[News] The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at the Border and Persuaded to Sign Away Her Rights

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-five-year-old-who-was-detained-at-the-border-and-convinced-to-sign-away-her-rights?fbclid=IwAR1UjUkCSECwDkNziWMCvTQl3S9e0g0CY2v3X9uxYPpTx7wzhoJNk7w-xOI 



  The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at the Border and Persuaded to Sign
  Away Her Rights

By Sarah Stillman - October 11, 2018
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Helen, a five-year-old from Honduras, was detained after the Trump 
Administration announced that it would halt the separation of immigrant 
families.

Photograph Courtesy LUPE

Helen—a smart, cheerful five-year-old girl—is an asylum seeker from 
Honduras. This summer, when a social worker asked her to identify her 
strengths, Helen shared her pride in “her ability to learn fast and 
express her feelings and concerns.” She also recounted her favorite 
activities (“playing with her dolls”), her usual bedtime (“8 /P.M./”), 
and her professional aspirations (“to be a veterinarian”).

In July, Helen fled Honduras with her grandmother, Noehmi, and several 
other relatives; gangs had threatened Noehmi’s teen-age son, Christian, 
and the family no longer felt safe. Helen’s mother, Jeny, had migrated 
to Texas four years earlier, and Noehmi planned to seek legal refuge 
there. With Noehmi’s help, Helen travelled thousands of miles, sometimes 
on foot, and frequently fell behind the group. While crossing the Rio 
Grande in the journey’s final stretch, Helen slipped from their raft and 
risked drowning. Her grandmother grabbed her hand and cried, “Hang on, 
Helen!” When the family reached the scrubland of southern Texas, U.S. 
Border Patrol agents apprehended them and moved them through a series of 
detention centers. A month earlier, the Trump Administration had 
announced, amid public outcry over its systemic separation of migrant 
families at the border, that it would halt the practice. But, at a 
packed processing hub, Christian was taken from Noehmi and placed in a 
cage with toddlers. Noehmi remained in a cold holding cell, clutching 
Helen. Soon, she recalled, a plainclothes official arrived and informed 
her that she and Helen would be separated. “No!” Noehmi cried. “The girl 
is under my care! Please!”

Noehmi said that the official told her, “Don’t make things too 
difficult,” and pulled Helen from her arms. “The girl will stay here,” 
he said, “and you’ll be deported.” Helen cried as he escorted her from 
the room and out of sight. Noehmi remembers the authorities explaining 
that Helen’s mother would be able to retrieve her, soon, from wherever 
they were taking her.

Later that day, Noehmi and Christian were reunited. The adults in the 
family were fitted with electronic ankle bracelets and all were 
released, pending court dates. They left the detention center and rushed 
to Jeny’s house, in McAllen, hoping to find Helen there. When they 
didn’t, Noehmi began to shake, struggling to explain the situation. 
“Immigration took your daughter,” she told Jeny.

“But where did they take her?” Jeny asked.

“I don’t know,” Noehmi replied.

The next day, authorities—likely from the Office of Refugee Resettlement 
(O.R.R.)—called to say that they were holding Helen at a shelter near 
Houston; according to Noehmi, they wouldn’t say exactly where. Noehmi 
and Jeny panicked. Unable to breathe amid her distress, Noehmi checked 
herself into a local hospital, where doctors gave her medication to calm 
her down. “I thought we would never see her again,” Noehmi said. She 
couldn’t square her family’s fate with the TV news, which insisted that 
the government had stopped separating migrant families.

A photo taken of Helen during her time in custody.

