By Damià Bonmatí
“Thank you, Mami, for everything you do.
I love you very much.
I know that you are a strong and brave woman.
Together we will move forward ... with God's help ”.
Liz's teenage daughter, a Salvadoran immigrant, now leaves her messages like these.
Suddenly her home in the United States was filled with colorful drawings, notes and post-its that communicate the young woman and the mother.
They are the
visible advances of the therapy that they undertook together to overcome the trauma
.
Liz and her 13-year-old daughter were separated for months by the Trump administration under a policy called zero tolerance.
It happened to them when they arrived at the southern border of the United States from El Salvador in late 2017.
They were seeking asylum but became one of thousands of families estranged by the government.
The mother was sent to an immigration detention center and the daughter to a shelter for minors.
“My daughter suffered a lot of psychological damage because it was a very strong separation.
They didn't even give me time to tell her how much I loved her, ”the mother recalls now.
"In one call I was crying and he said:
'Mom, I thought you abandoned me
.
"
A federal judge, John A. Kronstad, ruled in late 2019 that these families suffered trauma that cannot be healed by reunification alone.
For this reason, he forced the United States government to
offer free mental health evaluations and psychological treatment
for them.
Among those families are this Salvadoran mother and daughter.
To enforce the injunction, the government hired Seneca Family of Agencies, a California public agency, to locate those families and connect them to free mental health services in their communities by June 2021.
Thus, Liz and her daughter began therapy to work on the scars that that separation left on them: the mother's remorse for having emigrated to the United States and the daughter's questions about what they had done wrong to be separated.
Seneca, under the Todo por mi familia program, is looking for at least 2,700 immigrant families, although thousands more may have been separated.
They have a budget of 14.5 million dollars to achieve it, but it is being difficult for them.
The proven chaos with which the
zero tolerance
policy was implemented
within the government made it difficult to know how many minors were separated from their parents, where the families ended up living, and what was the best way to contact them.
Trump administration official says she wasn't moved by seeing children separated from their parents at the border, according to a book
July 7, 202002: 01
So far, they've only found a few hundred.
They have called phones that are no longer operational, numbers that turn out to be an ICE detention center, have searched for names on Facebook, sent emails and posted flyers in supermarkets, laundries and community associations.
And they
have activated a helpline, 844-529-3327
.
“This population does not trust the government,” Yohanna Navarro-Pérez, director of the Todo por mi familia program, told Noticias Telemundo in a digital interview.
“But they must know that we are not going to share any information or address with the government, with ICE, with Immigration.
And that is very clear in the contract we signed with the government ”.
When they do respond to those calls and messages, they find families that were left with one foot stuck in that separation more than two years ago.
As various reports have shown, children who were taken from their parents' arms have changed in many ways.
Some have not recognized their parents, misbehave, or exhibit sudden changes of character.
Others are overcome by anxiety when the adult leaves the house, they feel like thumb sucking like when they were babies, the ability to concentrate disappears or they pee again when sleeping.
[Nightmares, children wetting the bed and desperate parents: the consequences of the separation of migrant families are not over]
“We have heard that many of the children fight a lot or have very strong arguments and drastic mood swings.
There are changes in appetite, they lose weight or gain weight ”, describes Karina Acosta, community coordinator of Todo por mi familia, who is in charge of contacting the families.
Some 4,368 minors were separated at the border, according to count
Jan. 19, 2020
Acosta explained that mental services allow families to
reduce anxiety, improve self -
esteem, think more clearly and better develop their interactions
within the family and the outside world.
Therapy is helping Liz be more positive, communicate better with her daughter, and empower herself as an immigrant.
"I want all parents to know that it is time for us to talk, not to be silent, to say everything, because that way we can be freed from all the psychological damage we receive from Immigration."
In this week's episode of our podcast
Yo Estuve Ahí
, Julio Vaqueiro and Damià Bonmatí review the consequences of the
zero tolerance policy
on thousands of families.