Six-year-old girl reunited with deported dad after more than three months apart
newsdepo.com
Of the 182 kidnapped migrant children who remain in U.S. custody 60 days past a judge’s reunification deadline, 141 of those kids are still jailed because their parents have already been deported. One such child, Marianita, was finally reunited with her pSix-year-old girl reunited with deported dad after more than three months apart
Of the 182 kidnapped migrant children who remain in U.S. custody 60 days past a judge’s reunification deadline, 141 of those kids are still jailed because their parents have already been deported. One such child, Marianita, was finally reunited with her parents in Honduras last week, more than three months after she was ripped from her dad’s arms at the U.S.-Mexico border. “The little girl quietly smiled,” tweeted Yamiche Alcindor of PBS, “as her father wept.” The child had been in U.S. custody since June, when she was separated from her dad, Misael Ponce Herrera, and sent to a child detention facility in New York. Ponce Herrera told PBS that he had been forced to sign deportation papers and for months struggled to get his daughter back. In this particular case, the Texas Civil Rights Project, which helped reunite the family, said that Alcindor’s reporting was crucial in pushing officials to finally reunite them. “It’s great for this family, but it is painstakingly slow for the others,” said Efren Olivares, the group’s racial and economic justice director. “The federal government is very bureaucratic and they are not in a rush to reunite any of these families. They are only doing the bare minimum which the court is forcing them to do. They are dragging their feet on purpose because it does not benefit them politically to reunite these families. So they don’t seem to care.” We DO care. Can you give $5 to some of the important local organizations helping keep families together? Read more