A mother and child who were torn apart under the Trump administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy will be in the same room as the president who ordered their separation. Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon has announced that Albertina Contreras Teletor and 11-year-old Yakelin Garcia Contreras, two asylum-seekers torn apart at the southern border and separated for nearly two months, will be his guests at Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday. It will also be Yakelin’s 12th birthday.
Yakelin and her mom were kept apart for nearly two months after fleeing Guatemala. Hearing that asylum-seekers were being illegally blocked at ports of entry, they crossed a river and turned themselves in to border agents. Yakelin said she “couldn’t stop crying and crying” after they took her from her mom. “If I could say anything to the President,” she said, “I would tell him to stop separating kids from their parents because it is just too hard for us kids to lose our parents like that.”
More members of Congress need to be following Merkley’s lead, because family separation remains a crisis. Not only are kidnapped children still in U.S. custody in violation of a federal judge’s court order, but Trump officials have now claimed it would be just too much work to try to locate possibly thousands of other children who were separated prior to the official implementation of “zero tolerance” in order to reunite them with their parents.
“This child separation policy came from a dark and evil place within the heart of this administration. Innocent children suffered because of deeds that were carried out in our names and using our tax dollars as Americans,” Merkley, a fierce advocate for these children, said in a statement. “I’m bringing Albertina and Yakelin as my guests to the State of the Union because we need to bear witness to the suffering that this cruel policy inflicted, and resolve to make sure that nothing like this ever happens in the United States of America again.”