Thousands of migrant families continue to grapple with the traumatizing effects of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, first implemented as part of a larger “zero-tolerance” immigration policy this spring. Currently 2,047 children are being held by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and HHS officials won’t comment on whether the agency is still receiving children removed from their parents’ care.
VICE News Tonight on HBO this week obtained a recording of a phone call from one of those 2,047 children to his mother. The child, a 7-year old boy from Guatemala, initially crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with his father; the two were subsequently separated and the child detained at an Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelter in Arizona, while his father was sent to a detention facility in Texas. His mother and younger brother remain in Guatemala.
“We didn’t know things were going to be like this,” the mother says to her crying son in the audio recording, which she gave to Vice shortly after the phone call took place Tuesday. “If we had known, I wouldn’t have let you go with your dad. But we thought that everything was OK there.”
During the call, the boy can be heard sobbing and answering his mother’s questions with clipped, one-word answers. “Don’t cry, my love,” she says, comforting him. “Remember that God exists, honey. Kneel and pray to God — ask him to help you get out of there.”
She continues, “Don’t be sad, it will no time until your dad gets there and you can be with him again. Don’t be afraid, you’ll get out of there […]. You are getting out of there. We are going to see you again.”
Despite HHS Secretary Alex Azar’s promise that detained children should be allotted two phone calls to their parents per week, that hasn’t been the reality. The child from the VICE tape had only spoken to his mother twice in the month after being separated from his father at the border.
The government is partially responsible for the lack of communication between migrant children and their parents. Administration officials told reporters on a press call a few weeks ago that they had set up a hotline for parents to call in order to reunite them with their children. The hotline, however, is not newly established at all, but is instead the main line for ORR, the agency tasked with looking after separated minors.
Callers are given three options: to press one if their call is regarding an adult 18 years or older traveling to the United States, to press two if they have an extension for a case manager, or to press three for all other calls. Many parents have complained of calls either not going through or going un-returned, adding more chaos to an already dire situation.
President Trump supposedly reversed course on his own policy last week by signing an executive order to halt family separations, and a federal judge in San Diego Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction forcing the government to reunite children with their parents within 30 days, or within 14 days for children under the age of 5.
However, the damage has already been done. Multiple medical experts have warned repeatedly of the potential long-lasting mental health implications for children separated from their parents under such stressful circumstances.
Several recently publicized cases have painted a grim picture of what families detained at the border may face. In an emergency lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLU) and two Boston law firms, for instance, 31-year-old Guatemalan mother Angelica Rebeca Gonzalez-Garcia claimed that, before she was separated from her daughter on May 11, 2018, a guard mocked her and said, “Happy Mother’s Day.”
The officers also ordered Gonzalez-Garcia to bathe and groom her child before she was taken away.
They told mom to bathe her daughter and do her hair before they took her. pic.twitter.com/PnuuaoGg50
— Matthew Segal (@segalmr) June 28, 2018
In addition to the emotional trauma to which many of the children are subjected, many of the children separated from their parents are subjected to increasingly ridiculous demands. According to the Texas Tribune, toddlers as young as 3 years old have ended up facing deportation proceedings alone.
“We were representing a 3-year-old in court recently who had been separated from the parents. And the child — in the middle of the hearing — started climbing up on the table,” Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, told the Tribune. “It really highlighted the absurdity of what we’re doing with these kids.”
Children appearing by themselves in court proceedings is nothing new, as many unaccompanied minors have completed the process alone in the past. What is new is how young these children are now, a direct result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which refers anyone detained at the border for prosecution, including asylum-seekers.