“We are going to chop up your children.” That was the message that Carlos Arias got on Facebook one day. The stranger wanted Arias, an employee at a high-end design firm, to pay a fortune—$1,300 a month—to gangs that prey on families in El Salvador. So he fled, first to a relative’s home, and when the threats got even worse, to the U.S/Mexico border. But at the border, officials accused him of being the gang member, and then took his children from him.
As a ProPublica investigation recently found, immigration officials have continued to separate families at the southern border by accusing parents, with absolutely no evidence, of criminality. Arias said that officials forced him to take off his shirt in search of MS-13 affiliated tattoos, “expressing surprise when he had no tattoos.” Like Julio, Arias had documentation confirming his good standing. It didn’t matter to officials.
“The officers said they were going to take him from his kids, causing 11-year-old Alison, a shy and studious ‘daddy’s girl,’ to burst into tears,” the Houston Chronicle reports. Despite Donald Trump’s Oval Office PR stunt this past summer purporting to end family separation, the barbaric practice has continued. More than 130 days past a judge’s reunification deadline, over 170 kids torn from families under the “zero tolerance” policy are still in U.S. custody.
In some instances, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) leaders have had to do the job of incompetent Trump officials and navigate “treacherous roads, distrustful communities and remote villages” to try to locate parents that were carelessly deported by the administration. This is how family separation becomes permanent separation.
In the case of Julio, the Houston Chronicle reports he was released by an immigration judge on $8,000 bond, but he still doesn’t have his 4-year-old son back. Arias is still detained, while his two young children, Alison and 7-year-old Carlos, are in a children’s detention facility hundreds of miles away. “I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye,” he said. Today, Wednesday, Dec. 12, marks 139 days since a federal judge’s reunification deadline. Family separation remains a crisis.