Heartbreaking Stories of Trump Immigration Policy
June 11, 2018
Every day, there are more harrowing accounts of the Trump immigration agenda and the lives it destroys. From a delivery man in New York arrested while delivering food to an Army base, to a child sent to live in Michigan without knowing when he will see his family next, immigrants who in custody who feel they have no choice but to take their own lives, the heartlessness of this administration knows no bounds.
Time: An Army Base Ordered Pizza. Then Guards Called ICE on the Delivery Man
“This is unhuman,” [his wife] Chica said during a phone interview. “He was not committing any crime. He is a father who is working for his daughters. Every day our daughters ask me why their dad is not coming home.”
Washington Post: A family was separated at the border, and this distraught father took his own life
“A Honduran father separated from his wife and child suffered a breakdown at a Texas jail and killed himself in a padded cell last month, according to Border Patrol agents and an incident report filed by sheriff’s deputies. [… ]Muñoz’s death occurred not long after the Trump administration began implementing its ’zero-tolerance’ crackdown on illegal migration, measures that include separating parents from their children and the threat of criminal prosecution for anyone who enters the United States unlawfully.”
NYT: ‘It’s Horrendous’: The Heartache of a Migrant Boy Taken From His Father
“Since his arrival in Michigan, family members said, a day has not gone by when the boy has failed to ask in Spanish, ‘When will I see my papá?’
They tell him the truth. They do not know. No one knows.”
Boston Globe: ‘Children are being used as a tool’ in Trump’s effort to stop border crossings
“Every night before bed, Wil, who is 6 years old, says his prayers and then kisses two printed-out photos of his mom and dad that are taped on the wall by his bed goodnight. A few hours later, he’s likely to wander out of his bunk bed and stand outside the door of his foster parents’ room, crying and saying his stomach hurts.”
Washington Post: ‘They just took them?’ Frantic parents separated from their kids fill courts on the border
“The Guatemalan fleeing violence and poverty had rafted across the Rio Grande a day earlier with his son, only to have the 11-year-old taken from him by Border Patrol agents. […] As she consulted with Nicolas-Gaspar, dressed in the same dirt-caked tennis shoes and mud-stained shirt in which he’d been detained, the immigrant in his late 20s began to sob. She told him the best chance he had of seeing his son soon was to plead guilty.”
Daily Beast: ICE Deportee Killed Himself En Route to Native Country
“A 34-year-old Eritrean killed himself while being deported back to his home country, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Friday. Zeresenay Ermias Testfatsion was being held in Egypt’s Cairo International Airport when authorities found him “deceased in a shower area.”
Washington Post: After losing DACA and facing deportation, he returned to Mexico. He was killed weeks later.
“Instead of graduating from high school in Iowa, he returned to an increasingly violent country where he hardly knew anyone, even his relatives, Alejandro Alfaro-Santiz, a pastor in Des Moines who knows the family, told The Washington Post. The relatives he left behind in Iowa worried for his safety, knowing how deportees are often targeted by gangs in Mexico, as news reports have confirmed.
In May, three weeks after arriving in Mexico, Cano-Pacheco was killed in the north-central state of Zacatecas. His throat was slit while getting food with an acquaintance of his cousin’s, his family and friends told the Des Moines Register.”