EL PASO, Texas (CN) — Despite President Trump’s executive order to stop separating families at the border, it’s unclear where, how, or if families will be reunited with 2,300 children who have been taken away, and where they and new arrivals will be detained under the crackdown on families.
Five immigrants in El Paso on Monday told reporters at the downtown shelter Annunciation House that they are still waiting to be reunited with their children.
Ruben Garcia, longtime director of Annunciation House, told Courthouse News the people were part of a group of 32 who were released to the shelter from the county jail on Sunday after the shift in the zero tolerance policy.
The immigrants spoke in Spanish and Garcia translated their answers into English.
Miriam, a Guatemalan woman who declined to use her last name, wiped back tears as she told dozens of reporters and photographers crowded into the small, hot room that her 4-year-old son was taken from her when he was asleep.
She said agents came into her detention cell at night and asked her to dress her son, and said they could not tell her where he was going.
“I asked, ‘Where is he going to be? Is he going to be nearby here? Am I going to be able to see him?’ He said, ‘No,” Miriam said.
“I said, ‘When will I get him back? He said, ‘When you leave. We will return the child to you.’”
Miriam said she eventually was able to speak to a social worker in New York, where her son is being held. The social worker told her that her son was angry with her and didn’t want to speak to her because he thought she had abandoned him.
“I never imagined that they would take my child,” Miriam said. “That wherever or whatever they did to me that they would do it with my child.”
Cristian, from Honduras, said he tried to enter at a legal Port of Entry near El Paso with his 17-year-old daughter but was rejected by immigration agents. So he decided to cross the border without inspection, and agents separated him from his daughter. He said the experience has been traumatizing.
“I am so damaged by what has happened to me that it is hard for me to say anything,” he said.
Border Patrol agents on the border have stopped people from entering the United States to seek political asylum, and have turned many away and told them to wait, for indefinite amounts of time.
The Texas Tribune reported that last Tuesday about 15 people were waiting on the Friendship Bridge that connects Matamoros, Mexico to Brownsville, Texas. Several said they were stopped at the halfway point, before they could enter the United States to seek asylum.
Attorney General Jeff Session announced the mandatory family separation policy in April.
Under the policy, immigrants who cross the border are arrested and charged criminally. Their children are taken from them and sent to separate camps, often hundreds or thousands of miles away.
The policy has faced worldwide criticism, even from a few Republicans.