Photograph Courtesy Eugene Delgado

Helen had been brought to Baytown, a shelter run by Baptist Child & 
Family Services, which the federal government had contracted to house 
unaccompanied minors. Helen was given a pack of crayons and spent the 
summer coloring patriotic images: busts of George Washington and Abraham 
Lincoln, the torch on the Statue of Liberty. She was granted an hour of 
“Large Muscle Activity and Leisure Time” each day, and received lessons 
on the human respiratory system, the history of music, and “the risk and 
danger of social media.” “Helen,” a caseworker observed, “has excellent 
behavior at all times.” She had no major sources of stress, her reports 
noted, aside from “being separated from her family.” Her teachers 
encouraged her to develop “/SMART/ goals”—ambitions that are “Specific, 
Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.” Helen’s goal was 
simple: “Minor disclosed wanting to live with her mother and family in 
the U.S.”

According to a long-standing legal precedent known as the Flores 
settlement, which established guidelines for keeping children in 
immigration detention, Helen had a right to a bond hearing before a 
judge; that hearing would have likely hastened her release from 
government custody and her return to her family. At the time of her 
apprehension, in fact, Helen checked a box on a line that read, “I do 
request an immigration judge,” asserting her legal right to have her 
custody reviewed. But, in early August, an unknown official handed Helen 
a legal document, a “Request for a Flores Bond Hearing,” which described 
a set of legal proceedings and rights that would have been difficult for 
Helen to comprehend. (“In a Flores bond hearing, an immigration judge 
reviews your case to determine whether you pose a danger to the 
community,” the document began.) On Helen’s form, which was filled out 
with assistance from officials, there is a checked box next to a line 
that says, “I withdraw my previous request for a Flores bond hearing.” 
Beneath that line, the five-year-old signed her name in wobbly letters.

As the summer progressed with no signs of Helen’s return, Noehmi and 
Jeny contacted /LUPE/, a nonprofit community union based in the Rio 
Grande Valley, to ask for help winning Helen’s release. Founded by the 
famed activists César Chávez and Dolores Huerta in 1989, /LUPE/ fights 
deportations, provides social services, and organizes civil 
mobilizations on behalf of more than eight thousand low-income members 
across south Texas; Jeny, employed as an office cleaner, was one such 
member. Tania Chavez, a strategy leader forthe organization, met with 
the family to hear their story.

Helen’s case didn’t fit the typical /LUPE/ mold. “Historically, we have 
served longtime residents of the Rio Grande Valley,” Chavez told me, 
“but since this new surge of refugees came about, we’ve been on the 
front lines of advocacy against family separation.” Freeing Helen struck 
Chavez as a tangible and urgent goal. “Right away, we said, ‘How do we 
help this little girl?’ ” she said. As Chavez saw it, the girl’s seizure 
by the government showed that the family-separation crisis hadn’t been 
resolved, as many Americans believed—it had simply evolved.

The first stage of the family-separation crisis unfolded largely out of 
public view, not long after Trump took office. By January, 2018, when I 
began collecting the stories of parents who had been separated from 
their children at the border, the government denied that these 
separations were happening without clear justifications, and insisted 
that they weren’t encouraged by official policy. In the late spring, the 
Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, was still espousing 
this line, even as she ramped up “zero tolerance” 
prosecutions—criminally charging parents with “illegal entry,” and 
seizing their kids in the process.

Stage two of the crisis unfolded in the national spotlight. As the 
number of separations soared past two thousand, and their wrenching 
details surfaced, hundreds of thousands of Americans protested in the 
streets. Laura Bush said that the practice broke her heart. The American 
Academy of Pediatrics denounced it as “abhorrent,” noting that the 
approach could inflict long-term, irrevocable trauma on children. On 
June 20th, the President issued an executive order purporting to end the 
practice.

Now stage three has commenced—one in which separations are done quietly, 
/LUPE/’s Tania Chavez asserts, and in which reunifications can be 
mysteriously stymied. According to recent Department of Justice 
numbers—released because of an ongoing A.C.L.U. lawsuit challenging 
family separations—a hundred and thirty-six children who fall within the 
lawsuit’s scope are still in government custody. An uncounted number of 
separated children in shelters and foster care fall outside the 
lawsuit’s current purview—including many like Helen, who arrived with a 
grandparent or other guardian, rather than with a parent. Many such 
children have been misclassified, in government paperwork, as 
“unaccompanied minors,” due to a sloppy process that the Department of 
Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General recently critiqued. 
Chavez believes that, through misclassification, many kids have largely 
disappeared from public view, and from official statistics, with the 
federal government showing little urgency to hasten reunifications. 
(O.R.R. and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to 
requests for comment.)

