interests of children.”

The government has insisted that it knows the location of all children in its custody, and has called the process of reunification “well coordinated.” As of June 23, it said it had reunited more than 500 children with their parents, most of those in Border Patrol processing centers. But officials have declined to say how many of the thousands of children sent to federal foster care have rejoined with their parents.

Lawyers said the reality on the ground suggests bedlam. Some were initially given a 1-800 number for parents to find children that routed to an immigration tip-line. A corrected number was issued, though parents complain they cannot always make calls from detention, that operators have “deliberately” hung up, and that the agency often requires a call-back number which parents in prison don’t have.

In frustration, RAICES last week set up its own hotline, 866-378-2667, to identify separated parents in detention and connect them with pro bono legal counsel, funded by some $25 million in donations that has poured into the nonprofit as anger over the administration’s policy grew.

The flow of Central American families does not appear to be slowing, though many more now seem to be trying to turn themselves in at official ports of entry to apply for asylum, rather than crossing the border illegally. Dozens piled up on the Brownsville & Matamoros International Bridge last week, sleeping on donated mattresses and erecting tent-like structures to escape the furious sun.

Border Patrol officials stood guard at the mid-point of the bridge before it turns into U.S. territory and migrants said they were waved away or told to wait endlessly without explanation. By law, those seeking asylum can do so without prosecution once they reach American soil at official entrance points.

Walter Bindel, his wife and their four small children had been waiting on the bridge for more than three days. In Honduras, gang members forced him to pay a tax to run his small clothing store. When they fell behind one month, the gang killed his brother. They’ve been paying for three years now and Bindel said he could no longer support both that expense and his family.

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Border Patrol agents here first told him no one was allowed in. After several days on the bridge, Bindel said they awoke the family at 1 a.m. last week and told him that his wife and children could go in, but he would have to wait. If they entered together, they would be sent to different “camps.”

The father decided to wait.

“I don’t want to be separated from my family,” he said.

Several days later they were no longer on the bridge. A relative said he thought they had made it in, and were hopefully on their way to Houston.

Susan Carroll and Silvia Foster-Frau contributed to this report.

lomi.kriel@chron.com

@lomikriel