EL PASO, Texas — Miriam didn't get a chance to say goodbye before immigration authorities made her put her 4-year-old son in a van.

It was early Saturday, June 16, when an immigration officer told Miriam to get her son ready because they were going to take him away. He was asleep when she put him in the van.

The mother from Guatemala was told US immigration authorities were now separating kids from their parents. She was told that wherever she was released to, she would be reunited with her son.

None of that turned out to be true, and for days she tried in vain to track down her son. It wasn't until Monday, nine days after her son was taken from her, that she was able to get in touch with the social worker who was with her son. Even then, she couldn't speak with him because he was so upset he didn't want to speak with her.

"He thinks I abandoned him," Miriam told reporters. "I never imagined they would take my son away. I thought they would keep us together."

Other parents at the Annunciation House in El Paso on Monday repeated similar stories about being separated from their children and the difficulty in figuring out where they were taken.

Their experiences highlight the obstacles immigrant parents who were separated as a result of the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy now have to overcome to be reunited with their children — even after President Trump signed an executive order ordering the Department of Homeland Security to keep what the order called "alien families" together after they'd been apprehended.

More than 2,000 children seized before Trump's new order remain separated from their parents.

The moms and dads at Annunciation House weren't even charged with illegal entry, the zero tolerance policy that the Trump administration says triggered the separations because children could not be held with adults facing criminal prosecution. Ruben Garcia, the director of the El Paso–based shelter that takes in immigrant families, noted that the charges that had been prepared against them were withdrawn.



Garcia said the parents were given a phone number to call to locate their children — who, once they were taken from their parents, were deemed unaccompanied minors and handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

"If we bring in 30 cellphones and call that number, they are not going to be able to reach their children," Garcia said. "Their children have been taken from them and they are being made to go through hoops and hurdles to get them back. They are refugees, and ORR should be tripping over themselves to find these parents to bring their children back to them."

In a statement distributed late Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security said detained parents trying to find out where their child is being held were given a number to call that would connect them to DHS's Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The information would then be passed to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), of which ORR is a part. Parents or guardians were also given a number to ORR to report that they were looking for their child; the information gathered from that call would be sent to whichever HHS facility is holding the child.

DHS insists that within 24 hours of arriving at a facility, every child is given the opportunity to communicate with what it calls a "vetted parent, guardian, or relative." Afterward, efforts are made to make sure the child is able to communicate with their parent or guardian at least twice a week.

"The United States government knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families," DHS said. "This process is well coordinated."

In practice, however, it doesn't appear to be well coordinated or work out the way DHS described, the parents said.