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href="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">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</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at
the Border and Persuaded to Sign Away Her Rights</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Sarah Stillman - October
11, 2018</div>
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<p>Helen, a five-year-old from
Honduras, was detained after the
Trump Administration announced that
it would halt the separation of
immigrant families.</p>
</span><small>Photograph Courtesy LUPE</small></figcaption></figure>
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<p>Helen—a <span data-page="page_1"></span>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 <em>P.M.</em>”), and her
professional aspirations (“to be a
veterinarian”).</p>
<p>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!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“But where did they take her?” Jeny
asked.</p>
<p>“I don’t know,” Noehmi replied.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>A photo taken of Helen
during her time in custody.</p>
</span><small>Photograph
Courtesy Eugene Delgado</small></figcaption></figure>
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<p>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 “<em>SMART</em>
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>As the summer progressed with no signs
of Helen’s return, Noehmi and Jeny
contacted <em>LUPE</em>, 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,
<em>LUPE</em> 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 for<span
data-page="page_2"></span> the
organization, met with the family to
hear their story.</p>
<p>Helen’s case didn’t fit the typical <em>LUPE</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Now stage three has commenced—one in
which separations are done quietly, <em>LUPE</em>’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.)</p>
<p>Noehmi and Jeny connected with <em>LUPE</em>’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 <em>LUPE</em> 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.</p>
<p>“Judge, this case doesn’t stop here,”
Delgado said. “What about the little
child lost in the system?”</p>
<p>The judge looked confused. “What do you
mean?” he asked.</p>
<p>“Well, where is Helen, the
five-year-old?”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>By the end of August, Noehmi felt
desperate. She ate only a few spoonfuls<span
data-page="page_final"></span> of 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.</p>
<p>On September 7th, <em>LUPE</em> 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!” <em>LUPE</em>’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 <em>P.M.</em></p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>LUPE</em>’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.”</p>
<hr>
<p><em>A document from July shows a
checked box where Helen asserted her
legal right to have her custody
determination reviewed by a judge.</em></p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
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San Francisco, CA 94110
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