HOMESTEAD, Fla. — She came to the U.S. to help her family and ended up having it torn apart instead.
Buena Ventura Martin Godinez, a petite mother of two, carried her infant son from Mexico into the U.S in May, fleeing what she said were threats from violent local gangsters demanding money in their hometown in northwestern Guatemala. Her husband followed two weeks later with their 7-year-old daughter. All were caught by the Border Patrol.
Now, despite their request for asylum, the family is scattered. The husband, convicted of the misdemeanor offense of illegal entry into the U.S., awaits almost certain deportation at a jail in Atlanta. Martin, a heavy black monitoring device strapped to her ankle, and her baby boy are with relatives in a gritty town south of Miami. Their daughter is in the custody of a child welfare agency in Michigan, making tearful calls to a mother desperate for her return.
“Every time she calls, she cries. I tell her we never should have come here,” Martin said as she cradled 10-month-old Pedro in the front yard of her in-laws’ house as the sun went down Wednesday. “I never thought it would be like this.”
The family is one of thousands who have tried to find refuge in the U.S. in recent weeks only to be caught up in the harsh reality of an immigration system that has never been as welcoming as many desperate migrants hoped and has grown harsher under President Donald Trump, with the separation of parents from children as a means of discouraging illegal immigration.
More families are crossing the Southwest border from Guatemala than any other nation, with 29,278 families apprehended between October and the end of May.
Martin and her husband, Pedro Godinez Aguilar, could easily have been apprehended under the previous administration, too, and would have faced a tough battle for asylum. But the father wouldn’t have been prosecuted for a first-time crossing; he would likely have been briefly detained with his daughter and then released with a monitoring device while they battled their future out in court. And their daughter, Janne, wouldn’t have been shipped alone across the country, leaving them desperately trying to get her back.
It is a bitter lesson for people like the 29-year-old Martin. “I see now that it’s not true that people count here, that the laws protect families,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s a lie.”