For José and his family, the moment still feels raw, all these years later.
Pried from his father’s arms by federal agents at the southern border, José was one of thousands of migrant children separated from their parents under a Trump-era crackdown that came to epitomize the former president’s harsh immigration agenda.
The Times told Jose’s story after he was taken from his father in May 2018, when he was 5, and placed with a foster family in Michigan.
Today, José is in sixth grade in Houston and living with his parents. He is excelling academically, playing guitar in a school band and cultivating his passion for soccer. “You possess all the qualities to take you very far in life,” his English teacher, Ms. Keller, said in a handwritten note to him dated Oct. 2.
For all the promise his teachers see in his future, José is still shaken by his past.
“I don’t trust anybody,” he said in an interview last week. “I just trust my mom and dad.”
Those months are never far from his mind. “I think about it,” he said. “I just don’t tell anyone about it.”
He and his parents are still undocumented and their future uncertain.
As former President Trump campaigns for another term, vowing a return to hard-line tactics on immigration, the specter of family separation preoccupies people who fought the policy — and immigrants who endured its consequences.
The fact that federal courts found the family separation policy unconstitutional provides little reassurance.
Mr. Trump, who has promised mass deportations, said in response to a question about family separation on CNN last year, that, “When you have that policy, people don’t come. If the family hears that they’re going to be separated, they love their family. They don’t come.”
More recently, Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance have responded with vague comments about the policy, sidestepping whether they would resurrect it and not ruling it out.
“Every time somebody is arrested for a crime, that’s family separation,” Mr. Vance said during a visit to the southern border last month.
“But you’ve got to prosecute criminals and you have to enforce the law,” he added.
As she runs for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris has tried to project a tougher stance on the border than President Biden, but she has made clear that some measures are off limits.
At a media event on Oct. 16 in Doral, Fla., the Harris campaign featured children who had been separated from their parents, and were ultimately reunited. “I go to therapists, but I still have the fear of Trump being re-elected and the same thing happening,” said Billy, a teenager who was 9 when he was taken from his father.
Under the “zero-tolerance” policy, adults were criminally charged with illegally entering the United States and imprisoned. Their children, some only a few months old, were sent to shelters and foster homes.
The objective of the policy, which was tested secretly in 2017 in El Paso and rolled out officially in 2018, was to discourage migration of families, who had been coming to the United States in large numbers.
But images and audio that emerged of weeping children caused public outrage, and the policy drew condemnation from the American Academy of Pediatrics andhigh-profile figures, including Pope Francis and Laura Bush, the former first lady.
Mr. Trump suspended the policy on June 20, 2018, and a federal judge ordered the government to reunify families.
It was hardly a simple undertaking.
Many parents and children remained apart for years because of poor record-keeping by authorities. In 2021, the Biden administration established a reunification task force, working with nonprofits, that combed through government records and scoured villages in Central America to find deported parents.
Up to 1,000 families may still be apart, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a class-action lawsuit that ended the policy and resulted in a settlement with the federal government in 2023.
“I doubt very much that most people realize how many little children are growing up without their parents or understand the continuing trauma experienced even by those children lucky enough to have been reunited,” said Lee Gelernt, lead counsel for the A.C.L.U. in the lawsuit.
Under the settlement, deported parents have been allowed to join their children in the United States and live in the country legally, at least temporarily, with work permits. The families are entitled to receive some mental-health and legal services. Many are applying for asylum and could secure green cards.
When Janice Barbee, who fostered José, picked him up at the Grand Rapids, Mich., airport in May 2018, “all I could see was fear and confusion in those beautiful brown eyes,” she recalled. He did not cry. He would not hold her hand.
She read him Curious George classics at bedtime. Her husband nurtured his aptitude for soccer. They took him on outings with their children.
Even as he seemed to grow more comfortable, José guarded two small pieces of paper — a stick-figure drawing of his family and a sketch of his father in a cap. He carried them wherever he went during the day and tucked them under his pillow at night.
One day, José had a meltdown, all the while clutching the family drawing, Ms. Barbee recalled.
“He held onto it as he cried and wailed on my kitchen floor,” she said.
“In that moment, I wondered if he would ever heal from this unimaginable trauma of separation.”
Jose’s father feared that his son would be put up for adoption. He rejected an offer from U.S. authorities to be repatriated to Honduras, telling them he would not leave José behind.
Father and son were reunited in October 2018, five months after being split up.
“Why were you sent to jail? What did you do wrong,” the father recalled his son asking him.
José’s father said that his son cried easily and had nightmares. In 2019, José’s mother and younger siblings joined them in the United States. The family fled their native Honduras after gang members who had been extorting money from José’s father, an itinerant salesman, shot and wounded him, said the father.
During a September 2021 interview in Houston, José was a cheerful, chatty third-grader. As he remembered it, “my dad stayed in prison a year.”
“I was separated two times,” he said over lunch at a buffet restaurant, “when my dad was in jail and when my mom was in the hospital.” But José said he was overjoyed when his mother returned home with his baby sister.
José’s parents agreed to speak with The Times on condition that they not be identified.
Like some other separated families, José’s parents have been too fearful and suspicious of authorities to seek support services. As a result, they have not received the benefits and humanitarian protection available to them under the settlement, and they are vulnerable to deportation.
And with a presidential election looming, José’s parents hesitate to take any action that would enable a future administration, with a different immigration agenda, to find them.
José said recently that, he, too, was aware of the election and named both candidates.
How did they differ? “Trump doesn’t like the immigrants,” he said.
Who did he hope would win? “Everybody has a different opinion,” he said. “I can’t vote.”
With that, he returned to what he can control. He shared that he had recently received the highest score in his class on an English assessment exam and had been named sixth-grade student of the month.
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