By Kristina Cooke and Ted Hesson
GREENVILLE, Ohio (Reuters) -For 125 days in her immigration detention cell, Ingrid Mejia replayed in her head the day she was separated from her 3-year-old son.
Mejia, a 25-year-old farmworker from Guatemala, had gone to court on February 25 on a charge of driving without a license. She didn’t have a lawyer – or child care. So she left Eliazar, a chubby-cheeked child with dark hair and eyes, waiting outside with the person who had given her a ride to court.
She thought she would pay a fine and go home, just as she had four months earlier on the same charge. Instead, as this was her fourth such offense, municipal court judge Julie Monnin sentenced her to three days in Ohio’s Darke County jail.
The brief sentence plunged Mejia into the dragnet of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement, landing her in immigration detention for more than four months and stranding her U.S. citizen son in foster care for even longer.
Mejia began trying to get her son back on July 3, within hours of her release. She hoped it would happen in days. But at a July 15 custody hearing, child welfare officials said Eliazar had bonded with his foster family during her prolonged detention. They told the hearing a slow transition would be in the child’s best interest, Mejia said.
“He’s my son. I just want him back now,” Mejia said after the hearing. “I just want to hug him.”
Friends and family say Mejia is a hardworking mother, not a violent criminal, who did not need to be detained, and her son did not deserve to be in foster care.
Immigration authorities and those who favor restricting migration say Mejia repeatedly broke the law by driving without a license and by violating immigration rules. Mejia admits to using false paperwork to enter the U.S. and to being in the country illegally.
“I don’t think this offense should be minimized,” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors lower levels of immigration, said of the driving without a license charge.
Trump was elected on a promise to deport millions of immigrants who are in the United States illegally, and has deported more than 239,000 people so far, according to Department of Homeland Security data.
His administration has set arrest quotas for immigration enforcement officials of 3,000 a day – 10 times higher than average daily arrests the last year of President Joe Biden’s administration.
It has also been releasing far fewer people from immigration detention on humanitarian grounds. Just 67 people were paroled in June by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, down from 5,159 in December, Biden’s last full month in office, government data show.
Meanwhile, since Trump took office, ICE has dramatically increased “detainer requests” – notices to state and local jails to hold an immigrant for pick-up, sweeping up immigrants like Mejia. They rose to 700 a day on average through early June, from an average of about 400 a day during the same time period last year, according to a Reuters analysis of ICE data collected by UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project.
PICKED UP FROM JAIL
When Mejia was booked into the county jail on February 25, her fingerprints were automatically shared with ICE. They showed a match for a person who had entered the United States seven years earlier and was in the country illegally.
ICE issued a detainer request and on February 28, after Mejia had completed her unlicensed-driving sentence, immigration officers picked her up from jail and drove her 140 miles to a detention center in Tiffin, Ohio, according to jail records.
“She has been arrested multiple times for driving illegally and admitted to law enforcement that she was in the country illegally,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told Reuters in a statement, in response to questions about Mejia and her child.
McLaughlin said deportees are generally given the choice of taking U.S. citizen children with them or leaving them with friends or family in the United States.
After Mejia was convicted on February 25, police and child welfare officials tried to contact a friend whom she suggested could look after Eliazar during her three-day sentence.
But the woman didn’t answer the door to Mark Ater – the police chief in Union City, where Mejia lived – because she was afraid he might be working with ICE. With nobody else immediately available, Eliazar was placed in foster care.
The case weighed on Ater, the police chief said.
“It broke my heart that this kid was taken away from his mom,” he said. “Outside of the entire situation, there was still a kid that was going to go into foster care.”
Monnin, the judge, declined to comment, saying the “unfortunate consequences of the defendant’s actions are out of my control,” adding: “I pray that a reunification process is developed quickly.”
A TEENAGER ALONE
Mejia fled sexual and gang violence in Guatemala, arriving at a port of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border in November 2017, a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday, according to her immigration paperwork.
Smugglers told her to travel on her younger sister’s documents to ensure she was processed as an unaccompanied minor in the event that her journey took longer than expected, she said. While entering on fraudulent documents does not disqualify an asylum application, it can make it harder to win, experts say.
Mejia spent four months in a government children’s shelter before being released to pursue her asylum claim. She moved on to Virginia, where she lived for eight months with a woman who beat her with a leather whip and made her work for no pay, according to her application for a visa for victims of human trafficking. Reuters was unable to verify her account independently.
By September 2019, she had escaped and made her way to an area of rural Ohio in America’s Corn Belt, dotted with poultry farms and egg processing plants. She got a job packing eggs into cartons that were shipped to grocery stores across the country.
Mejia said she tried to use mini-van ride shares to get to work from her home in Indiana, 20 miles away, but sometimes there were no seats available. Neither Ohio nor Indiana allow immigrants in the country illegally to obtain drivers’ licenses.
She was driving to work on February 18 when she ran a stop sign, colliding with another car, according to the police report. Nobody was injured. The officer at the scene wrote her up for driving without a license, requiring her to appear in court.
