Last month, Los Angeles Times reporter Esmerelda Bermudez accompanied Hermelindo Che Coc, an asylum-seeker from Guatemala, as he was reunited with his six-year-old son. She recorded the exact moment that Jefferson met his father again after two months apart, a video that perfectly captures the human toll of the Trump administration’s migrant family separation policy. Take note of the young boy’s reaction:

Tonight, Guatemalan asylum seeker Hermelindo Che Coc was reunited w/ his 6-yr-old son, Jefferson at LAX. The two were separated at the border, didn’t see each other nearly 2 months. The boy had a vacant look in his eyes. Also a cough, bruise on his eye & rashes all over his body. pic.twitter.com/231bn1wlsN — Esmeralda Bermudez 🦅 (@LATbermudez) July 15, 2018

Jefferson does not speak, or cry, or even hug his father back. “The boy had a vacant look in his eyes,” Bermudez wrote in the tweet that accompanied the video. “Also a cough, bruise on his eye & rashes all over his body.” In her account of the reunification, she reported that Jefferson seemed to blame his father for the experience. “Papa, I thought they killed you,” he told his father while crying. “You separated from me. You don’t love me anymore?”



Jefferson’s apparent trauma does not appear to be an isolated incident. The New York Times reported this week that children who were separated from their parents by U.S. officials earlier this year have, since reunification, “are exhibiting signs of anxiety, introversion, regression and other mental health issues.” The Times focused on one child in particular, a five-year-old Brazilian boy who “pleaded to be breast-fed,” despite having been weaned years ago, and hides behind the couch when strangers visit their home.

Other disturbing stories abound. According to migrant advocates, children have told stories of Customs and Border Protection guards kicking them while in custody and threatening to have them adopted by American families. A lawsuit alleges that children were being injected with psychotropic drugs, prompting a federal judge this week to order the government to stop doing so without parental consent. One mother alleges that officials told her daughter that she’d been abandoned and would spend the rest of her adolescence in a shelter. “When they reunited, the daughter believed that and wanted nothing to do with her mom,” wrote U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, to whom the mother told the story.

A federal judge intervened in July to force the Trump administration to reunite all of the separated families. As of the court-ordered deadline on July 26, the Department of Homeland Security said that 1,422 children had been reunited with their parents while another 711 children remained in its custody. A separate group of 378 children were released, to their parents or sponsors, by the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s unclear how many children have been released since that deadline or what will happen to those still in custody whose parents can’t be located.