Noehmi and Jeny connected with /LUPE/’s newly hired attorney, Eugene 
Delgado. Delgado had grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, a child of 
migrant workers. He left the region for a life in corporate law, 
practicing in New York and in the United Arab Emirates. But, when the 
family-separation crisis flooded the news this summer, he told me, “I 
wanted to help my community.” He moved back to McAllen and joined /LUPE/ 
to fight deportations full time. He agreed to represent Noehmi and her 
family, and at the summer’s end he went with them to court to represent 
them in removal proceedings. There, a judge granted Noehmi and her 
relatives more time to apply for asylum. Toward the end of the hearing, 
Delgado brought up Helen.

“Judge, this case doesn’t stop here,” Delgado said. “What about the 
little child lost in the system?”

The judge looked confused. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, where is Helen, the five-year-old?”

The judge, Delgado recalled, seemed startled. Both he and the government 
prosecutor had no idea that Helen existed, let alone where she was being 
held. “I could give you a couple of phone numbers to call?” the 
prosecutor offered.

Delgado began the search. “It was just a complete maze, trying to trace 
the girl down,” he recalled. “I talked to at least ten people—case 
workers, social workers.” Eventually, he learned of Helen’s placement in 
Baytown, the Houston shelter. After that, Noehmi and Jeny were allowed 
two ten-minute calls with Helen per week, during which the girl often 
pleaded, “Come get me, Grandma!” The government collected fingerprints 
and other information from Noehmi and Jeny, to determine whether they 
were Helen’s rightful guardians; the Office of Refugee Resettlement soon 
deemed Jeny a fit sponsor, Delgado told me, but the completion of 
Noehmi’s background check was delayed for unexplained reasons.

On August 17th, Helen was transferred to a foster home in San Antonio. 
“I feared, did they give Helen away?” Noehmi told me; she worried about 
the prospect of adoption. Delgado managed to arrange a supervised visit 
between Noehmi and her granddaughter. At the visit’s start, Helen was 
gleeful, shouting, “Grandma, you came to get me!” But the girl exhibited 
strange new behaviors that troubled Noehmi. “She kept hiding under the 
table,” Noehmi said. After an hour, the two were separated again; again, 
they both cried. A case worker offered Noehmi a chance to ride the 
elevator downstairs with Helen before the girl was taken away. Noehmi 
declined. “I took the stairs, so I could scream and cry,” she told me. 
But she raced down to meet Helen outside and hugged her one more time 
before Helen was loaded into a minivan and carted back to foster care.

By the end of August, Noehmi felt desperate. She ate only a few 
spoonfulsof beef stew each day. Again, she sought hospitalization, for 
anxiety. “I was sick in the head,” she told me. Tania Chavez asked if 
the family wanted to escalate their tactics for getting Helen back. 
“People forget that family separation has been happening in our 
community for decades—it’s not a new thing,” Chavez told me, referencing 
the routine nature of deportations for mothers, fathers, and 
grandparents with deep Texas roots, and the children often left behind. 
Chavez had found, in these cases, that authorities sometimes responded 
to public pressure; she’d never tried this in family-separation cases, 
but it seemed worth a shot. Chavez reached out to Alida Garcia, the 
vice-president of advocacy for the group FWD.us, and Jess Morales 
Rocketto, the chair of an alliance known as Families Belong Together. 
These teams worked together to craft a national social-media campaign, 
using Helen’s O.R.R. case-file photograph: an image that eerily 
resembled a cherub-cheeked mug shot. On August 31st, they began to 
circulate a petition addressing the O.R.R. official in charge of Helen’s 
case. “By that Friday, we already had six hundred signatures,” Chavez 
said. Right away, they began receiving calls from O.R.R., promising that 
Helen would be returned to her family as soon as possible. There was 
simply a holdup with her grandmother’s fingerprint check, they said.

