Trump administration officials say the U.S. government knows the location of all children in its custody after separating them from their families at the border and is working to reunite them.

A fact sheet on “zero-tolerance prosecution and family reunification” released Saturday night by the Department of Homeland Security also says a parent must request that their child be deported with them. In the past, the agency says, many parents have elected to be deported without their children. That may be a reflection of violence or persecution they face in their home countries.

As part of the effort, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have posted notices in all its facilities advising detained parents who are trying to find or communicate with their children to call a hotline staffed 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday.

A parent or guardian trying to determine if a child is in the custody of HHS should contact the Office of Refugee Resettlement National Call Center at 1-800-203-7001, or via email at information@ORRNCC.com. Information will be collected and sent to HHS-funded facility where minor is located.

The fact sheet doesn’t state how long it might take to reunite families. The Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Texas has been set up as the staging ground for the families to be reunited before deportation.

How the government would reunite families has been unclear because the families are first stopped by Customs and Border Patrol, with children taken into custody by HHS and adults detained through ICE. Children have been sent to shelters around the country, raising alarm that parents might never know where their children can be found.

The fact sheet states that ICE has implemented an identification mechanism to ensure on-going tracking of linked family members throughout the detention and removal process; designated detention locations for separated parents and will enhance current processes to ensure communication with children in HHS custody; worked closely with foreign consulates to ensure that travel documents are issued for both the parent and child at time of removal; and coordinated with HHS for the reuniting of the child prior to the parents’ departure from the U.S.
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The U.S. Homeland Security Department said late Saturday the government has reunited 522 children separated from adults as part of a “zero tolerance” initiative and plans to reunite another 16 children in the next 24 hours.

The department said in a statement U.S. Customs and Border Protection expects a small number of children separated for reasons other than zero tolerance would remain separated, including if the familial relationship cannot be confirmed.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order to end his policy of separating immigrant children from their families on the U.S.-Mexico border, after images of youngsters in cages sparked outrage at home and abroad.

The department also said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has 2,053 separated minors in HHS-funded facilities “and is working with relevant agency partners to foster communications and work towards reuniting every minor and every parent or guardian via well-established reunification processes.”

Currently, 17 percent of minors in HHS funded facilities were placed there as a result of the zero tolerance enforcement effort, and the remaining 83 percent arrived in the United States without a parent or guardian, it said.
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As VOA approached the 77,000-square-foot detention center from one side, three young cousins trekking on a dirt side road stopped.

“Yep, that’s Ursula,” said Ramon Montoya through the driver’s window of a red pickup, referring to the detention center, a sterile dirty-white box with burgundy trim that stands a few kilometers north of Mexico. Locally, the center is called by the name of the street it’s on, Ursula.

The Kansas-born son of Mexican-native parents and meat industry workers, 20-year-old Montoya moved to McAllen, Texas, with his family when he was in the fourth grade. 

“Where the Tex meets the Mex,” he described it, “a fusion of two cultures.”

“I love it here,” Montoya continued. “This place has a lot to offer and it’s sad to see it disgraced by something like this.”

Detention center

The detention center is also the country’s largest U.S. Border Patrol Processing Center and it is a short stroll from Montoya’s home. For him, there’s no escaping the reality of family separation in the South Texas border region, where illegal border crossers regularly seek refuge from economic hardship, cartel and domestic violence in their home countries.

Inside the facility since early May, more than 1,000 migrant parents and children were held and later routinely separated.

In Texas, a Republican stronghold politically, a new University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, showed a majority of state voters opposed separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border; while 28 percent supported it. Republican men were more likely to support the separation than were women and Democrats.

An executive order this week shifted the focus from family separation to family unit detention. But it did not clear up how families already separated are to be reunified and what kind of conditions detained families will be held in.

It did not ease the hit in the gut for some first- and second-generation Americans in a state that continues to swing toward greater diversity, where Latinos may outnumber non-Hispanic white residents by 2022.

Montoya, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, calls the situation shameful. 

“Put yourself in their place for just a second, and you might be able to understand why so many people are devastated by this,” he said.

​Laws not working

About an hour drive southeast of McAllen is Brownsville, an area rich with nature reserves that cut across the U.S.-Mexico barrier.

The proximity to sandy beaches on the Gulf with their palm trees and green parrots is what brought retired educator Larry Genuchi here 26 years ago.

Similar to McAllen, the area’s sizable share of Hispanic residents make for a diverse blend of shared traditions. But also like McAllen, the community has heard stories of migrant despair. It is also the site of a former Walmart-turned-foster care facility that houses more than 1,400 unaccompanied migrant boys, some of them forcibly separated from their families.

In an interview and downtown tour along the U.S.-Mexico border, Genuchi expressed nostalgia for the days he would stroll right across the bridge, before crime became rampant in neighboring Matamoros, Tamaulipas. He says he now hears gunshots across the Rio Grande River.

