Border officials tried to force a 3-year-old child named Sofi to choose being separated from either her mom or her dad in their effort to tear the family apart, NPR reports. When officers began to drag her dad away and the child began to cry, officers scolded her. “You said with mom,” they told her.
The near-separation occurred when the asylum-seekers, sent back to Mexico under the Trump administration’s inhumane “Remain in Mexico” policy, crossed back into the U.S. for their first court date. In El Paso, Texas, mom Tania recalled that a Border Patrol agent said she could stay in the U.S. but her husband Joseph would have to return to Mexico—and Sofi had to choose between them.
"The agent asked her who she wanted to go with, mom or dad,” Tania told NPR. “And the girl, because she is more attached to me, she said mom. But when they started to take [my husband] away, the girl started to cry.” NPR reports that “When the three children realized the family faced separation, they latched on to Joseph—the son around his neck and a daughter around each leg, the parents said.”
The administration had also forced the family to wait out its case in Mexico, even though the girl suffers from a serious medical condition, and this should have made them exempt from Remain in Mexico. “Sofi's chest bears the scar of an earlier surgery. [Attorney Linda] Rivas presented evidence from a Mexican health clinic that the 3-year-old girl had suffered a heart attack, a revelation that seemed to stun Immigration Judge Nathan Herbert.”
Tania “said they spent parts of two days last week trying to prevent the Border Patrol from separating their family,” and “were aided by a doctor who had examined Sofi and pleaded with agents not to separate the family.” She said the doctor, contracted by the government, stayed past his shift to persuade agents not to separate them, and returned again the next day to continue. "The doctor told me, don't let them ask her because they don't have the right to ask a minor," Tania said.
The family was eventually permitted to stay in the U.S., and has since reunited with relatives here. Rep. Veronica Escobar called the attempted separation an “outrage” and said “it's absolutely horrifying that a toddler would be asked to choose between two parents. It was just stunning to me. It's one thing to read about it; it's another thing to actually hear a parent recounting the story firsthand in their own voice.”
Government officials tried to make a child name Sofi choose between her parents. If you’re convinced that life these days feels like something out of a movie, you’re not wrong.