'Like a kidnapping': Migrant family separated under Trump reunited after four years
Source: BBC
'Like a kidnapping': Migrant family separated under Trump reunited after four years
8 May 2023
By Madeline Halpert
BBC News, New York
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It was just after midnight on 2 November, 2018. Mr Martinez and his children had travelled over 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres) by bus from their home country of Honduras, on a 15-day journey to the Texas border in an attempt to enter the US to seek asylum. The girls were then aged 10, 12 and 14.
For a month, Mr Martinez asked US officials over and over when he would be able to see his daughters again. He got no answers.
The US government eventually deported Mr Martinez back to Honduras, alleging he crossed into the US illegally. It would be nearly four years before he was finally reunited with his children in the US, where they were living with his mother and sister.
"They would call me and say 'Daddy, daddy, why'd you turn around? And I had to tell them I was deported," Mr Martinez told the BBC through a translator. "It was so hard."
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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64959802
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From the article:
Activists say the Trump administration did not maintain thorough databases or records linking parents' information to their children, which several reports from the Atlantic, NBC and other outlets have also revealed. As a result, Mr Biden's officials inherited a "disaster", said Lisa Frydman, the vice president of international programs at Kids In Need of Defense (KIND), another organisation involved in contacting migrant families.
Introduced in the original article, 'Rebeca Sanchez Ralda, a Guatemala City lawyer and human rights worker" :
KENNY GONZALEZ
Rebeca Sanchez Ralda has spent mornings walking to remote villages in treacherous conditions to reach parents of children who were separated at the border
(Wouldn't she fit the image of a "guardian angel?" )
