The tiny, round-faced 4-year-old with dark pigtails and aqua bows clutched her sparkly bear and approached terminal 2 at Miami International Airport Friday morning. Then she spotted a police car parked outside.
She teared up and didn’t want to enter.
Weeks earlier in South Carolina, Debhani (whose family did not want to disclose her last name) had watched officers take away her mother in a cruiser that looked just like the one before her. She hadn’t seen her mom since.
“You can really see the trauma,” said Lindsey McElroy, lead immigrant justice officer for the Guatemalan Maya Center in Palm Beach County, who accompanied the little girl. “The entire drive down, she started crying every time she saw police officers or heard police sirens because she saw her mother get taken. It’s just really devastating.”
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Her mother, Laura, who is from Guatemala, was detained by local law enforcement during a routine traffic stop in South Carolina eight months ago. She was forced to leave Debhani and Eithan, her then three-month-old breastfeeding son, in the care of their grandmother. Then she was deported, even though she was seeking asylum and had no criminal record. Her last name was not disclosed for privacy concerns.
They are the 59th set of children the Guatemalan Maya Center, a non-profit that advocates for immigrants, has helped return to their parents. They are among the many kids with citizenship who have followed their parents to an unfamiliar country after deportation.
“Both these children are US citizens, and we really feel like they’re being put in exile because of what the American government is doing to their families,” McElroy said.
These siblings' experiences are the ripple effects of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. This past May, ProPublica reported that more than 100,000 children with citizenship had a parent detained or deported since the mass deportation campaign last year.
Not much is known about how the children's parents reached South Carolina, but both kids were born there.
Their father, Erick, was deported first. Then, when their mother was stopped by police, her immigration records were checked, and she was taken into custody. The Maya Center’s McElroy suspects they were “profiled.”
After the mother was deported, they were left in the care of their grandmother. Debhani’s mother left her a phone and the two stayed in constant contact through FaceTime. The mother soothed her babies over the phone and helped them go to sleep some days.
Then the grandmother decided they should return to their parents' care. She called the Maya Center for help. Just a couple of weeks later, out-of-state volunteers delivered the pair to McElroy, who drove them from Ocala to Miami.
At a rest stop, Debhani refused to use the bathroom at first because there was an officer inside, McElroy recounts.
Soon they arrived at the home of Maya Center volunteers Patricia and Pablo Barrientos in Miami. The couple dedicated the first floor of their living room to a play space for the siblings.
There, Debhani and Eithan ate Mickey-shaped pancakes, played with the Barrientos’ granddaughter, and went to a swimming pool for the first time.
“They taught me more than I could teach them,” said Patricia.
The group boarded an American Airlines flight and landed in Guatemala City at 2:15 p.m. CST.
“It’s a happy reunion of a family that should have never been separated,” said Patricia.
Pablo added, “I don’t know if they will come back one day. That little one there, he could be an engineer one day. He figures things out.”
