Guatemalan meets his children 45 days after being separated at the US border

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
Yeni González was arrested and separated from her three children on May 19 at the southern border of the United States. On Tuesday, he found himself in New York, becoming a new mother Courage for opponents of Donald Trump's immigration policy.

This 29-year-old Guatemalan mother was able to reunite with her children through the mobilization of hundreds of volunteers across the United States in the midst of an explosive debate over the separation of migrant families on the border with Mexico.

The practice was announced on May 7 and applied until June 20, when Trump was besieged by an avalanche of critics nationally and internationally.

The weeks of systematic arrest of undocumented migrants who sought to cross the border, and were separated from their minor children, were sufficient to clutter the courts and that hundreds of children were sent to detention centers Across the country.

The mobilization to help González began eight days ago, when a 40-year-old New York-based journalist, mother of three, heard on the radio a lawyer talking about this migrant from Guatemala and his children sent to a place of refuge in New York, a stronghold for immigration thousands of miles from the border

Julie Schwietert Collazo, specialist in Latin America and resident of Queens, a neighborhood with a large immigrant population, launched a fundraising campaign on the GoFundMe website. As she told AFP on Tuesday, she quickly collected the $ 7,500 required for bail, which resulted in Gonzalez being removed from the center where she had been held in Eloy, Arizona. , a border state.

It was still to organize his trip to New York. Many volunteer drivers, migrant rights advocates and even immigrants took turns for four days so that Gonzalez could cross the United States from west to east. A family from Queens then offered to host it.

The mobilization reached the social networks and Monday, the MSNBC star, Rachel Maddow, fiercely anti-Trump, intervened to revive the fundraising, which Tuesday tomorrow, I already had $ 40,000, according to Collazo.

In the midst of a damp heat, about twenty cameras recorded Gonzalez's entry into the Cayuga Centers of Harlem, accompanied by his lawyer and MP Adriano Espaillat, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic arrived as a child in the United States.

An hour and a half later, Gonzalez, little and dressed in jeans and sneakers, left with tears in her eyes

"I am very happy, my heart is full of joy, they let me see, j & # I hope that all this will end soon because all I want is to be with them and we are no longer separated, "he said in Spanish, showing the reporters a pacifier that his daughter had given him. 659003] From a broken voice, barely audible, she kissed Espaillat and thanked all those who had helped her.

But her battle is far from over, says her lawyer, José Xavier Orochena

González will not be able to recover custody of their children aged 5, 8 and 10, until the fingerprints are completed, which will take "a month at best", at least he says.

And there is no guarantee that your application for asylum is not definitively rejected, in which case the whole family will be In the meantime, Gonzalez can visit her three children regularly, "every day if she wishes," she said.

400 mothers still detained
Many other mothers arrested at the border are still in a situation "We live in the United States a horrible time, where women like her are separated from their children "said Espaillat, a deputy of the Democratic opposition.

"We must make sure that the process of (family reunification)

González declared that 400 other mothers were still detained in the center from which she was released.

" We share a lot of sadness (…) If this message comes to their minds, I ask God to leave soon According to Orochena, who voluntarily represents 12 mothers, the majority can not pay the thousands of dollars in bonds needed to leave the detention centers, an obstacle that the system of "crowdfunding" While thousands of people demonstrated on Saturday in several major cities in the United States to demand the meeting of migrant families arrested, this New York journalist hopes that his initiative will serve of "model". "for all those who" want to do something similar ".