This is Family Separation and What It Means to People and Lives

Catherine Rampell for the Washington Post tells the story of Leticia and her son, who  crossed the Rio Grande seeking asylum from danger in Guatemala. Instead, they were torn apart by a policy designed to inflict trauma. Now, she is fighting for restitution for families like hers.  

Rampell writes:

“Leticia tells her story to anyone who will listen: judges, journalists, political officials. She recounts the moment she realized strangers had snatched her son while she slept in a migrant detention cell; and the agonizing month that followed, when no one would tell her where her child was or whether he was even alive.

Sharing this story is painful. But Leticia knows it would be more painful to still be living this experience, as hundreds of families still are. Because the U.S. government is, even today, separating families.

`For them I would tell my story over and over again’ she says.

Before the country moves on, before a new administration and the public try to put this national atrocity in the rearview mirror: Leticia wants us all to remember. She wants us to provide what is owed to hundreds of children whose deported mothers and fathers still haven’t been located, because the government didn’t bother to keep records; and to the thousands more families who have been found, and in some cases reunited, but still fear for their lives.

Three years ago, Leticia and her son became victims of one of the largest-scale, ethnically motivated human rights abuses perpetrated by the U.S. government since Japanese internment. Today, they want to be advocates.” (bold added).

KJ