Tag: Family Reunification

Originally published by The Washington Post

Two by two, they came through the double doors of the shuttered retirement home: mothers tightly clutching their children, fathers holding fast to small hands.

They had been among the more than 2,500 parents stripped of their children and imprisoned after illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

But now, after outrage and protests and a class-action lawsuit, the Trump administration was being forced to reunite the families ahead of a court-ordered deadline Thursday. Hundreds of parents were being released each day from immigration jails across the Southwest. Their children were being set free from shelters and flown to meet them. And within minutes of their teary reunions, the families were being taken to the handful of nonprofit groups that had rushed to help them.

They were the lucky ones. At least 463 parents may have been deported without their children, the government reported to a federal judge Monday night.

Villanueva lays his head down for a moment as he speaks to volunteers about travel arrangements for him and his 7-year-old daughter Friday in El Paso. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Danely waits for her father as he speaks to volunteers at the shelter, a former retirement home. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

A volunteer takes Villanueva and Danely to their room. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

At the former Sisters of Loretto convalescent home, in drab rooms that once housed aging nuns, more than 100 immigrant children and parents were reconnecting after weeks or months apart. A boy with a shock of dark hair and wide grin galloped noisily down the linoleum hallway on a plastic horse. In what had been a library, a dozen parents curled up with their children on plastic mattresses on the floor.

On Friday, the day’s final van-load of families arrived just as dusk descended on El Paso. Last through the double doors and into the dimly lit hallways was Jose Luis Villanueva Alvarado. Under the arm of the wiry Honduran construction worker hid his 7-year-old daughter, Danely, whom he had last seen seven weeks earlier, sleeping on a Border Patrol facility’s bare floor as he was led away in handcuffs.

Now father and daughter sat on the ground with their backs against the wall, examining each other for signs of their time apart, as they and two other families were welcomed by Ruben Garcia.

Annunciation House Director Ruben Garcia greets Danely and her father after they arrive at the temporary sanctuary he has created for newly reunited families. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

“I want you to know that you are not in immigration custody anymore,” the 69-year-old Catholic activist told the new arrivals in Spanish. Garcia had been helping undocumented immigrants in El Paso for more than 40 years, through other crises along the border. Yet he said he had never witnessed anything quite like the chaos of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown.

When he learned in late June that the government was going to reunite the separated parents and children, he scrambled to transform the former retirement home into a temporary sanctuary for them.

“We’re going to give you food and everything you need,” including plane tickets to reach waiting relatives, he told them. “Ya están libres.”

You are now free.

But the parents wondered: Free for how long?

Some had been given GPS ankle monitors just an hour or two earlier. All of them were required to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the agency that had just released them.

For now, they were here, in a place that was part emotional respite, part logistical staging ground. As they waited for a volunteer to take their information, Danely spotted a girl with whom she had spent a week at a shelter in Phoenix.

Julieta Cardona Pedro raced over.

“She says that they’re friends,” said her father, Alfredo Cardona Pascual.

And then the 9-year-old from Guatemala and the 7-year-old from Honduras did what they were never allowed to do in the shelter.

They hugged.

Julieta Cardona Pedro, left, with Danely chat at the El Paso shelter. The two girls met when they were at the same shelter for children in Phoenix. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Garcia smiles as he speaks to a volunteer. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Julieta and her father, Alfredo Cardona Pascual, walk out of the migrant shelter to head to the El Paso airport. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

“This is what we were suffering for,” Villanueva said, watching.

“Thank God it’s behind us,” Cardona said before he led Julieta away.

For Villanueva, it was his first night with Danely since June 3, when they spent a few restless hours in a safe house in Juarez, just a few miles from here. Now there were volunteers handing him orange juice, serving him pizza and calling his relatives in New Jersey. Now someone was adding his name to an online spreadsheet so that someone else across the country could buy plane tickets for him and Danely.

“How many minutes do we get to shower here?” the girl asked as a volunteer showed her father how far it was to New Jersey on a map. “Because in the shelter, we only got five minutes to shower and three to brush our teeth.”

Soon, a volunteer showed them to their room, where a Guatemalan father and son were already sitting on one of two hospital beds.

