Mateo has not seen his father Noel in more than two years
Credit: Dan Callister for The Telegraph
Xiomara can recall every detail about the moment her eight-year-old daughter was taken away.
It was May 10, 2018 — Mother’s Day in her native El Salvador — and she and her daughter Sofia were being held in a cramped and filthy US detention centre.
Xiomara, 34, had travelled to the US border to make an asylum claim days earlier, after facing threats of extortion and violence from the criminal gang MS-13.
She had been taken to "la hielera", or “the ice box” – the nickname many migrants give the US border patrol’s notoriously cold holding cells – which was packed with dozens of other mothers and sick children.
It had been a shock to find that the only water they had to drink came from the toilet; their meals consisted of packets of cold instant soup.
It was then that immigration officials informed her that Sofia would be kept in the US — but she would be deported.
“I felt so distraught,” Xiomara recalled, but the immigration officials were unmoved. “I remember them telling us we were invading their country,” she said.
Border patrol processes asylum seekers in Texas' Rio Grande Valley
Credit: John Moore /Getty
She remembers vividly how, as officials began lining the children up in order of their age, one young child began screaming and had to be forcibly removed from his mother.
“My daughter wouldn’t let go off my hand either,” Xiomara said. “I told her ‘just go’ because I didn’t want the officers to pull her from me by force. That would be worse.
"I told her we’re going to get through this and we would see each other very soon."
Her voice cracked as she added: "So she went and I just stood there crying.”
Xiomara assumed she would be reunited with Sofia in a matter of weeks — but more than two years later she is still waiting.
People are familiar with the Trump administration’s "zero tolerance" family separation policy, which saw more than 5,500 migrant parents separated from their children and deported.
The "zero tolerance" policy was met with international condemnation
Credit: AFP
But despite Donald Trump later publicly disowning the policy, what is less well known is that hundreds of parents have still not been reunited with their children.
A recent lawsuit revealed that the US government has been unable to locate around 600 parents who were separated from their children at the border.
More than 300 children also cannot be located because they were released to sponsors whose contact information is no longer up to date. Migrant advocates say the true numbers are likely even higher.
Most of the children are believed to be in the United States, while most of the parents were deported to their home countries.
In Xiomara’s case, she was deported to El Salvador a few months after her daughter was taken away.
She says the first few weeks were the worst. Unable to sleep, she began hallucinating. “I thought my daughter was talking to me,” she said. “I listened to her just calling me: ‘Mummy, Mummy’. I would hear other children crying and I imagined my daughter was going through the same thing.”
Xiomara has since learned that Sofia, who is now 11 years old, was released to relatives in California and she is able to do daily video calls, but the pain of separation is constant.
She has found her daughter’s birthdays particularly hard. “My daughter tells me she doesn’t want a cake until I’m there to enjoy it with her,” she said. “She tells me it’s been too long already.”
The job of tracking down parents like Xiomara has been taken up by NGOs and migrant advocacy groups.
It is painstaking work. “It’s really all over the map with what information we’re given,” explains Cathleen Caron, from Justice In Motion, a non-profit working to track down missing parents. In some instances, Ms Caron says her colleagues have little more than a misspelled name and a village to inform their searches.
“They’re like detectives,” she said, describing the extreme efforts often involved. "Sometimes it’s hours and hours [of car travel] and after that they’re walking because there are no roads."
Dora Melara, an associate of Justice in Motion, works to track down separated parents now living in Central America
Credit: Courtesy of Justice in Motion
Ms Caron said the work has been complicated by the pandemic and two recent hurricanes in Central America, which have cut off entire areas.
Joe Biden, the president-elect, has called the family separation policy "criminal" and pledged to create a task force dedicated to finding and reuniting separated families, but he has yet to reveal any details about his proposal.
Groups like Ms Caron’s are now urging Mr Biden to allow those migrants deported under the "zero tolerance" policy to return to the US and claim asylum.
"This has been one of the longstanding scars of the Trump administration so for Biden to take measures to help these families heal and have some measure of justice is crucial," she said. "I think it will be a strong statement for Biden on day one [of his presidency] to say he’s going to bring these families back to be with their children on US soil."
Without that guarantee, even those parents who have been tracked down often face an impossible choice: do they agree to have their child deported back to danger and poverty, or remain separated?
