The Daily - The Scars of Family Separation

This week, “The Daily” is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened since the stories first ran. Today, we’re going back to an episode from this summer, when we met Nazario Jacinto Carrillo, a farmer from Guatemala who was separated from his daughter at the United States border as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Guests: Caitlin Dickerson, who covers immigration for The New York Times, spoke with Mr. Carrillo. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Duration: 23m
Broadcast on: 27 Dec 2018
Audio Format: other

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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So, they arrive in May, but their timing really couldn't be worse because it's at the height of the execution of this policy that the United States government has created to separate parents from their children. And it was introduced without any real planning as to how we might at some point bring the families back together. So, pretty quickly, Filomena is taken from Nazario and she's shipped off to New York. Originally, he doesn't even know where she is, much less when he might be able to get her back or why she's been taken away. He wasn't expecting this. No one coming to the border during that time period was. And so, he starts to panic, like any parent would. He's sitting in an immigration detention center along the border, trying to get answers about where Filomena might be, when he can get her back, and he's learning nothing until finally, a border agent comes to him and offers what he thinks is the first sign of hope. This agent offers him a choice. He says, "You can remain in the United States and continue to fight your asylum claim." If you do that, we can't give you any information about your daughter. We don't know what's going on there. But if you revoke the claim and you agree to go back to Guatemala, we can make sure that she's on a plane back to your hometown and you'll have her back within two weeks. So, Nesario thinks about it and then he decides to go for it. So, he decides to revoke his asylum claim and he signs documentation agreeing to go back to Guatemala without his daughter and wait for her there. Because he believes he will be reunited with her by signing a piece of paper. Right. And did he become reunited with her? He's still not reunified. And why not? He doesn't know. We know that the United States government has asked for basically an exception in this ongoing court case that forced family reunification here domestically that applies to every single parent and child who's been separated by the federal government and who still remains in federal custody. So, the first job that government lawyers had was to make an accounting of every single person in that situation. They came up with a number that's right around 2,500. And then they had to seek out ways to reunite those families. The judge required that any kids who were under five years old had to be returned to their parents by July 10th. And any kid that was between the ages of five and 17 had to be returned by Thursday, the 26th of July. So, the government begins to do this

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