In each room, parents held their children while hiding their worries. Some teenagers clung to their parents like toddlers. Others wouldn’t talk. A few stared into space and cried.

In Room 109, Villanueva wondered whether Danely was okay, and how long they would be here, and what awaited them in New Jersey.

And yet he was overjoyed to be with her again. As he stripped off her socks and walked her down the hall to the shower, the 41-year-old began to sing to her as he had in Honduras.

“Turn on a light, let it shine,” he sang. “Before such need in the world, turn on a light in the darkness.”

As she giggled in the shower, Villanueva gazed into a mirror for the first time in almost two months.

“I look ugly,” he said. “I’m skinny and scruffy.”

“No, Papi,” she said. “You’re not ugly.”

And then they returned to Room 109 and climbed into bed.

Villanueva and Danely lie on their bed before going to sleep at the Loretto shelter. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

On Saturday morning, Villanueva and Danely sat in a crowded cafeteria, eating pancakes and pan dulce with Cisary Reynaud and his daughter, Shirli, dressed in purple sequins. The fathers had met in immigration jail weeks earlier, swapping stories of their girls. Now they were all sharing a meal. As they finished, a volunteer walked over.

“You are leaving at noon,” she said in Spanish, handing Reynaud a thin slip of paper with his name on it and the number of a flight to Virginia, where a brother he hadn’t seen in 14 years had agreed to take them in.

Villanueva leaned over to take a look.

“Are you leaving, too?” Reynaud asked.

Cardona and Julieta clean their room before leaving the shelter. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Villanueva rests as Danely combs his hair. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Father and daughter pray before having lunch. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Villanueva didn’t know. As the last ones to arrive the night before, he and Danely were one of the few not to have tickets yet.

Around them was a constant churn as families cleaned their rooms and packed their bags and learned to which ICE office they had to report. All the while, newly reunited families kept arriving, although the pace had slowed. They rummaged through a room full of donated clothes. In short supply were shoelaces and belts — taken from the parents to prevent suicide — as well as small women’s shirts.

“All we have are larges, but the women are so small,” a volunteer said as she shelved a new shipment.

The volunteers were grad students and stay-at-home moms, retired teachers and Jesuit priests in training. One wore a rainbow on her name tag. Another drank out of a water bottle with the sticker “Make America Mexico Again.”

Many were from El Paso — a blue city in a red state — but some came from as far away as California, North Carolina or New York. They stayed late into the night, sometimes driving immigrants to the airport themselves when shuttles weren’t available. What they all shared was a belief that separating families was morally wrong.

“I think we need to apologize to them for what our country has done to them,” said Annette Tiscareño, a social worker who brought homemade horchata to Loretto.

Many of the volunteers were veterans. One group called itself the Burrito Ladies after the bean-filled tortillas they had been making for undocumented immigrants for years.

But no one had been doing this as long as Garcia. When Mother Teresa visited El Paso in 1976, he told her of his plans to open a sanctuary for immigrants. She told him to “announce the good news and bring the people home to Jesus,” he said. When the sanctuary opened two years later, he christened it Annunciation House.

Villanueva and Danely are thrilled to be together after seven weeks apart. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Danely picks out a dress from shelves of donated clothes and shows her father her choice. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Toys, shoes and a doll are among the items Villanueva packs up for his daughter. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

When refugees from Central America’s civil wars flocked to Annunciation House in the 1980s, Garcia took in six Salvadoran orphans. And when a surge of unaccompanied minors began arriving in 2014, he used the closed retirement home to accommodate them. Now it had been pressed into service again to handle the flood of separated families.

Yet not even the retirement home was enough to host all the reunited families when ICE unexpectedly sent him about 200 parents and children late Thursday night. Almost half ended up in three other Annunciation House facilities alongside other undocumented immigrants who had continued to arrive in a steady stream throughout the latest crisis.

The Loretto-Nazareth migrant shelter in El Paso. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

A volunteer checks in with Villanueva and Danely before the pair leave the shelter. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Danely gets ready to leave. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Annunciation House has always relied on donations for its annual budget of about $250,000, Garcia said. When it came to buying more than 300 last-minute, cross-country flights to Oregon or Alabama or Florida — some as expensive as $2,400 — it received help from FWD.us, an immigration advocacy group founded in 2013 by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and other tech entrepreneurs.