Noel, 42, speaking from his home in Honduras this month after being separated from his teenage son in 2018
Credit: Paulo Cerrato for The Telegraph
It is a question that Noel, a 42-year-old labourer from Honduras has been battling with since his teenage son Mateo was separated from him in May 2018.
Noel travelled to the US with his sixteen-year-old to claim asylum and escape the criminal gangs that were attempting to recruit Mateo.
Instead, Noel says he was taken into custody and then put in a federal prison as he waited for his case to be processed.
A US Customs and Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas
Credit: AFP
He spent months working as a cook in prison before finally being transported to another migrant processing centre.
“The immigration officer came to me one day and said ‘you’re leaving, get your things ready’. I thought maybe I would be with my son or maybe we would be deported together,” he said.
In fact, it would be just Noel who was deported. His son, he later discovered, had been released by immigration officials to the care of an uncle who was living in Maryland.
“It’s been extremely hard for him,” Noel said. “The uncle abandoned him because he didn’t want to go through all the paperwork and processing and my son actually had to find another friend to live with,” he said.
Mateo, photographed this month in Maryland, where he has been since being separated from his father Noel
Credit: Dan Callister for The Telegraph
Noel bitterly regrets his journey to the US, but he knows the two-year separation has been even harder on Mateo. “He was such a shy child. He had never been away from home [before we went to the US], not even to the nearby villages.”
He also knows that the ordeal has had a severe effect on his Mateo; he struggles to focus in school and has developed mental health issues.
But Noel is reluctant to have Mateo return to Honduras. He sold his house and moved to another town, but the stranglehold the gangs have on communities is hard to escape.
Noel, at his home in Honduras
Credit: Paul Cerrato for The Telegraph
“I do what I have to do to survive,” Noel said, describing the bits of decorating and construction work he is able to pick up, but scarcely makes ends meet. It is not the sort of existence he wants for his son.
“He would like to come home. But I’ve told him I really want him to make this sacrifice because things are very difficult here,” he says. “I tell him that we have to trust God and everything will work out.”
Some more fortunate parents have been reunited with their children in the US, but the scars of the separation remain.
Lisbeth, 33, was separated from her daughter Isabella for 16 months
Credit: James Breeden for The Telegraph
Lisbeth, a 33-year-old El Salvadorian, was reunited with her daughter Isabella in April 2019 after 16 months apart.
She sees it as a “victory” that she was able to be able to return and stay with her daughter in the southwest of the US, but she says the pain from the separation “never goes away”.
It is clear to her that Isabella also suffered a great deal during her time in a detention centre. “She talks a lot about that time,” Lisbeth said. “That’s the first time she experienced anxiety attacks.”
Lisbeth is still very worried about her. As well as the physical changes she has noticed in the intervening months, like the fact that Isabella is now taller than her, she has also noticed a big change in her personality.
“She’s very anti-social now, she wasn’t like that before,” she said.
Lisbeth was reunited with her daughter Isabella in April 2019 after 16 months apart.
Credit: James Breeden for The Telegraph
With the help of a legal aid non-profit, Al Otro Lado, Lisbeth successfully fought to return to the US while her asylum case is given a proper hearing.
She is pinning all her hopes for the future on the outcome. She left El Salvador to escape her partner, who had become involved in a criminal group and left her fearing for her and Isabella’s life.
But her experience of the US immigration system has changed her perspective of the country she now calls home.
“I would never have imagined that this would happen; that they would separate us and make us go through that process to be together,” she said. “It shouldn’t be a crime to try to seek something better for your family.”
Luisa says her experience has changed her perspective on the country she now calls home
Credit: James Breeden for The Telegraph
Back in El Salvador, Xiomara too is hopeful that one day soon she will be back with her daughter.
She fears that every move she makes is monitored by the gangs that control her local neighbourhood. She is also concerned about the repercussions of detailing her story, as she is still hopeful that she can return to Sofia in California while her asylum case is heard.
But she says she has agreed to relive the trauma of her separation for this interview because stories like hers have gone unheard for too long.
“So many families are lost; they don’t know where their children are. I lost my child but I also lost my faith,” she said. “I want to say that what happened to me is not part of the past.”
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