The group quietly traveled north assisted by a team of immigration attorneys with a plan to reunite families divided by the Trump administration.
Luisa Hidalgo, from El Salvador, hopes to reunite with 14-year-old daughter Katherinne.
The group of parents walked toward the border here, flanked by local religious officials, and waited at the entrance to the United States as the attorneys negotiated with U.S. officials. Many of the parents, like José Ottoniel, from the tiny town of San Rafael Las Flores, Guatemala, said they had been pressured into signing deportation papers, after being separated from their children, before they could begin their asylum claims. When he returned home after being deported in June, Ottoniel was told that his 10-year-old son, Ervin, was still in the United States, at a shelter.
Ottoniel and other parents converged at a three-story hotel in Tijuana, where lawyers told them to remain quiet about their plans. They rehearsed how they would address U.S. immigration officials. They watched telenovelas. At night, they called their children across the border.There was Luisa Hidalgo, 31, from El Salvador, whose daughter, Katherinne, 14, is in the Bronx with a foster family. The girl texted her mother the same words over and over:"Fight for me.
In most of the 2,700 cases of family separation at the border by the Trump administration last year, both the parents and children remained in the United States, sometimes held in shelters and detention centers thousands of miles apart. Almost all of those families have now been reunited and are in the process of pursuing their asylum claims.
But as the government refused to articulate any plan to reunite the families, Pinheiro decided waiting much longer would put the parents at risk. Some had relocated to a safe house in Guatemala City to escape threats in El Salvador and Honduras. Some had already been without their children for more than a year, and those separations were taking a psychological toll.
Singapore Latest News, Singapore Headlines
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