9 Separated Migrant Parents Return to Reunite With Kids

Nine Central American parents who were forcibly separated from their children at the southern border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, and then deported without their kids, landed Wednesday night at Los Angeles International Airport to reunite with them.

The asylum-seekers had permission to be admitted to the United States as a result of a federal court order. While some in the group continued their journey to different U.S. cities, others, like Esvin Fernando Arredondo, passed through the arrival gate at LAX to find their families waiting for them with open arms.

Arredondo, all smiles, embraced his three daughters and wife, who he hadn’t seen for nearly two years. It was a moment he said he had prayed for during many sleepless nights after U.S. authorities sent him back to Guatemala in August 2018.

On Wednesday afternoon, as he waited to board his U.S.-bound flight at the airport in Guatemala City, he said the prospect of reuniting with his daughters felt "like a miracle."

"I feel completely happy," said Arredondo, 44. "I want to recover some of the time I lost with my daughters, with my family. All I want to do is be with them, hug them and kiss them."

Arredondo is one of 11 parents who will also have a chance to pursue their asylum claims in the U.S. after a federal judge in San Diego ordered the government to allow them to return. Two of those parents were not part of the group that arrived together from Guatemala.

In September, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw ruled that U.S. authorities had unlawfully removed these parents. He cited evidence that immigration officers had misled or coerced them into signing deportation orders, and that some parents had agreed to abandon their asylum claims believing it would allow them to get their kids back.

More than 5,500 children were forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border before and after the official start of "zero tolerance" in the spring of 2018. At least 471 parents were then deported to Central America without their kids.

In a lawsuit seeking to reunite the families, ACLU attorneys for the separated parents said it was unlikely that many more of the deported parents would be allowed by Sabraw to return to the U.S. But Linda Dakin-Grimm, Arredondo’s attorney, said the arriving parents were still making history.

“There's only nine of them, but they are, I hope, a beacon of hope for many, many other people who haven't had any kind of remedy for what happened to them,” said Dakin-Grimm, a pro bono lawyer with the nonprofit Kids in Need of Defense, who is also representing Arredondo’s wife and children in their asylum claims.

According to his declaration to the court, Arredondo's family fled Guatemala in February 2018 after his 17-year-old son, Marco, was murdered by alleged gang members. Arredondo and his wife feared they or their daughters would be next. Police would not protect them, he said.

The family sold their home and began the trek to the U.S., Arredondo said, but in Mexico, he and his 11-year-old daughter Andrea were stopped and questioned by authorities, and got separated from the rest of the family.

Arredondo’s wife, Cleivi Jerez, and daughters Keyli and Alison made it to the Texas border and passed an initial asylum screening, known as a “credible fear” interview. They were then allowed to join relatives in Los Angeles.

But when Arredondo and Andrea presented themselves to U.S. border officials in May 2018, he said, a crying Andrea was taken away while he protested. Arredondo was detained for three months, and did not pass his interview to establish a fear of returning to Guatemala, although his reasons were the same as his family’s. He was then deported.

Andrea spent about a month in a government-contracted shelter before she was released to her mother, according to Dakin-Grimm.

Back in Guatemala City, Arredondo said he was afraid the gang, known as Mara 18, would kill him. He said he couldn’t return to his old part of town, where he had worked as a taxi driver and participated in a neighborhood watch group of friends trying to protect their families. He said he believes that joining the group had made his family a target of the gang. On his return, Arredondo said, he survived on odd jobs, painting homes or doing construction work, while worrying about his family.

“It was very, very difficult,” he said. “After the deportation, I arrived in Guatemala with no money, no extra clothes, no home, and worst of all — no family. I spent entire nights unable to sleep, just thinking about them, hoping they were alright.”

While the Trump administration has stopped large-scale separations of migrant parents from their children, Department of Homeland Security officials are implementing new policies that have drastically reduced access to asylum for Central American migrants at the southern border.

One such policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols, has allowed authorities to return more than 57,000 non-Mexican asylum-seekers to Mexico to wait while their claims are processed in the U.S.

Only about 0.2% of the people in the program have won asylum since it began a year ago, compared to 29% of all asylum-seekers last year.