The Daily - The Scars of Family Separation

Episode Date: December 27, 2018

This week, “The Daily” is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened since the stories first ran. Today, we’re going back to an episode from this summer, when we met Nazario Jacinto Carrillo, a farmer from Guatemala who was separated from his daughter at the United States border as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Guests: Caitlin Dickerson, who covers immigration for The New York Times, spoke with Mr. Carrillo. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Hey, it's Michael. This week, The Daily is revisiting our favorite episodes of the year, listening back, and then hearing what's happened in the time since the stories first ran. Today, we're going back to an episode from this summer, when we met a man named Nazario, who was separated at the border from his daughter as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, as it raced to meet its deadline for reunifying parents and children separated at the border, the Trump administration deemed hundreds of parents ineligible.

border, the Trump administration deemed hundreds of parents ineligible. What does it mean to be ineligible for reunification with your own child? It's Friday, July 27th. Hello? Hi, Nazario. Yes? Hello, I'm Caitlin Dickerson. I'm a journalist in the United States, from the New York Times. Uh-huh. I wanted to talk to you a little bit

about your situation with your daughter. Yes. So Nazario Jacinto Carrillo is from rural Guatemala, and his family farms potatoes. He comes from an indigenous village there, so he speaks Spanish, but it's actually his second language, though he can't read or write. Caitlin Dickerson covers immigration for The Times. And in May, he decided to leave Guatemala with his five-year-old daughter.

Her name's Filomena. They left behind his wife and a two-year-old son who would presumably come and join them later. But the goal for Nazario and Filomena was to seek asylum in the United States. We don't know the details of their case, but we know they live in an area that falls right along the main route for trafficking both people and drugs into the U.S. And so a lot of people flee there and seek asylum because the area is really infested with cartels. So they arrive in May, but their timing really couldn't be worse because it's at the height of the execution of this policy that the United States government has created to separate parents from their children.

And it was introduced without any real planning as to how we might at some point bring the families back together. So pretty quickly, Filomena is taken from Nazario, and she's shipped off to New York. Originally, he doesn't even know where she is, much less when he might be able to get her back or why she's been taken away. He wasn't expecting this. No one coming to the border during that time period was. And so he starts to panic like any parent would.

He's sitting in an immigration detention center along the border trying to get answers about where Filomena might be, when he can get her back, and he's learning nothing until finally a border agent comes to him and offers what he thinks is the first sign of hope. This agent offers him a choice. He says, you can remain in the United States and continue to fight your asylum claim. If you do that, we can't give you any information about your daughter. We don't know what's going on there. But if you revoke the claim and you agree to go back to Guatemala, we can make sure that she's on a plane back to your hometown, and you'll have her back within two weeks.

So, Nazario thinks about it, and then he decides to go for it. So he decides to revoke his asylum claim, and he signs documentation agreeing to go back to Guatemala without his daughter and wait for her there. Because he believes he will be reunited with her by signing this piece of paper. Right. And did he become reunited with her? He's still not reunified.

And why not? He doesn't know. We know that the United States government has asked for basically an exception in this ongoing court case that forced family reunification here domestically that applies to every single parent and child who's been separated by the federal government and who still remains in federal custody. So the first job that government lawyers had was to make an accounting of every single person in that situation. They came up with a number that's right around 2,500.

And then they had to seek out ways to reunite those families. The judge required that any kids who were under five years old had to be returned to their parents by July 10th, and any kid that was between the ages of five and 17 had to be returned by Thursday, the 26th of July. So the government begins to do this work and very quickly discovers that some people have criminal records that are serious enough to preclude them from reunification, and they ask for an exception in those cases. But then they also begin to discover, wait, wait, we actually don't know where some of these parents are. Some of them have been released into the United States, but we didn't keep in touch. We don't know where they are. A lot of them have been deported abroad. And so they've asked the judge again for an exception for those parents because we don't know where they are.

Are they all being called ineligible? They're all being called ineligible. So this is what the government means when they say that people are ineligible for reunification. Because I thought it meant that parents had done something wrong that somehow meant that they weren't fit to be reunited with their children. somehow meant that they weren't fit to be reunited with their children. Well, that might be what the government wants you to believe, because that's the group of people who we hear about most often when it comes to the ineligible parents. But in reality, it's really a designation that government lawyers came up with

to try to limit the number of people who they had to reunify under this deadline to try to make it easier on them, because it was a huge challenge. And in the case of deportations, like Nasario, the government effectively made them ineligible by telling them that being deported would reunify them with their children. Exactly. So we've heard a range of experiences

and certainly many people say that they were outright lied to and that's why they agreed to be deported. But there are lots and lots of others who just didn't really understand what they were signing or what they were agreeing to. They were maybe looking at documents in English or in Spanish, and they didn't know either of those two languages. And we know that hundreds of parents were presented with a form that the federal judge in this case later said was misleading them because it basically presented them with two options. It said, I agree to be deported with my child or I agree to be deported without my child.