Waiting in New Jersey was Villanueva’s 18-year-old son. He had been sent to the United States four years ago after Villanueva’s brother had been killed by a “banda organizada,” one of the organized-crime groups that terrorize Honduras — often with the support of corrupt police officers.

When some of those responsible for the killing had recently gotten out of prison, Villanueva decided it was time for Danely to go, too. With his wife staying behind to safeguard their house, he borrowed $9,000 from relatives to take the girl to the United States, never thinking she could be taken from him.

Villanueva, who had been caught crossing the border once before, had not asked for asylum while in ICE custody, nor had some of the other fathers at Loretto.

“I was afraid to ask for it, because we were told then we’d be there for six or eight months, without our children,” Villanueva said.

His roommate, Wilson Perez Vasquez, nodded in agreement.

Julieta, left, shows Danely, center, and Angely Chinchilla Melgar the birthday gift her father made while they were separated. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Even now that they were free, asylum was an afterthought. The fathers had a more modest goal — to stay in the United States long enough to pay off the debts accrued in getting here, and move their families out of harm’s way back home.

“One year is not enough,” Perez said, “but three, four or five would be good.”

As they spoke, Danely sat on the edge of the bed, peering down the hallway. She caught sight of Julieta, and soon they were running up and down the linoleum halls together with Angely Chinchilla Melgar, a 6-year-old from Honduras whom Danely had befriended in another shelter.

But soon it was time for Julieta and her father to go to the airport. Julieta packed her most precious belongings — the birthday present her father had made her in jail and the Michael Kors purse a Loretto volunteer had given her — next to her father’s ankle-monitor charger in the black duffel bag that she, like the other kids, had been given at the shelters. As they lined up near the door, a volunteer handed them bags of food and told the immigrants — most of whom had never flown before — not to take liquids through airport security. Then they were hustled into a van.

An hour later, it was Angely boarding a van to the airport. And then, an hour after that, Danely silently waved goodbye to Perez and his son as they slipped out of the room.

Then another wave of families arrived. Among them were Sergio and Jennifer Reyes, who had been detained at the same time as Villanueva and Danely and taken to the same Border Patrol facility. It was Jennifer, 14, who consoled Danely when she woke up to find their fathers were gone.

“She cried a lot,” Jennifer said. When Danely stopped eating the cold instant noodles they served, it was the older girl who made her eat.

Ariel Romero and his son Jose Romero, 7, of Honduras outside the shelter. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Danely watches as her father talks to a volunteer moments before leaving the shelter. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Julieta listens to volunteers sing to them and others with recent birthdays during lunch. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

At dinner, the two Honduran families sat together, eating lasagna donated by a local restaurant. Afterward, the retirement home was quiet. One father read the Bible as he charged his ankle monitor. Another did push-ups with his son outside on a patch of grass in front of a statue of the crucifixion.

German Cardona, a hulking man, boasted that he did 120 push-ups each day in his cell during the two months he was apart from his 14-year-old son, Eber. But separation had been hard, he admitted. One father in his detention center had killed himself, he said, and a few others had suffered strokes. Asked whether he had seen any changes in his son, Cardona said no but then began to cry, prompting Eber to do the same.

As the sun set, a couple more families came outside to talk and throw a football. Eventually, Villanueva and Danely joined them, sitting on the curb a few yards away. Villanueva had gone to the volunteers’ office looking for headache medicine but instead found documents saying that he and Danely were due to leave on Sunday at noon.

Garcia speaks to immigrants who just arrived at the Loretto migrant shelter. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Villanueva’s ICE check-in was in 10 days. But unlike most of the parents, he hadn’t been given an ankle monitor.

“I want to do the right thing,” Villanueva said. “But if I show up with my daughter, I’m afraid they’ll deport us.”

After all they had been through — the journey through Mexico, the separation, the seven weeks apart, including a month without being able to speak with each other — to have just 10 days in the United States seemed cruel.

“Me presento o me fugo,” he said. Do I show up or do I run?

