Maria Hernandez, 54, was finally able to hug her daughters in January, four years after they were taken from her and she was deported to Honduras.
At Los Angeles international airport, Nicole, now seven, greeted her mother with a single red rose. Michelle, nearly a teenager, hung back with a bouquet of roses and sunflowers. When Hernandez turned towards her, Michelle rushed into her embrace, sobbing.
“I was far away but always thinking of you,” Hernandez whispered to her daughters.
The trio had crossed into the United States in search of asylum. Once apprehended, Hernandez said, she was given an impossible choice: leave the country, either with the girls or without them. Rattled by recent threats to Michelle from Honduran gangs, Hernandez decided the girls would be safer in the US, she said.
The sisters were sent to a children’s shelter in California and eventually released to live with their brother Maynor, now 34, who earns a living selling oranges in Los Angeles. Hernandez was deported, one of thousands of parents separated from their children under the controversial “zero tolerance” policy of the then president, Donald Trump, to deter illegal immigration. Reuters, which has followed the family since 2020, has referred to the girls by their middle names to protect their privacy.
Over the years, Hernandez tried to bridge the 2,800 mile (4,500 km) gap between them with near-daily video calls, studying her children’s faces on a smartphone screen and listening to their stories. Nicole reported losing a tooth; Michelle confessed her crushes.
On her first night in the US, Hernandez shared a bed with her daughters, gazing at them as they slept and marvelling at how much they had grown.
“So many years without seeing them,” she said, her voice shaky from crying. “They are so big now.”
‘A human tragedy’
The Trump administration contended that allowing families to be released together in the US while they applied for asylum only encouraged illegal immigration. In response, the administration sought to prosecute and deport parents like Hernandez and place their children in US custody as “unaccompanied minors”.
However, traumatic family separations, which began in 2017 before any official announcement, were captured in the media worldwide and caused an international outcry. Trump reversed course with an executive order ending the practice in June 2018.
Jeff Sessions, an attorney general under Trump and the force behind “zero tolerance”, defended the strategy in an interview with Reuters last March, saying a person crossing the border illegally with a child “shouldn’t be given immunity”. However, he expressed regret for the separations.
As of 25 January, a taskforce set up by the current president, Joe Biden, had reunited 126 children with their parents or legal guardians. About 377 more – from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, and Venezuela – have reunifications in progress, according to the US Department of Homeland Security.
Setting up a process to bring back parents who were deported to countries across Latin America took months, in part because of the Trump administration’s incomplete and shoddy record-keeping, the taskforce said. A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
To aid the taskforce, the Biden administration created the websites Together.gov and Juntos.gov, where families can register for reunification.
The administration is “dedicated to finding every family and ensuring families have long-term stability in the United States,” said Michelle Brane, the head of the taskforce, in a statement.
Still, some families have been left frustrated, even distraught, at the slow pace of reunifications, according to migrant advocates.
“We are talking about people who haven’t seen their kids in three or four years,” said Hernandez’s lawyer, Carol Anne Donohoe, who manages the family reunification project at Al Otro Lado, a non-profit immigrant advocacy group based at the US-Mexico border.
”Why are you making them jump through these hoops?” she said. “Any question you ask these parents is extremely traumatising, because they are panicking and thinking, ‘Oh, no, I am not going to get back.’”
Tips from taxi drivers
It fell to the Honduran lawyer Dora Melara to search for Hernandez.
Melara was enlisted in early 2020 by the New York-based advocacy organisation Justice in Motion, as part of the lawsuit against the US government brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Melara had only an incomplete name and location for Hernandez from a US government list of parents and guardians who had been separated from their children at the border. She had no contact information for Hernandez’s daughters.
The Honduran lawyer took three trips over weeks to a gang-ridden town in northern Honduras near the city of San Pedro Sula. She only travelled during the day for safety reasons.
Thanks in part to tips from local taxi drivers, she found Hernandez in March 2020. By the time she showed up on Hernandez’s doorstep, manila folder in hand, the Honduran mother was so desperate to see her daughters that she was contemplating another attempt at crossing the border, this time with a migrant caravan.
When Hernandez found out she could apply to rejoin her girls after Biden took office, she was overjoyed – but what followed was months of delay.
“I gave all the information I could, but then time just passed and I didn’t get any messages. I felt like I was never going to see my daughters again,” Hernandez said.
Complicating her case was her petition to travel with her now four-year-old grandson, Aron, who was in her care and would need his own passport and other permissions to leave Honduras.
By October 2021, she had filed applications for “humanitarian parole” for herself and her grandson to enter the US, her lawyers said. Approval came weeks later, in December. Then Aron came down with dengue fever, pushing back their travel date past Christmas.
Finally, in early January, Hernandez was told to pack her bags, take a Covid-19 test and head for the local airport with Aron.
A new start
After the two travellers landed in Los Angeles, the family made their way to Maynor’s one-bedroom apartment. The girls stayed out of school the next day to help their mum with the mundane tasks of building a new life in the US: getting a mobile phone, enrolling Aron in school, looking for a bigger place to live.
Under humanitarian parole in the US, Hernandez is entitled to a work permit and is protected from deportation for three years, but she has no clear path to a permanent legal status.
The Biden administration recently pulled out of settlement talks with hundreds of families who had sued the government seeking compensation for costs and suffering allegedly caused by separations. Some Republican lawmakers raised an outcry over the potential for high payouts.
In 2019, however, a federal judge ruled that separated families are entitled to some mental health services at no cost.
A November 2021 study by the non-profit organisation Physicians for Human Rights found that parents and children forcibly separated at the border endured severe psychological trauma, including confusion and panic, depression, frequent crying and nightmares. Symptoms can linger even after reunification, the clinicians found.
For Michelle, it has been hard to talk to others about what she’s gone through.
“All the problems, I kept it to myself because it’s weird telling a teacher or a friend or somebody, because maybe they will not understand you or they will just feel bad about you,” she said after spending her first day with her mother.
Speaking in fluent English, Michelle said she tried to be strong for her younger sister, Nicole, who became sad when she saw other schoolchildren with their mothers.
“I said, ‘Some day you will be like that. Some day you will be with your mom.’”
“The past is the past,” she added. “Now that my mom is here, I want to make new memories.”
Photography by Lucy Nicholson, Reuters
