At 9 He Lost His Mom to Gang Violence. At 12 He Lost His Dad to Trump's Immigration Policies.

[SummerSnow]

A father pleaded for asylum for his 12-year-old son. Instead, the Trump administration deported him and put his son in a shelter. Now the family cannot get the boy out.

By Karla Cornejo Villavicencio/New York Times/July 3, 2018

When Brayan was 9 years old, in 2016, his mother was brutally raped and murdered in Honduras. Her body was found in a septic tank. When Brayan saw her in the coffin, she was so disfigured that he couldn’t recognize her. She had been seven months pregnant. That’s when his nightmares began, his fear of the dark. His mother’s boyfriend had abused her and was arrested in the killing, but he claimed it was a gang killing and was set free. He threatened Brayan and his father, José, so José vowed to bring Brayan to safety in the United States. The opportunity to travel there safely arrived this year.

During Holy Week in late March, Brayan and his father joined a caravan of hundreds of Central American migrants fleeing through Mexico to the United States. When they arrived at the California border in May, Brayan’s father — seeking to follow the letter of the law — heeded the advice of immigration advocates and presented himself and his son for asylum. Border Patrol officers refused to even glance at the notarized letters from lawyers making his case, José said. He was jailed for 20 days, asked to sign papers in English he did not understand and was deported to Honduras. Brayan was flown to a shelter for children in Maryland.

Brayan is now one of the more than 2,000 children — a conservative estimate — who have been separated from their families as part of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance crackdown on undocumented immigration. On June 26, a federal district judge in San Diego ordered that those families must be reunited within 30 or fewer days — even though a Justice Department lawyer acknowledged there was no formal procedure to reunite families.

Brayan’s story, pieced together from interviews with him, his father and his grandmother — whose last names are being withheld because they are undocumented — shows just how hard the government is making the reunification process, and why every step of the zero-tolerance policy is needlessly traumatizing for thousands of children and their families.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/opinion/family-separation-zero-tolerance-asylum

[SamKnause]

1. Evil fuckers !!!!!!!!!!!!