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On Friday there was finally good news. The ProPublica's audio girl from a migrant detention center – who can be heard sobbing on the record after being separated from her mother – was reunited with her mother a month after having been ripped off the arms of the other. The 29-year-old mother, Cindy Madrid, and the six-year-old daughter, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, met early Friday morning at Houston Airport.
Madrid and Jimena left the airport hand in hand around 3 am, according to ProPublica reporter Ginger Thompson, who published the original ripping audio of children who were separated from their parents. The pair is mounted in a van with Jimena sitting on Madrid's lap and radiant, according to Thompson.
ProPublica reported that their reunification was a "whirlwind". Thursday night, Jimena was removed from a Phoenix shelter at dinner time and airlifted to Houston. She then stayed overnight with a coloring book in Terminal A of the airport. Madrid was released Wednesday in South Texas, according to CNN. She was unable to fly to Houston, her lawyer drove six hours to the airport
The Madrid lawyer said that the girl had what ProPublica described as " a bit emotional "when she saw her mother. In a previous interview, about a week before they were together again, Madrid said that they had only been separated for days before separation. "In six years, I had been away from her only two nights," Madrid told ProPublica. "And every time, she made me promise to never be away from her again, she hated him, we are incredibly close."
The history of Madrid and Jimena – reinforced by the audio of Alison crying at the US Customs and Border repeatedly repeating her aunt's phone number – crystallized the effects of the Zero Tolerance Policy of the Trump Administration. The policy did not codify separating families, but rather treated all illegal entries into the country as a criminal offense. Because children could not go to jail with their parents (who were now charged with criminal rather than civil offenses), they would be under the care of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). ). The Associated Press reported that more than 11,800 children (ages a few months to 17 years) are accommodated in approximately 90 institutions across the country, from California to New York.
For Madrid and Jimena, their story is far removed from the price points of the operation of a child detention center. Salvadoran immigrants came to the United States to apply for asylum.
In an affidavit shared with ProPublica, Madrid wrote that she brought her daughter to America after a band leader in El Salvador killed her boyfriend. Madrid walked with him and held his hand when his boyfriend was killed. According to ProPublica, the gang member reportedly threatened to kill her, but she reported the murder to the police.
A few weeks after his badbadination, the gang leader approached Madrid from the market and threatened to kidnap Jimena when he saw them. "We did not leave home after that," Madrid told ProPublica. "When a gang member says something like that, they do not play, we were terrified."
It is in Madrid that Madrid has decided to take his daughter to the United States where Madrid has her sisters and nieces. They were separated at the border on their second trip north and reached the United States for the first time.
"It was a long and difficult journey," Madrid told ProPublica. "But Jimena is very well behaved, all her cousins are in the United States and she was really happy to come live with them."
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