“HOUSTON— They had come so far together, almost 3,000 miles across three countries and three borders: a mother with three children, fleeing a gang in El Salvador that had tried to kill her teenage son.
But now, in a frigid Border Patrol facility in Arizona where they were seeking asylum, Silvana Bermudez was told she had to say goodbye.
Her kids were being taken from her.
She handed her sleeping preschooler to her oldest, a 16-year-old with a whisper of a mustache whose life had been baseball and anime until a gun was pointed at his head.
“My love, take care of your little brother,” she told him on Dec. 17.
“Bye, Mommy,” said her 11-year-old daughter, sobbing.
And then her children were gone.
Once a rarity, family separations at the border have soared under President Trump, according to advocacy groups and immigration lawyers.
The administration first put forth the idea a year ago, when John F. Kelly, then secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he was considering separating parents from their children as a deterrent to illegal immigration.
Kelly, now the White House chief of staff, quickly walked back his comments after they triggered public outrage, and the controversy ebbed as illegal immigration plunged to historic lows.
But when border apprehensions began to rise again late last year, so, too, did reports of children being stripped from their parents by Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“Separating children from their parents is unconscionable and contradicts the most basic of American family values,” 71 Democratic lawmakers said in a letter to DHS in February.
The separation of a Congolese mother from her 7-year-old daughter generated headlines and spurred a class-action lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union this month.
“We are hearing about hundreds of families,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
“DHS does not currently have a policy of separating women and children,” according to an agency statement released this month, but retains the authority to do so in certain circumstances, “particularly to protect a child from potential smuggling and trafficking activities.”
“The truth is that whether they call it a policy or not, they are doing it,” Gelernt said.
For Silvana’s children, the separation was bewildering and frightening.
They had no idea where their mother was. Did their father, who had fled to the United States months earlier, know where they were? They were told they’d join their family in a few days, but days turned into weeks.
Surrounded by strangers in a strange place, they wondered: Would they ever see their parents again?
‘My soul left me’
The family’s crisis began a year ago, when Silvana’s husband, Yulio Bermudez, refused to help MS-13 members in San Salvador escape from police in his taxi. The gang beat him and threatened to kill him.
Silvana Bermudez weeps on March 16 as she watches a video of her children during their separation. (Michael Stravato/For The Washington Post)Yulio fled north and crossed illegally into Texas, where the 34-year-old claimed asylum and eventually joined relatives.
Then one night in November, Silvana sent her oldest son — Yulio’s stepson — to a pupuseria down the block. As he was walking, the teenager saw a car pull up. A member of MS-13’s rival, the 18th Street gang, peppered the restaurant with gunfire.
The gang member then turned his gun on the teen, who was frozen with fear. But when he pulled the trigger, there was only the click of an empty chamber.
“Must be your lucky day,” the gangster said and sped off.
[‘People here live in fear’: MS-13 menaces a community seven miles from the White House]
Silvana, 33, and her son reported the incident to police, also describing Yulio’s run-in with MS-13. Within days, MS-13 members showed up to their door to tell Silvana she’d pay for snitching, she would later tell U.S. immigration officials. And when the 18th Street member saw her in the street, he pointed his finger at her like a gun.
“It was a clear sign that he was on to us and he wanted to hurt me and my child,” she said in immigration court filings.
Relatives drove Silvana and her kids to the border with Guatemala, where they caught the first of many buses on their way to America.
When they arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border several days later, Silvana and her children followed a group of migrants through the night to a tall brick wall.
“When I saw they were jumping a wall, I said, ‘Oh my God, where do I go from here?’ ” Silvana recalled in an interview. But it was too late to turn back, so she ushered her daughter forward and watched as the 11-year-old disappeared over the wall. Then she handed up her 3-year-old.
“My soul left me, because the wall was very high,” she recalled. Out of sight on the other side of the wall, migrants caught the boy using a blanket.
They had been walking through the desert for a few minutes when they were caught and taken to a “hielera,” or ice box, the nickname for the cold, barren Border Patrol facilities along the frontier where detained migrants sleep dozens to a room.
There, Silvana was told she was being separated from her kids because she had tried to enter the country illegally a decade earlier. Border Patrol agents said she would be charged with “illegal reentry” — a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison — and that her children could not join her in court, she recalled later. (The Washington Post is not naming the children because of the family’s fears about their safety.)
Instead, the kids were loaded onto a van and driven for four hours. As his baby brother slept in his arms, the 16-year-old could hear his sister crying out for their mom. He tried to comfort her, but a metal divider stood between them.
[She fought to keep immigrants from being deported. Now she faces the same fate.]
