By Jack Healy
AURORA, Colo. — Micaela Samol Gonzalez, dressed in blue detention scrubs, made her way to the front of a windowless courtroom in Colorado on Thursday and faced the judge. After she gave her name and arranged a future court date for her immigration case, the judge asked whether she had any questions.
She had just one.
“My question is regarding my son,” Ms. Gonzalez, whose boy was taken away by immigration authorities shortly after she was accused of crossing the border illegally on a journey from Guatemala, said in Spanish. “I’ve been given a number to contact him but nobody’s replying to me, and I’m wondering if he’s doing well.”
A day after President Trump signed an executive order scrapping his administration’s practice of separating immigrant parents and children at the border, there was no relief for Ms. Gonzalez and hundreds of other parents who were little closer to reuniting with the more than 2,300 children who have been taken from them under the administration’s “zero tolerance” border enforcement policy.
Parents said they still did not know how to track down their children, and struggled to find out any information through a 1-800 hotline set up by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. Others who had located their children said they were still separated by thousands of miles and a bureaucratic maze they did not know how to navigate.
The one thing they wanted was their children. But parents and lawyers said those reunions still seemed achingly distant and uncertain.
Administration officials have said children were taken only from parents who had violated the law by crossing the border without proper documents. Brian Marriott, senior director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, said after the new executive order was signed that the agency was “working toward” reunifying families, though he could not say how quickly that would happen.
s Ms. Gonzalez listened to the judge over a pair of translation headphones, a court officer gave her a photocopied fact sheet titled, in Spanish, “Are you detained and separated from your children?” She said she had not seen her son since May 25, when they were separated at the border. She thought he was in New York. She knew nothing for sure.
“I called but nobody answered,” she said. “I tried before. I will keep trying.”
Even outside the walls of a detention facility, some parents could only guess when they would see their children again.
Angelica, a 31-year-old asylum applicant from Guatemala who feared repercussions if she disclosed her last name, said she had not seen her 8-year-old daughter since the two were separated at an immigration detention facility in Arizona in early May. They had been apprehended by immigration officers somewhere in the desert.