The reunification videos should be heartwarming. Yet footage of migrant parents meeting their little ones for the first time following months of separation often shows a much more disturbing encounter.
In one, Guatemalan asylum-seeker Hermelindo Che Coc meets his 6-year-old at the Los Angeles International Airport, carrying a birthday balloon and a present. When he sees his son, the boy stares back vacantly. He offers no smiles or cries of joy. Instead, his body is rigid when his father embraces him.
The New York Times reported similar stories of parents’ worst nightmares — their stunned children no longer recognizing them and calling out instead for the social workers at the shelters where they’d been held after being taken from their parents at the border.
“The main thing to realize is that the children are very traumatized by the separation and the conditions in the detention center,” Dr Elizabeth Barnert, an assistant professor of pediatrics at UCLA, told DW. “Then the reunion is a very confusing and intense time. The children feel happiness but also a lot of confusion and anger.”
Barnert’s research focuses on the separation and reunification of children who were disappeared during El Salvador’s civil war. She warns that children may blame their parents for abandoning them.
“In a child’s psychology the natural tendency is to think, ‘Mom, you failed to protect me.'”
As the Trump administration reaches the court-ordered July 26 deadline of reuniting all children over the age of five with their parents, the difficult reunifications that already have taken place highlight how much damage splitting thousands of families at the border has inflicted on families. Now doctors warn the children who were pried from their parents are likely to face physical, mental and emotional long-term damage.
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