Family tell of ‘suffering’ of five-month separation in case that came to symbolise Donald Trump’s immigration policy

A 15-month-old baby who came to symbolise the US government’s draconian policy of separating immigrant families did not recognise his parents when they were reunited in Honduras, his tearful mother has said.

Adalicia Montecinos said her son, Johan, had “suffered everything that we have been suffering”, after spending five months at an Arizona shelter, after being separated at the Texas border from his father who was deported.

“I kept saying ‘Johan, Johan’, and he started to cry,” Montecinos said.

But Johan soon warmed to his parents, laughing as he received kisses outside a centre where they concluded his final legal paperwork before heading home.

Montecinos said she could not be happier to have her son back but was angry that he had been kept from her for months, and she’d been forced to watch him grow up via video.

“I will never see my son walk for the first time, or celebrate his first birthday. That’s what I lost, those memories every mom cherishes and tells their children years later.”

Johan’s case triggered international uproar when earlier this year the Associated Press reported his appearance in a US courtroom.

“I never thought they could be so cruel,” said Johan’s father, Rolando Antonio Bueso Castillo, 37, who had sought entry to the US in search of a better life, determined that his children would not grow up in the same poverty that he had endured since dropping out of the fourth grade to sell burritos to help his single mother support him and his four siblings.

Rolando’s younger brother left the mountains of central Honduras for the US seven years ago and was thriving in Maryland with his wife and children. His sister had followed, and had also done well, the Associated Press reported. Their eldest brother was killed in a drive-by shooting in San Pedro Sula, one of Latin America’s most dangerous cities.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children who were found crossing the US-Mexico border illegally at a processing centre in McAllen, Texas, after being separated from their parents. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Rolando, who earned $10 a day as a bus driver, was well aware of the dangers of crossing Mexico. Scores of Central Americans have fallen to their deaths jumping on trains or been murdered, kidnapped, robbed or raped on their way to the US.

But he paid a smuggler $6,000 (£4,590) out of the money his brother had sent him and packed five baby onesies, three jackets, a baby blanket, lotion, nappies, bottles and cans of formula mik for the clandestine trip.

The plan was for Adalicia – in her first trimester of pregnancy – to stay behind and work at her market stall selling baseball hats with the view to joining them a few months later.

Father and son had made it as far as Tampico, Mexico, 300 miles from the Texas border, when the plan started to unravel. The smuggler drove them into a warehouse and told them to board a tractor trailer filled with scores of other parents and children from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru.

Rolando and Johan spent three days locked in the trailer.

“We were carried like meat, but we had no choice by then,” Rolando said.

In the Mexican border city of Reynosa, they boarded a makeshift raft and floated across the Rio Grande to the US. They trudged through the Texas brush until a US border patrol agent spotted them and asked them where they were going.

Rolando said his response was simple: “We’re going to search for the American dream.”

The pair were taken to a detention centre were they were held in a cell cordoned off by a chain-link fence and where they slept on a mattress under a thin, reflective blanket. Rolando said he had to ask for three days before he was allowed to bathe Johan, who was covered with dirt. Initially, Rolando thought that at the worst he and his son would be deported.

But on the fifth day, immigration officers said they were taking him to an office for questioning and an agent removed Johan from his father’s arms. It would be the last time they saw each other for five months.

Rolando, who has apparently attempted to enter the US four times, spent 22 days locked up in different detention centres along the Texas border, knowing nothing of what had happened to his son and with no money to call his wife to tell her what had happened. Upon being deported he was told his son would follow in two weeks. But months passed.

On Friday he would not say whether he would attempt another entry.

“They broke something in me over there,” he said. “This was never my son’s fault. Why did he have to be punished?”