As reports swirled about the more than 2,000 migrant children had been separated from their parents at the southern border, Jonathan Blitzer wrote in The New Yorker that “No protocols have been put in place for keeping track of parents and children concurrently, for keeping parents and children in contact with each other while they are separated, or for eventually reuniting them. Immigration lawyers, public defenders, and advocates along the border have been trying to fill the void.”
Blitzer’s latest dispatch from El Paso, Texas, is about a Honduran woman named Ana Rivera, and her son Jairo.
They were caught scaling a fence in El Paso, and spent the night in a holding cell at a U.S. Border Patrol station with other mothers and children, a group of about twenty-five people in all. On the afternoon of their second day in detention, two male agents entered the cell. “They didn’t say anything,” Rivera told me. “They just walked over and grabbed Jairo. It felt like my son was stuck to me. He clung to me, cried and screamed. They had to pull him away.” She pleaded with the agents to tell her what was going on. The other women in the cell were too stunned to speak, Rivera told me. In the next few hours, the agents started taking other children, too. Eventually, the mothers were told that they would be reunited with their children after spending a few days in jail.
Nearly six weeks later, Rivera has not seen her son.
Blitzer joins us to talk about the latest developments after the president signed an executive order to keep families at the border together on Wednesday.
The zero-tolerance policy isn’t over. But is the political pressure? Will the families who are already separated be reunited? How?
GUESTS
Jonathan Blitzer, Staff writer, The New Yorker; @JonathanBlitzer
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