But while the 70-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, doesn’t claim to have all the answers, for him there is clearly a wrong one to solving illegal immigration.

“I’m a parent and a I’m also a grandfather and I’m telling you,” he said, “taking away children, putting them in danger — boy, that goes against everything in my body.”

Genuchi, who only shares his voting record with “God and my wife,” is appreciative of law enforcement for doing “the very best that they can.” But some policies, he suggests, need to change.

“All they’re trying to do now, I think, is just enforce the laws that are there,” Genuchi said. “But they’re finding out the laws don’t work real well.”

Caring but realistic

Newly elected GOP Hidalgo County Chair Adrienne Peña-Garza, the first woman to hold the position in the county, is transparent about her own role as a Hispanic Republican resident in an “extremely” democratic area.

Shielded from Thursday’s torrential downpour that resulted in Texas’ worst flooding post-Hurricane Harvey, Peña-Garza spoke to VOA by phone in her friend’s truck.

The porous border, as she describes it, needs to be fixed, and while she doesn’t think children should be separated from their parents under most circumstances, she believes stories in which a child’s safety is in question go underreported, along with the quiet heroism of McAllen’s Border Patrol agents whom she describes as “merciful and compassionate.”

But as a mother and community member herself, rhetoric on the issue is important, and she is careful in talking to the media.

“I know that there have been people in my party in the past that had been a little too far to the right on rhetoric, where they sound like they don’t care about individuals,” Peña-Garza said.

“I care about all people no matter where you’re from, but at the same time we’re talking about U-S-of-A, we’re talking about border security, we’re talking about what’s best for people.”

Next to “Ursula,” Ramon Montoya imagines his own family coming to McAllen at a different moment in time.

“We have so many examples in our world’s history where people have been victim to these kinds of injustices, and now we’re the ones causing the harm,” Montoya said. “I choose to believe that we’re better than this.”
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After President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday, families seeking refuge from violence in their home countries are no longer being separated at the U.S. border. Still, more than 2,300 migrant children are living in shelters without their parents, and the Trump administration doesn’t have a plan in place to reunite these children with their parents.

One mother from Guatemala cried Friday as she held her young son for the first time in a month. Agents separated them after she crossed the border in May. “Te amo. Te amo.” “I love you. I love you,” she repeated as she kissed him and wrapped a blanket around him. 

The mother, Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia, sued the U.S. government for separating her from her 7-year-old son. The lawyer who helped her worked for free.

​Long-term consequences

Government video shows children being held in cages, lying under Mylar blankets. They have also been placed in tents and shelters throughout the U.S., some as far away from Texas as Oregon.

The American Medical Association warned that as a result of being separated from their families, these children could suffer health consequences that could last a lifetime. 

Dr. Colleen Kraft, the president of the American Association of Pediatrics, has taken an active role in speaking out for these children. She warns that children who are exposed to toxic stress do not develop language or other skills at the proper age as a result of the trauma of being forcibly removed from their parents.

Trauma causes the body to produce high levels of stress hormones that can kill brain cells, affect the heart and cause children to regress. Some regress to wetting themselves. Others could develop a stutter. Some develop behavior problems.

“It may take a long time for this trauma to be resolved and these children to be healed,” Kraft said.

No one knows that more than Dr. Lisa Fortuna, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Boston University Medical School. Fortuna works with migrant children separated from their parents. She says the family separations have been going on for some time, and it’s very hard on children, no matter their age.

“I’ve had multiple kids tell me about feeling very cold, not eating enough, not having support of their parents or adults that care about them and that that was very, very distressing for them,” Fortuna said.

Touch important

Caregivers at some of the facilities where the children are being held say they are not allowed to touch even very young children. These rules were put in place for teenagers, but Myriam Golden, a social worker who specializes in treating traumatized children, says touch is very important, especially for small children.

“When you rock a child, they can hear your heart rate. You can hear their heart rate, and it is through that co-regulation, children can be soothed,” she said. Goldin is one of the founders of the Gil Institute for Trauma, Recovery and Education in Virginia.

Fortuna says a parent’s touch teaches a child that they are being taken care of and loved. She says if children are not touched, they can become despondent and withdrawn. They don’t learn how to relate to others. They lose the ability to trust. They can stop expressing emotion even if they are reunited with their parents.

Goldin cites a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Adverse Childhood Experiences, that shows that early childhood experiences have a profound impact on future violence and victimization. Goldin says the study proves scientifically that if the needs of children are not met, long-term mental and physical health problems can result.

Not every child separated from their family will have permanent health problems, but young children are the most vulnerable, and the separation from a parent can compound the stress they may have already experienced in unsafe conditions in their home countries.
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