On September 7th, /LUPE/ was told that Helen would finally be released, 
nearly two months after she was taken from Noehmi. “We were attached to 
our phones all freaking Saturday,” Chavez said. “Then she wasn’t 
released—they played us!” /LUPE/’s team adjusted the petition to address 
a greater number of O.R.R. officials, each of whom received a personal 
e-mail every time a person signed. Paola Mendoza, an artist and 
prominent voice for immigrant rights, tweeted about the petition, as did 
the actress Alyssa Milano. “We got six thousand signatures, then ten 
thousand,” Chavez said. Then, that Monday, Noehmi and Jeny got a phone 
call: they should be at their local airport at 6:20 /P.M./

At the airport, Noehmi breathlessly scanned the gates: nothing. Then, 
she heard a little voice cry out, “That’s my grandma! That’s my 
grandma!” Helen raced into her arms. “Is that my mom?” Helen asked. She 
hadn’t seen her mother since she was an infant. The whole family held 
one another, and then went home. Noehmi had prepared a surprise for 
Helen: a giant Teddy bear, a pizza party, a stack of new clothes, and a 
Disney princess castle with a “Mulan” theme (“She’s a princess fanatic,” 
Noehmi told me).

Soon after, the shelter sent a small black backpack that Helen had left 
behind. It held Helen’s legal paperwork, including the document that the 
five-year-old had been told to sign, withdrawing her request to see a 
judge. The backpack also held Helen’s colored sketch of Lady Liberty. 
Beneath the statue’s image, a lesson summary, in Spanish, read, 
“Objective: That the students draw one of the most representative 
symbols of the United States.”

Last Thursday, Helen’s family held another party, with cake and more 
princess gear, to celebrate the reunion and to thank the advocacy groups 
that helped make it happen. Chavez hoped that the party would also help 
the family’s healing. “Helen had resentment,” she said, “because I think 
she thought she was abandoned by her family.”

Jess Morales Rocketto, of Families Belong Together, told me that Helen’s 
reunion—the result of the first known public mobilization to free a 
specific kid from O.R.R. custody—holds lessons for a broader organizing 
effort. “One of the things Helen’s story really showed us is that the 
Trump Administration never stopped separating children from their 
families,” Morales Rocketto said. “In fact, they’ve doubled down, but 
it’s even more insidious now, because they are doing it in the cover of 
night.” She added, “We believe that there are more kids like Helen. We 
have learned we cannot take this Administration at their word.”

Noehmi fears that some of the damage inflicted on her family can never 
be mended. “Helen was always a very calm girl,” she told me, sitting in 
/LUPE/’s office on a recent Friday night. “Now I have to be very patient 
with her—she’s very attention-seeking.” Lately, at bedtime, Helen hides 
in the closet and refuses to go to sleep, afraid that her family might 
leave her in the night. Sometimes Noehmi wants to hide, too; she buried 
her round face in her hands, weeping, when she recounted one of Helen’s 
declarations upon her return: “You left me behind.” But Noehmi decided 
to share their story with me because she worries that other families are 
still living out a similar search. “I fear there are still other 
children suffering,” she said. “Other families are feeling this anguish, 
this struggle, and they need us to act.”

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/A document from July shows a checked box where Helen asserted her legal 
right to have her custody determination reviewed by a judge./

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/Later, in August, officials assisted Helen in filling out a form—signed 
by the five-year-old, while separated from her family—withdrawing her 
request for a hearing before a judge. While in custody, she was also 
given crayons and asked to color patriotic images, including one of the 
Statue of Liberty./

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