In the past two months, under the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy, the government has taken some two thousand immigrant children away from their parents.
Credit:John Moore / Getty
A few days ago, Emily Kephart, a program coördinator at an immigrant-rights group called Kids in Need of Defense, set out to try to find a six-year-old Guatemalan girl who had been separated from her father after arriving in the United States, in May. The pair had been split up as a consequence of the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy at the border, which calls for the criminal prosecution of all migrants, including asylum seekers, who cross the border without turning themselves in to officials at so-called ports of entry. Now the father was in an immigration-detention facility in Arizona, awaiting deportation. He had no idea where his child was. Kephart was put on the case after the father called his family, back in a small town outside of Huehuetenango City, in Guatemala’s western highlands, and his family, in turn, contacted a local nonprofit that works […]
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Reminds me in some ways of Guatemala, under a US backed dictatorship with hundreds of thousands of Maya Quiche were shot, villages were destroyed and children were swept up by soldiers. Years later, these children as adults began to find out that many of the ‘fathers’ who’d raised them were the same soldiers who’d taken them away from the real families. They were in deep shock, realizing they’d been living a lie for decades. And by the time they’d learned the truth, that the chlldless families who adopted them – soldier/govt.officials who stood in as parents were dead. The ensuing identity crisis, learning that the people you believed to be your parents had been liars, murderers, active supporters of a dictatorship was emotionally devastating.
As yet, we know little about exactly where these immigrant chidren are.
I continue to meditate and pray for reunion with their families.