For Jim Groff, 76, who heard the collision from his home across the street, the facts of Mejia’s detention are simple: She was in the country illegally. “If mom wants her little baby back, send them back,” he said.
But he wished the U.S. could speed up the process of allowing immigrants to come into the country legally. “Jeepers, creepers, they’re damn good workers,” he said.
MIXED MESSAGES
In late February, after her transfer to immigration detention, a distraught Mejia contacted Maira Vasquez, for help finding out where Eliazar was and how she could get him into the care of a family member. Vasquez, a U.S. citizen, attended Eliazar’s birth as a community health worker and the two women had stayed in contact.
When Vasquez visited Darke County’s Department of Job and Family Services in March, officials told her this was a new situation for them and they weren’t sure how to handle it.
Asked for comment, the agency said it was unable to share details about the case, citing privacy laws. “We continue to work closely with the family, law enforcement and our community partners to ensure child safety,” it said in a statement.
Many state and local child welfare agencies don’t have the training to handle cases involving the immigration system, said Kelly Kribs, co-director at the nonprofit Young Center’s technical assistance program, which aims to support children caught between the federal immigration and state court systems.
ICE and local child welfare agencies work as separate systems, with separate goals, she said.
“These agencies don’t talk to one another,” Kribs said.
That can lead to mixed messages.
Mejia told Reuters in a phone call from detention in March that ICE officers told her that she could be reunited with Eliazar if she signed a document agreeing to be deported.
But Vasquez said that county officials told her that Eliazar was in their custody, and they had their own processes meant to look after the boy’s best interests.
Mejia didn’t sign – and Vasquez continued to explore options for placing Eliazar with family or friends.
Mejia’s sister, who asked not to be named as she is afraid of being arrested by ICE, was initially willing to take him. But county officials told her that it would be difficult for her to pass background checks as she is in the country illegally.
Two friends who do have legal residency declined to take Eliazar because they feared exposing family members who are in the U.S. illegally, Vasquez said.
Eliazar’s father has never been involved in his life, and was not an option, Mejia said.
LASTING TRAUMA
Experts warn that forcibly separating a child from a parent can result in trauma, even after they are reunited. Mejia’s “son is being set up for major psychiatric and learning problems in the future by this separation,” Joan Lederer, a psychiatrist who evaluated Mejia at the request of her lawyer, wrote in a court filing.
In detention, Mejia thought about Eliazar warming to people quickly. He doesn’t talk much due to a speech delay, she said, which makes conversations by phone difficult.
In April, child welfare officials sent Vasquez a picture of a smiling Eliazar with a toy truck. They told her that Eliazar’s foster family had five other children. Mejia said officials told her that nobody in the house spoke Spanish and she worried he would not understand what was going on around him.
By that point, Ater, the police chief who went to the address Mejia provided that February day, was alarmed that Eliazar was still in foster care.
He reached out to Vasquez and said Eliazar could stay with him and his family until he is reunited with Mejia ‒ “three minutes or three years.” He would even fly the boy to Guatemala if Mejia were to be deported.
“I have to go out and do my job,” he said. “But on the flip side, I’m also human and this isn’t cool. This little dude is not with his mom, and what does the future hold for him and what does the future hold for her?”
Mejia worried that signing over custody of Eliazar to Ater could mean losing him forever. She also didn’t think it would help ease access to the boy for family members, as they were unlikely to visit him at the home of a police officer for fear of being arrested by ICE, Vasquez said.
She decided to wait.
On July 2, an immigration judge dismissed Mejia’s deportation case for a second time, ruling that she was entitled to a hearing before an asylum officer and noting she was the sole custodian of a U.S. citizen child with disabilities.
This time, ICE did not contest the ruling and released Mejia the next day.
Vasquez picked her up from the detention center, and the two women tried calling Darke County children’s services but it was the eve of the July 4 holiday and they couldn’t immediately get through.
The following Monday afternoon, Mejia did meet Eliazar, in the offices of children’s services. “I just hugged him and hugged him,” she said.
She said he recognized her, but didn’t speak to her. He seemed attached to his foster parents, and she said she overheard him speaking English.
In the July 15 custody hearing, child welfare officials recommended more visits so that Eliazar could get used to his mother again, Mejia said. Officials also ordered inspections of her home to ensure her place is appropriate for a child, she said. Darke County children’s services declined to comment.
Vasquez said child welfare officials expressed concerns about how Mejia would support Eliazar, now that she has lost her egg packing job. Vasquez said she had raised funds to deposit about $3,000 in a bank account in Mejia’s name to show she has money to tide her over until she gets her work permit.
On Monday, July 21, an official from children’s services and Eliazar’s foster mom dropped him off at Mejia’s home with unexpected good news.
He would be allowed to stay with her, with regular child welfare visits until the case is closed.
“They are not going to take him away anymore,” Mejia said. “This makes me happy.”
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke in Greenville, Ohio and Ted Hesson in Washington, D.C., additional reporting by MB Pell in New York and Carlos Barria in Union City, Indiana; Editing by Mary Milliken and Suzanne Goldenberg)
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