On Sunday morning, Danely helped her father sweep and mop their room twice, just to make sure it was clean. Then Villanueva packed her clothes and crayons and coloring book into her small black duffel bag, laying her doll from the shelter with “My First Christmas” on it on top. Finally, he donned the same shirt he had arrived in and put everything from Loretto in a neat pile by the bed.

Villanueva and Juan Mendez are handed documents by a volunteer as they arrive at the airport with their children. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

As they waited for the van to the airport, Villanueva fretted over their stop in Denver.

“My fear is when we have to change planes,” Villanueva said. “Can I ask people for help?”

“Of course,” said Lucila Arronta, a volunteer whose energy made her a favorite of the families at Loretto.

As she walked them to the van, she gave them both hugs and waved as they pulled away. Villanueva put his hands to his face, silently praying for a safe journey.

Five minutes later, they pulled into the airport parking lot, where three more volunteers were waiting for them. Inside, theygave Danely lollipops before taking her and her father to the United counter, where an employee printed out tickets 24C and D.

“All set,” she said in Spanish as she handed them the tickets.

They followed the volunteers through an atrium decorated with a massive American flag, past a Starbucks and up an escalator to the security checkpoint.

Earlier, when the volunteers told them to take everything out of their pockets, Villanueva had been so nervous he had pulled out the lint. Now a Border Patrol agent approached.

Villanueva is nervous as he and Danely reach the airport. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Villanueva and Danely navigate the airport security. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Father and daughter wait in line to pick up their tickets to New Jersey. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

“Cómo está, señor?” the agent asked.

“Fine,” Villanueva said. “A little nervous —.”

“Trust me,” the agent continued in Spanish. “Everything is going to be fine. All I’m going to do is review your documents.”

He asked Villanueva his name and birthday. Then he bent down toward Danely.

“And when were you born?”

“2010,” she answered.

“You don’t know the month or day?”

“October 18th.”

“Okay,” the agent said and moved on to the next family.

When he was out of earshot, Villanueva exhaled.

“I wanted to ask him, ‘When are you sending me back?’ ” he said. “It gives you panic.”

“He’s wearing the same uniform as the men who—,” Danely said before trailing off.

Her father’s thoughts returned to their ICE check-in date.

A Transportation Security Administration agent beckoned them forward. Villanueva took his daughter’s hand and, looking around, guided her through the metal detector and toward their gate.

Villanueva and Danely pass a giant American flag as they make their way through the El Paso airport. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Washington Post)

Originally published by The Washington Post

Hillary Clinton is offering a helping hand to immigrants looking to reunite with their families: She says she’ll help organize transportation they might not be able to afford.

“I’m going to be tweeting about this in the days to come, but if any of you work for an airline please direct message me because these families will need vouchers and discounted tickets to be reunited over these thousands of miles,” she told a crowd cheering her Saturday in Central Park when she took the stage as part of a star-studded summer festival of conversation, music and food.

Immigrants separated from their children after crossing the U.S. border illegally was only one topic addressed by the former Democratic presidential candidate, secretary of state and U.S. senator from New York as part of the OZY Fest in the park’s Rumsey Playfield.

She was interviewed by Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective, a nonprofit advocate of liberal causes that led the event.

Clinton also took on this week’s burning topic: Republican President Donald Trump’s encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, amid special counsel Robert Mueller’s warning that Russian intelligence services have active “interference operations” in U.S. politics.

“It’s really distressing and alarming,” Clinton said. “It should concern every American of any political party because this was a direct attack on our democracy.”

Clinton, who lost to Trump in the 2016 election, said “It’s fair to say it was a broad and unfortunately successful attack on our electoral system.”

She said the United States has four main adversaries: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

“If anyone gets away with the attack Russia did, it empowers them all to keep probing.”

As for the Helsinki meeting, “now we have Putin telling the world what was decided,” she said, while “we’re hearing crickets from the White House; nothing has been put out that contradicts or replaces Putin’s agenda.”

Clinton described the Russian leader as a “very aggressive guy,” and said she believes he “wants to dominate his neighborhood again.”

“In this case it seems like our president doesn’t care,” she said. “He wants to be friends with Putin for reasons we aren’t sure of.”

Clinton concluded: “We are still very vulnerable.”

Other announced guests at the festival included comedians Michelle Wolf and Hasan Minhaj; the band Passion Pit; rapper Common; authors Malcolm Gladwell and Salman Rushdie.