The desert gave way to neighborhoods, and the 11-year-old said she began to believe they were being taken to their dad’s house. When the van finally stopped in front of a large building on the outskirts of Phoenix, she thought: My dad lives in a hotel?
But the building wasn’t a hotel. It was La Hacienda del Sol, one of dozens of shelters around the country for unaccompanied minors. And it was surrounded by a six-foot fence.
Silvana’s sons were given bunk beds in a room with several other boys. The windows were equipped with alarms, which often went off during the night. Each evening, the 16-year-old would lie awake worrying about their fate.
And each morning, the 3-year-old would wake up and ask the same question.
“Where’s Mommy?”
“She had to go to work,” his older brother would say. “She had to go shopping.”
Silvana’s Bermudez’s 3-year-old son kept asking, “Where’s Mommy?” during their long separation. (Michael E Miller/The Washington Post)The boys had each other, but their sister was by herself in a wing for girls. They only saw her at meals and for a few hours in the evening, when they would play Battleship or Connect 4.
Silvana had given her oldest son a scrap of paper with his stepdad’s phone number on it. But he’d lost it. There was no Internet at the shelter, and when the teen asked to access Facebook to contact Yulio, he said he was told he’d have to make an official request.
Days passed as the children waited for Yulio or Silvana to find them. They took classes, spoke to therapists and received vaccinations. All the while, there was a constant churn of children around them. They would make new friends, only to lose them a few days later, writing their names in notebooks in the hopes of one day re-connecting.
At one point, the 11-year-old’s only roommate was a 4-year-old. Shelter employees asked her to help care for the girl by warming up her bottle and putting her to sleep.
“She was alone,” Silvana’s daughter said. “Without her mom. Without anyone.”
Christmas arrived without word from their parents. Instead of dinner with family and fireworks in the streets of San Salvador, there was pizza and a shelter employee dressed as Santa Claus dispensing winter hats and plastic yo-yos. When Silvana’s daughter began shimmying to Latin music like she had in her dance troupe in El Salvador, she was told to tone it down. And a no-touching rule meant she wasn’t allowed to hug her older brother, even when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.
The 11-year-old began to despair.
“At first I thought it’d only be a few days before I saw my dad,” she recalled. “But after a month there, I was going crazy, thinking, When? When? When?”
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This story should be appalling to every American on two levels. First, the unnecessarily cruel policy of separating families, which has frequently been in the news lately.
With a good lawyer, time to prepare and document their case, the right U.S. Immigration Judge, the right BIA “appellate panel,” and the right Court of Appeals panel, protection can be granted under the law in these cases. But, because there are no appointed counsel in Immigration Court cases, most families like this don’t get the top flight legal help that they need to understand the unduly and intentionally overcomplicated law and prepare a winning case. Moreover, too many Immigration Judges at both the trial and appellate levels are biased against or unreceptive to asylum cases from the so-called “Northern Triangle” involving gang violence. Some Circuit Court of Appeals panels care and take the time to carefully review BIA findings; others view their “Ivory Tower Sinecures” as an excuse to merely “rubber stamp” the BIA result without giving it much, if any, apparent thought. And this was happening before the Trump Administration took over.
Now, with the biased, White Nationalist, anti-asylum, restrictionist Jeff Sessions actually in charge of our Immigration Courts it’s basically “open season” on the most vulnerable asylum seekers. Sessions rapidly is moving to make the entire U.S. asylum process basically a “Death Train” with the Immigration Courts and the BIA as mere “whistle stops on the deportation railway.”
Outrageously and shamelessly, Sessions has moved to make it difficult or impossible for individuals to obtain counsel by detaining them in out-of-the-way locations specifically selected for lack of availability of legal services and harsh conditions; separated families to demoralize, punish, and terrorize applicants; cranked up the pressure on already overburdened U.S. Immigration Judges in a system already collapsing under 670,000 pending cases to turn out more mindless removal orders; limited the rights of asylum applicants to full hearings — for all practical purposes a “death sentence” for the majority of those who are unrepresented; and indicated an intention to strip particularly vulnerable women, children, gays, and other asylum applicants similar to this family of the bulk of the already merger substantive legal protections they now possess.
Yes, Sessions’s evil and idiotic plan — which reverses decades of settled administrative precedents — is likely to tie up the Federal Courts for years if not generations. But, not everyone in the position of these families has the time, resources, and know how to navigate the Courts of Appeals to obtain justice. That’s particularly true when folks are held in detention in deliberately substandard conditions.
Because Congressional Republicans have long since abandoned any pretensions to human decency or to care about the Constitutional and statutory rights of migrants, Sessions is running roughshod over the laws, the Constitution, and human rights, and wasting taxpayer money by grossly mismanaging the Immigration Courts, without any meaningful oversight whatsoever.
