New York Times
By Annie Correal
August 04, 2018
Eight children are expected to get on a plane in New York on Tuesday, headed to Guatemala. There, they will be reunited with their parents who were deported ahead of them, after being separated by the Trump administration at the southern border.
Their flight was arranged by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, but the reunion effort for children whose parents were deported is not being led by the federal government, which divided the families in the first place. Instead, it has fallen to volunteers, activists and lawyers around the country who have scoured birth certificate registries in Central America, passed names to elected officials and coordinated with groups there who have run radio ads to find parents who might be in Guatemala’s remote mountain villages.
Gustavo Adolfo Juárez Panamá, the president of the Asociación de Retornados Guatemaltecos, which typically assists people who have returned to Guatemala after being deported, joined the effort. “We had some success,” he said from Guatemala City. “People came to us and when we asked how they found us they said, ‘My friend heard it on the radio.’”
The children’s return comes as the federal government and the American Civil Liberties Union stand off over how to reunite some 400 children in the United States with deported parents. Separated children whose parents were deported were not included in the government’s attempt to reunify thousands of migrant families by the court-ordered deadline of July 26. Officials deemed those children “ineligible” for reunification.
The government was supposed to submit a plan to a federal judge in California on Thursday to reunite the families, but instead it told the A.C.L.U. to come up with its own plan, urging the group to use its “considerable resources and their network of law firms, N.G.O.s, volunteers and others” to accomplish the task, in a court filing that a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., Lee Gelernt, called “remarkable.”
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw held a hearing with both parties on Friday and said, “This responsibility is 100 percent on the government.”
The judge expressed disappointment that the government had not devised a plan and said he wanted it to appoint one or two people to oversee the reunification of deported parents with their children. “There has to be someone to hold to account and to supervise the entire process,” he said.
He also said the A.C.L.U. should create a steering committee to devise its own plan and show how it was using government information. The A.C.L.U. said this week that the government provided it with information on about 120 deported families that was not particularly useful, including several addresses that referred to “calle sin nombre” (street without a name).
Judge Sabraw had ordered the government to reunite more than 2,500 children with their families by July 26 after the A.C.L.U. sued on behalf of separated parents. The government has released 1,979 children from custody, according to a court filing submitted Thursday.
Nearly 600 children remain in government custody, including 410 who have had a parent deported, according to the filing. More than 300 are from Guatemala and another 100 are from Honduras. The rest are from El Salvador, Brazil and Romania, among other countries.
The children from New York are among the first to be reunited with deported parents.
They include Filomena, who turned 6 while in federal custody in New York, and who was described by the consul general of Guatemala, Nivia Rosemary Arauz Monzón, as a small girl with pigtails who, although she understands Spanish, mostly remains silent.
Filomena’s father, Nazario Jacinto Carrillo, is a farmer in Guatemala. His lawyers said he chose to be deported after he was separated from his daughter in May when they illegally crossed the border because — like many in his position — he believed deportation would be the fastest way to be reunited with her. He was wrong.
“He is relieved that he will have her back soon,” said his immigration lawyer, Erika Pinheiro, who is based in Los Angeles. “Nazario and his daughter have been separated for months, even though they had three attorneys working on their cases since before Nazario was deported.”
The path to get the eight children on a plane to Guatemala was one with many obstacles.
Over the course of this process, some children with deported parents have given caseworkers and lawyers enough information to locate their families, such as memorized phone numbers, according to Catholic Charities, which was charged with providing legal services for the hundreds of separated children sent to New York.
For others, lawyers and volunteers searched for parents using public records, then turned to officials and nonprofits in the home countries.
Once it was clear that the families wanted the children returned, and the government would not drop its deportation case against the children, the swiftest path toward getting them back home was what is known as a voluntary departure order, according to Anthony Enriquez, the director of the unaccompanied minors program for Catholic Charities.
A voluntary departure order places the responsibility on the United States government to return a child to a safe place in their home country, Mr. Enriquez said. “It gives the government the burden.” (A voluntary departure order also protects children from incurring the stiff penalties that come with an order of removal.)
The eight children’s cases were expedited, Mr. Enriquez said, and they were all granted voluntary departure orders by an immigration judge in recent weeks, including a 6-year-old boy who appeared in court in July, Leo Jeancarlo.
But no action was taken by the government to send the children home.
ICE, which is ultimately responsible for repatriating the children, “have been taking their sweet time,” said Mr. Enriquez.
A spokeswoman for ICE, Sarah Rodriguez, said the children’s cases were held up by a judicial order and that ICE had “coordinated extensively with the Guatemalan consulate and attorneys involved, and was confident that eligible children will be returned to their parents as soon as possible.”
The Guatemalan consul general, Ms. Arauz, said her office had prepared travel documents for the eight children — who don’t have passports — and that it learned this week that they had been booked on a commercial flight departing on Tuesday. Ms. Arauz said to prepare travel documents it had needed materials from the federal authorities that had not been immediately forthcoming, including photographs of the children, which the consulate was not authorized to take.
The children will be flown to Guatemala City, where they will be turned over to the local authorities and returned to their parents, who have been waiting for them for months.
Beth Krause, the supervising attorney for the Immigrant Youth Project at Legal Aid, said three of the 70 children it has represented in New York were separated from relatives who were deported. She said they may want to stay in the United States and that Legal Aid was “working with the parents and investigating the viability of sponsors here.”
In one foster home in the Bronx, where nine separated boys lived at one point, just four remained this week. The foster mother, who spoke anonymously because she was not authorized to give her name, said two of the separated boys had relatives who were deported.
If there is a plan for the boys, she said, “They haven’t told me anything.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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