At 2:30 in the morning on Friday,a mother fromGuatemala anxiously waited for her 7-year-old son, Darwin, to walk off an airplane at the Baltimore-Washington Airport.
It was a moment that Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia had prayed for since May 21, when she and her son were separated under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy after crossing the U.S border seeking asylum.
For more than a month, Mejia, 38, had no idea where her son — whom she calls “my companion” — was.
“As we entered [the U.S.], they took my information and I was carrying him [Darwin] on my back,” Mejia told PEOPLE in a sit-down interview one day after they were reunited. “They took our digital fingerprints. They asked me where I was going.”
Border agents then took Darwin, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in federal court, and didn’t tell Mejia where they were taking him. As he was taken away, the complaint reads, he was screaming and crying and didn’t want to leave his mother.
Mejia recalls asking the officer where they were taking her son but says, “They acted as though they didn’t understand me. They never told me where he was going or who he was going with.”
The Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy has resulted in more than 2,000 children being separated from their parents at the border since May. Last week, after intense public pressure, President Trump signed an executive order reversing his own administration’s policy. “We are keeping families together,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
Mejia says her only option to find Darwin and get him back was to file a lawsuit against the U.S. federal government.
Patrick Semansky/AP/Shutterstock
“My son had disappeared and they wouldn’t give him back to me,” she says about her motivation to file the lawsuit. “All I wanted was to have him here with me.”
Mejia was fleeing domestic violence from her husband, she says, which is why she made the decision to leave Guatemala.
“At one point throughout the journey we slept in a paddock,” she says. “We continued to fight and fight until we reached our goal to get to this country.”
An Emotional Reunion
“With the help of Libre, they helped me locate Darwin,” she says. “They made it possible for my boy to come back to me.”
After they were finally reunited at the Baltimore-Washington Airport on Friday, the mother and son spent the entire morning talking about their horrifying experiences when they were apart in different centers.
“They put you in a room and lock you up,” says Mejia. “They wouldn’t even serve you clean water. Most people didn’t even drink the water because it has a bleach scent. The guards would tell them that they could drink water from the toilet if they didn’t like the water they served. I had to drink the bleach water out of necessity because I wanted to live.”
She added: “It’s tough to be there. You suffer a lot.”
RELATED VIDEO: The Story Behind the Heartbreaking Viral Photo of the Little Girl Crying at the Border
But what hurts her the most, she says, is hearing about what Darwin, whom she calls her “little angel,” went through.
“He’s a small boy and I felt great sadness for him,” she says. “Yesterday he couldn’t sleep just telling me that he had to bathe himself, he had to sleep on the top beds and was scared all alone. When he was sad he would cry and a lady with curly hair would come to him and tell him not to cry because ‘men don’t cry here.’ ”
She says she’s still “trying to wrap my head around what happened to him,” and wonders “how did this psychologically affect him? For him, it’s a trauma to live through this.”
Mejia says the entire ordeal makes her think of the story of Adam and Eve from the Bible.
“This country is the forbidden fruit and when someone comes here as an illegal immigrant they are punished for it,” she says. “I think it’s this way. … We entered this country without authorization and the president got mad.”
She continued to say that “what the president is doing is putting [officials] on the border who are punishing people who are trying to cross into this country. Since we are illegal immigrants and we didn’t ask permission to enter the country, our punishment is to be separated from our children.”
Now that she’s been reunited with her son, Mejia says she wants to help other parents who are still separated from their children.
“It’s very difficult to help everyone,” she says. “People don’t have enough resources.”
On Saturday, she and Darwin flew to Austin, Texas, to temporarily stay with friends as they begin to plan their future.
“I want him [Darwin] to learn English and be able to get a job,” she says, adding that she’s hopeful the bond company Libre will continue to help her and her son. “I hope that God can create a way so that my son can grow here, study here and one day work here.”
source: people.com
