LA LIBERTAD, El Salvador, Aug 17, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Since being returned to
his parents in Honduras, 16-month-old Johan has suffered from stomach
problems and sleepwalking.
They say the symptoms come from the trauma of being separated as a result
of the US government’s “zero tolerance” policy against migrant families who
illegally cross the country’s southern border.
Rolando Bueso, 37, and Johan, then aged 10 months, were intercepted by US
Border Patrol officers on March 17 after crossing from Mexico into Texas with
the help of a people-smuggler, who was paid $6,000.
They were soon split up and sent to detention centers in different states,
with the infant becoming just one of 2,000 Central American and Mexican
children that US authorities forcibly removed from their parents between
April 19 and May 31 this year.
Bueso ended up being deported back to Honduras on April 5 — but his son
remained in US custody until he was finally returned to his family on a
flight that landed on July 20.
His parents discovered that Johan, who had grown his first teeth, taken his
first steps and spoken his first word — “agua” (water) — while away, had
been badly affected by his months of detention.
“Everything we give him to eat he has problems with. And he gets up and
sleepwalks at night,” said his mother Adalicia, 21, who is eight months
pregnant with another child.
She added bitterly that US authorities had sent him back without all his
papers, which included his birth certificate and vaccination record.
She was speaking in their modest home in La Libertad, a village north of
the capital Tegucigalpa. Johan had been flown back to the northern city of
San Pedro Sula, the main arrival point for deportees from the US.
According to the Honduran government, most Honduran children taken away
from their parents inside the US have still not been returned.
The foreign ministry said only 146 children had been reunited with their
families as of August 10, and 313 were still being held by US authorities.
So far this year, again up to August 10, Honduras has accepted 17,573
Hondurans deported from the United States and 27,334 from Mexico.
– Giving up the dream –
Johan “might be traumatized for life,” Bueso said, watching over his son
who was playing with a black and white cat.
He said the experience had convinced him to give up on trying to illegally
enter the United States. The Americans, he said, “are too rough.”
He and his son were caught on his fourth attempt to reach what Central
Americans call “the American dream”: a land where work is relatively well
paid and easy to come by and violent gangs don’t rule the neighborhoods. Each
time, Bueso was deported.
Honduran officials admit that many of their citizens risk the voyage into
the US with young kids because they believe it enhances their chances of
being legally allowed to stay.
Bueso’s two brothers, who live in the US state of Maryland, had shown that
it was possible to make it.
But Trump, with his embrace of policies designed to make the US look as
inhospitable as possible to migrants and his ambition to build a wall along
the border with Mexico, is changing some calculations.
In Bueso’s case, it was a harsh readjustment. As an assistant on a bus
servicing the La Libertad-San Pedro Sula route he can hope to earn $8 on a
good day. In the US, as a laborer, he could expect to make $10 per hour.
The small, concrete-block and tin-roofed home he and his wife live in is
owned by one of his brothers who lives in the US, Adrian, who also supplied
the $6,000 to pay the smuggler.
Bueso said he won’t try again to reach the US, “but no matter how many
walls they put up there are always people who are going to try because they
are looking to survive.”
Bueso acknowledged that La Libertad was a relatively peaceful village that
didn’t suffer from the corrosive gang violence or drug trafficking that
blighted so much of Honduras. But he pointed out that the country’s economic
situation was dire — something he blamed on government corruption.
More than a million Hondurans live in the United States.
Most of them lack documents to legally stay, yet they represent a pillar
holding up Honduras’ economy. Each year $4 billion in remittances are sent to
Honduras, accounting for 20 percent of gross domestic product.
This year, thanks to a strong dollar and taut US labor market, remittances
have grown nine percent, according to the central bank.