In any case, you're going to be deported. In any case, you're going to be deported, A, is the message. And B, it's misleading because these are parents who for weeks and in some cases months have received no information as to why their kids were taken and when they're going to get them back. And so this symbolizes to them the first suggestion that they even could get their kids back. And so parents basically said, I would have signed anything as long as the words with my child were on that form. But was that a deliberate tactic on the part of the U.S. government to make people ineligible for reunification by deporting them?

It's hard for us to say what was deliberate and what wasn't because we're operating with one side of the story. We're operating based on the families and what they tell us. What I can tell you is that it's very typical both in dealing with the Border Patrol and also in dealing with ICE, who takes custody of people once they stay in the United States for a little longer. It's very typical for people working for those agencies to basically encourage people to give up their claims. Their job is enforcement. You know, their job is to limit the number of people who come into the United States. And so this is not the first time that I've heard stories of people being pressured into agreeing to their own deportation. It's actually a very common narrative, but I think the stakes are obviously

a lot higher here when we're talking about agreeing to leave. And also, by the way, we might keep your kid and we might not have any idea when we're going to return them. So back in Osirio, is it possible that the person who asked him to sign that document, deporting himself and not being eligible for reunification, that border patrol person may not have even known what the implications of this were? I think at that point, nobody knew. Because until we had these specific deadlines, no one really knew when reunification might happen.

People who were responsible for enforcing this policy didn't have the information that they needed to do it. And so that's why we have a temporary stay on deportations now because the judge is saying, whoa, whoa, whoa. People are agreeing to stuff they don't exactly know what they're agreeing to. Even when they're agreeing to something, they're not exactly getting it. So no more deportations of anybody, much less without their children, until people are clearly aware of their rights. much less without their children, until people are clearly aware of their rights. And does this judge consider this broad category of ineligible parents who can't be reunited with their children for any number of reasons the government's come up with, does he consider

that to be an excuse? He's clearly skeptical of that excuse in some cases. So I think this judge is deeply disturbed about the more than 400 parents who've been deported without their kids. He has agreed to give the government an extension on those cases, but he's definitely not letting them off of his radar. He's committed to making sure that those parents get their kids back. So, Caitlin, that's everyone who's ineligible to be reunified. What's happening with everyone else who is still eligible for reunification? So there is an incredible scramble.

There are a lot of children to be reunited. Will Washington meet the deadline? In Baltimore, seven-year-old Andy couldn't hold back his tears after seeing his mother out alley for the first time in nearly a month. Today's the deadline a California judge gave the government to get every last one

of those families back together, but it does not look like it's going to happen. And it's hard to sort of overstate the level of last-minute planning and changing of plans that's happening. Thousands of people, government employees, but also advocates, were helping to move parents and move kids to get them

into the same place and to get them back together, which is actually a lot more complicated than you might imagine. So here in New York, where hundreds of kids were housed, we're hearing that, you know, they're being rounded up largely in the middle of the night, put onto buses and sent across the country. A lot of them are going to the border where the government has set up staging facilities to try to siphon down where these reunifications are taking place. But it's all happening so quickly that we've heard stories of kids

who were sent to the wrong facility. So they arrive and realize their parents aren't there. Or there were a seven and a nine-year-old set of siblings from New York who were sent to the Southwest this week to be reunited with their mother. But after they arrived, their lawyer discovered that it seemed she actually had already been deported.

So they didn't end up getting to see her. This is all starting to sound like a plan to separate parents from their children, but not to bring them back together. That's right. We have not seen any evidence of a plan for how parents and children might have been brought

back together. And there's really no evidence that they would have been returned to one another if it weren't for this judge who ordered it. We'll be right back. So if it's been this hard to get these eligible families reunified, families who are still inside the United States, I cannot but wonder how hard it's going to be to reunify people like Nasario, who have been deported. I can't either. I mean, from everything we've heard, there really hasn't been any effort yet to even track these parents down. And the government has said that

once they do, they're not going to allow their parents back into the United States to retrieve their kids. So that means they'll have to be vetted from abroad. Then travel documents will have to be obtained for the children, most of whom arrived here, as you can imagine, without passports. So it's really hard to tell when they might be able to see their kids again, which is, of course, crushing for parents who are sitting in small towns with no information. And what do we know about where Nazario is in this process? in this process. So we know that he has a team of lawyers who are working desperately to try to help him.

