Prominent in the news has been the plight of thousands of immigrant families who are separated from one another at the Mexico-United States border. Now, as reunification is occurring for some, what is the aftermath of the forced separations?
A recent report by the PBS News Hour focused on 3-year-old “Sofi” (last name withheld). She and her grandmother and guardian, Angelina, were among those separated when they made their way legally from Mexico to a U.S. immigration checkpoint in Texas, seeking to escape reprisals from a Mexican drug cartel. For 47 days, infant Sofi was on her own without her family, first in a migrant shelter in El Paso, Texas, and then in a facility in Pennsylvania. For Ana, whose mother was in California already, the time apart from Sofi was one of mind-numbing worry over the fate of her daughter and mother.
Now, life is better. Through an interpreter, Ana said: “I feel good, very good to see her with my mom, and to know that she will now be with us, and she won’t be apart from me.”
The separation was hard on Sofi.
“She cried all the time, told me she didn’t want to be there,” said Ana of Sofi’s ordeal. “One time, she didn’t sound OK. She couldn’t speak clearly, and they were giving her a bad look. They would scold her. And she wanted to tell me something, but couldn’t, because they would scold her. So that had me very worried.”
The early days of reunification have gone fairly well. But unease remains. Sofi mentioned medicine she was given and of being punished for crying or refusing to eat. Whether those incidents are real or embellished, and whether emotional scars remain, is the stuff of the unknown.
“We haven’t asked her many questions because she says that it was a bad place. We want to eventually ask her little by little how she was treated. I think that, with time, we need to let her know that they separated her from us for some time,” Angelina said. “ because she looks good now – but who knows how she will react later on.” Sofi is home. But hundreds of other children reportedly remain separated from their families.
Click here to watch the News Hour report.