Parents who were deported at the height of the family separation crisis in 2018 were allowed to present themselves for asylum

A group of 29 parents who were wrested from their children and deported at the height of the family separation crisis last year have been allowed to cross back into the US and seek asylum, in an attempt to reunite with their loved ones.

Trump’s family separations: watchdog review paints damning picture of policy Read more

The parents, who travelled across Central America to the Mexicali border crossing, were made to wait 10 hours on Saturday, before they were allowed to present themselves for asylum. During tense negotiations, prominent public figures including Hillary Clinton agitated on their behalf.

Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) .@fams2gether, @ACLU and others are in Mexicali today working to reunify families the administration has separated. Help by calling @CBP now at 1-855-681-1349 and demand that CBP allow parents to apply for asylum—their legal right—so they can be reunited with their children.

Religious leaders and a coalition of immigration advocacy groups including Al Otro Lado, Families Belong Together and Together Rising helped the parents make their way back to the border entry port. They said the struggle to reunite the 29 with their 27 children in the US, one of whom was as young as five, had only just begun.

“This is a huge victory for these families,” said Erika Pinheiro of Al Otro Lado. “But this fight isn’t over until they’re reunited with their kids. They are now going into the black hole of CBP [Customs and Border Protection] custody, and some could be separated again.”

The plight of the parents and their missing children is an indication that the family separation crisis that erupted last summer is continuing to have ramifications for hundreds of people. Thousands of children were separated from their parents in 2018 as a result of a “zero-tolerance” policy imposed by Donald Trump.

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Though hundreds of families were reunited after Trump was forced to back down in the face of national and international outrage, hundreds more stayed divided.

Last month a report from the Texas Civil Rights Project based on interviews with migrant families being prosecuted by US agents at the McAllen border crossing found that families were still being separated long after the policy officially ended. It suggested 272 adults had been split from their children, 25 under the age of 10.

CBP said the report was flawed. The Trump administration admits to ongoing family separations but only, it says, in specific cases such as violent criminal behavior by the parent or parents.

Immigration advocates are also alarmed by the news coming out of detention facilities where families are being held together, having crossed into the US without documentation. Many babies under the age of one, some as young as five months old, are being detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.

A joint letter of complaint has been sent by the American Immigration Council and other groups to the US Department of Homeland Security, raising “grave concerns” about the detention of babies at Dilley. Though the infants are with their mothers, the groups warn they are vulnerable to “serious illnesses, pain, disability, and even death from preventable infections and disease”.

In a letter to the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, Physicians for Human Rights highlighted the case of an infant who was just 27 days old, having been born during the mother’s journey north. The baby was not examined by a doctor until he had a brain seizure, the group said.

The physicians said detention at such a young age could have devastating impacts.

“A large body of research,” they wrote, “demonstrates that early childhood adversity and stress, such as conditions infants are exposed to in detention, can have significant detrimental impacts on the developing infant brain, with long-lasting and negative consequences on children’s learning and behavior.”