And we know where Filomena is. We know where he is, obviously. But there's still no information. I mean, I just got off the phone with him. He has no idea when he might see her again. What does he say to you? It's really hard to talk to him on the phone. I mean, we've spent quite a bit of time,

but he has a hard time answering questions or describing things. You know, I've asked him to tell me about Filomena, tell me about the town where he lives or his life. I've asked him to tell me about Filomena, tell me about the town where he lives or his life. Really, all he does is ask me when he's going to get his daughter back. And he kind of repeats the question. He asks you as if you have the answer.

As if I know. Even after I tell him that, you know, I'm sorry, I don't have any more information, then he'll say, Okay, but more or less, how many days? Can you tell me how many days it might be? It's like he's stuck. It's like he can't comprehend what's happening. You know, he's asked me, what do they want from her?

She was five years old when she was detained. She had a birthday, so she's six now. But he says she doesn't have anything for them. She's a kid. He feels like his daughter's been kidnapped. I mean, he just doesn't get it. And she doesn't either. So he talks pretty regularly with a caseworker who's been assigned to watch over her here in New York.

But Filomena won't get on the phone with her parents. Why not? It's too upsetting for her. I think she's tried a couple of times and cried the whole time. And like a lot of kids her age, they actually believe that their parents intentionally left them. So she's feeling abandoned. So she's feeling abandoned.

And Nazario told me that, you know, he's tried, that her mother has tried, that even her two year old brother cries for her and asks for her. But they really haven't even talked to her on the phone. So she just understands on some level that her father made the decision to leave. But of course she can't understand that he had done it with the promise that it would mean that they would be reunited. She can't understand any of that. All she knows is that her dad agreed to leave.

Caitlin, thank you very much. Thank you. So on August 7th, about a week after we talked about Nazario and Filomena on the Daily, Filomena was sent back to Guatemala City by the American government. That same judge had ordered that all the parents who were deported without their children be tracked down, and if they wanted it, had their children returned to them. So Filomena was one of eight Guatemalan children on the plane that day who'd been separated from their parents. And Nazario and his wife, Marcela, took a 10-hour-long bus ride to Guatemala City to pick

her up. He said that when he saw her, she looked different. But when I asked what specifically had changed, he couldn't point to anything in particular. He said it was just her way of being. She was just a different child. So I've been in touch with the family ever since Filomena was sent home. And the last time we talked was about three months after she got there. I called them with the help of a colleague, Sandra Garcia, who speaks much better Spanish than I do. Nosario is in a lot of debt, and that's really his biggest concern right now.

He borrowed more than $2,000 from a local bank, which he paid to a coyote to bring him to the United States. And his plan was to work and save money to pay that money back. But instead, he returned to Guatemala with nothing. He says the only way he'll ever be able to save enough to repay that debt is to come back to the United States again. But that scares him and he's losing sleep over it because he doesn't know what his options are. He doesn't want to end up detained away from his children again. We actually got on the phone with Filomena, too.

And she gave us mostly one-word answers like any six-year-old. You know, we said, how are you doing? Good. How do you feel to be home? Contenta. She says she's feel to be home? Contenta. She says she's content to be home. But when we asked her if she ever wanted to come back to the United States, her tone changed.

She immediately said no. She said she was scared that she didn't want to be taken away from her dad again. And remember, she's six. But despite everything they've been through, you can actually look at Nazario as one of the lucky parents, because six months after the executive order ending family separation, there are still children in federal custody. And on top of that, the government is still separating some families. So historically, even before President Trump came into office,

if a parent crossed the border with a child and that parent had an outstanding criminal record, they would be moved into criminal custody and children, of course, can't go to jail. So in those rare cases, parents and children were separated. But what we're hearing anecdotally is that border agents might be acting more zealously than they had in the past. So before, under previous administrations, their directive might have been, you know, come up with every way possible to keep families together.

And what we're hearing now instead is that they might actually be trying to come up with reasons to separate families, even if the allegations against the parents are flimsy, are arguable, they're separating those families anyway. And that means that if Nazario decides to come back with Filomena, it's possible they could be separated again. Daily listeners often ask how they can support this show. The answer is through a subscription to The Times, Thank you. off your first year, plus your first month free. It's a good deal. To learn more, visit nytimes.com slash the daily offer. That's nytimes.com slash the daily offer. And thank you.