Earlier this year, in only his second week in office, President Joe Biden signed several executive orders aimed at reversing some of the Trump administration’s harshest immigration policies. In June, the Biden administration released a “progress report” on its “relentless pursuit of reunifying families that were cruelly separated during the previous administration.” The report identified 2,127 separated children not yet reunited with their families. According to the Women’s Refugee Commission, as of August, the Biden administration has reunited only 40 families that have been separated from each other for years. Slow, painstaking progress is being made, but the nightmare is far from over for many families.
Whenever I hear any news about our treatment of migrant children from the global south, I think about the photograph of a small girl and her father face down in the Rio Grande. Their names were Óscar and Valeria. In the photo, Valeria is wearing red pants, her little body is tucked into her dad’s black t-shirt, her little arm wrapped around his back.
It’s difficult to fathom the desperation a parent must feel to tuck their infant inside their shirt and wade into a wide, unforgiving river. Óscar was trying to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico to Texas with his daughter to seek asylum. Like so many others, they’d been turned away in Matamoros by U.S. Border Patrol officers.