Read more:https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/hillary-clinton-is-cheered-at-star-studded-central-park-fest/2018/07/21/f5f4fa5a-8d48-11e8-9d59-dccc2c0cabcf_story.html?utm_term=.ebc892e7bfb7

Originally published by LA Times

With one week left under a federal judge’s deadline to reunify families separated at the border, the Trump administration on Thursday said 364 children age 5 and older have rejoined their parents.

That’s only a fraction of the 2,551 children in that age group who’ve been identified for possible reunification.

The government’s latest status report on the effort does not speculate on whether it will make the July 26 deadline, only saying that the new truncated process to match up families and clear parents for reunification “is proceeding.”

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego, who is overseeing the reunification effort as part of a preliminary injunction he granted, has set a hearing for Friday afternoon to discuss the progress.

The families are being released into the community on parole rather than being detained together — the same as families of children younger than 5 who were reunited under an earlier deadline this month.

The families are being dropped off at the offices of local social service organizations, which are equipped to assist them with immediate basic needs such as transportation and clothing, according to the court filing.

Of the roughly 1,600 parents possibly eligible for reunification, 848 parents have been cleared, 272 are awaiting a final interview and others are still in the vetting process or are no longer in immigration custody and must be tracked down.

Authorities say they have identified 91 parents so far with a criminal record or other disqualifier that makes them ineligible for reunification. Additionally, more than 100 parents declined to be reunified with their children when asked during an interview.

Authorities cautioned that the numbers reflect reports as of midnight Wednesday and are unofficial.

The reunification process includes using official records, interviews or other observations to confirm the parent-child relationship, as well as background checks on the parents. DNA testing is being used in cases where there are red flags. Eligible parents currently in immigration custody are being moved to one of eight facilities where they undergo a final interview by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Children who are in shelters spread across the country are being brought to the facilities, joined with their parents, then released. Officials have not identified which facilities are being used.

Authorities say more than 700 parents have final orders of removal, but for now they remain in a holding pattern due to a Monday court order that prohibits the government from deporting newly reunited families.

The American Civil Liberties Union has asked for a seven-day period between family reunification and removal to give the parents time to consult with a child advocate or attorney to decide if the children have viable claims to contest their own immigration cases.

“These parents may only have a matter of days to make the momentous decision whether to leave their child behind in the United States,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt urged in Thursday’s joint briefing.

Sabraw had been reluctant to impose such an order earlier last week but changed his mind a few days later by granting a temporary injunction that halts removals.

The removal issue will be argued separately in a hearing on Monday.

The ACLU complained that the government has continued to fall behind in providing information on the parents who fall into the various categories of eligibility. The ACLU proposed deadlines spread over the next few days for authorities to provide lists of parents either released from ICE custody, deported or with final removal orders.

The massive reunification effort is tied to a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU in San Diego. The two named plaintiffs are women who claimed asylum at a port of entry and crossed the border illegally and had their children taken from them. Both families have since been reunited.

The government has been working to streamline its processes since its first efforts to reunite children under age 5 earlier this month.

The deadline of July 10 was not met in that instance, with some of the 57 children being reunited in the days that followed due to “logistical” reasons. Many other children were determined to have parents who were ineligible for various reasons, including criminal records. The ACLU is still working to help find the 12 parents in that age group who have already been deported.

Read more:http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-family-reunited-judge-20180720-story.html

Originally published by The NY Times

The delivery trucks keep pulling up to one of the largest churches on the South Texas border. They have unloaded thousands of diapers in recent days — tall stacks of diaper boxes sit on pallets outside an auditorium, wrapped tightly in plastic. On Tuesday, Dairy Queen even showed up, delivering donated ice-cream bars.

Four hundred of them.

All of it — the ice cream, diapers, disposable plates, shampoo, bottles of water, electrolyte children’s drinks — has arrived at the church in the border town of San Juan to help the Rio Grande Valley’s newest and neediest temporary residents: the migrant families who were separated by immigration authorities after crossing the border and then reunited and released.

For days now, San Juan, McAllen and other cities in the Rio Grande Valley have been a way station for the reunified families. Volunteers, city officials, local businesses and members of Catholic organizations have scrambled to feed, assist and provide transportation and overnight housing for hundreds of the reunited families.

The process has been a relatively smooth one, because of a loose network of volunteers and officials who have been helping and housing undocumented immigrants in the Valley for years. But as hundreds of reunited families have been released in just a matter of days, that network has struggled to respond to an unanticipated logistical emergency.

Federal officials faced with a federal court deadline to reunite migrant children with their parents have in many cases left the families, their lawyers and the volunteers to sort out what happens after their release — where they would sleep, eat and stay cool in the South Texas heat while they wait for hours or even a day to board their bus or plane.

Some of the newly released families are sleeping and resting on the floor at the San Juan church campus, lying on thick blue mats, until their onward travel plans can be arranged.

Officials with the federal Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security said that they were “working tirelessly” to manage the logistics of the reunifications, which under the court’s order must be completed by July 26.

“The safety and well-being of children remains our top priority as we work to comply with the court’s order as expeditiously as possible,” the officials said in a statement. One of the agencies involved, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had tapped additional resources “to facilitate more efficient reunification of family units going forward.”

With less than a week left before the deadline, just 364 of the 2,551 separated children, or less than 15 percent, have been reunited with their families, according to a status report filed on Thursday.

For parents who have in many cases spent weeks in detention, struggling to learn the whereabouts of their children, their ordeal does not end once they are reunited. Lives remain in upheaval: They are led to other shelters, obtain donated clothes, line up for food and rely on others to arrange their bus and air travel as they head for the cities around the country where their relatives live.

Top officials in the Valley have pitched in. The ice-cream delivery was coordinated in part by the mayor of McAllen, Jim Darling. A local Dairy Queen owner read about separated families, called Mr. Darling and offered to donate Dilly Bars.

The mayor contacted Sister Norma Pimentel, the Catholic nun known for her work helping undocumented adults and children. Sister Pimentel — the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley — asked for 400 bars, and Dairy Queen made the delivery Tuesday at the church, a tourist attraction called the Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle.

“It’s unfortunate that we have had to deal with it for so long, but we’re proud to do it,” Mr. Darling said of the city’s yearslong assistance in helping the immigrants who are periodically released by federal authorities in McAllen.

San Juan and McAllen have become hubs for the newly reunified families largely because of its location near the Port Isabel detention center, an ICE facility where many of the families in South Texas have been reunited. After children and parents are brought back together, the families are driven to the Basilica in San Juan. From there, volunteers and others take some of them to the airport in McAllen.

Laura Torres, 47, a Desert Storm Army veteran who lives in McAllen, served as a volunteer airport driver for the families. Her neighbor asked her to help, and so on Tuesday, she picked up four mothers and their four children at the Basilica, drove them to the airport and helped make sure they got on their flights to various cities where they will join their relatives.

Ms. Torres said most of the mothers she drove had not previously seen their children in more than a month. One mother was from Guatemala and was headed to Chicago to join her husband. Others were from El Salvador and Honduras, and they were catching flights to Miami, Maryland and Minnesota.

“It was important to me because they are human beings and because I felt bad when I first saw the pictures of the children in the cages,” Ms. Torres said.

On Thursday morning, the scene at the Basilica illustrated the needs, and the numbers. The church provides a spacious, tree-shaded resting spot off Expressway 83. The immigrants lingered on the grounds, sitting on the grass near winding sidewalks as their children ran around. Next to a gift shop, beyond a gazebo wrapped with flowers, people mingled outdoors in an area covered by canopies. Volunteers carried boxes between the buildings. Hundreds of people — as many as 300 or 400, those involved said — this week were calling it a temporary home.

Not all of the families were those who had been separated as part of the Trump administration’s ”zero-tolerance” policy on border enforcement. Some had been apprehended together at the border, detained and released with ankle monitors. One of those was a widow and mother of four from Honduras. She was lying on the grass, her baby on top of her, as her son climbed a tree. The woman, who asked that her name not be used because of her immigration status, managed a smile.

“We’re so happy,” she said. Then she paused. “It’s not that we’re happy. It’s that we’re content.”

Read more:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/us/migrant-families-reunite-texas.html

Originally published by CNN