The night-crossers were often families, exhausted and terrified from their journeys, seeking asylum from whatever terror had driven them from home.
.. While they had been evacuating their homes and traveling — some for weeks — the United States had changed the rules. Pleas for asylum that had been accepted for years might now be rejected.
.. Mothers and fathers, who would have been released to await court hearings, would now be jailed. Their children would be seized
.. There were dozens of them, though it was hard to count in the dark. When the guards’ lights hit them, Moore saw that they were almost entirely women and children. It was about as pure a family exodus as he had seen in his career.
.. On their faces were mixtures of relief and fear. Sometimes just one or the other. “There was a boy, about a 10- or 12-year-old boy, who was visibly terrified,” Moore recalled.
.. The secretary of homeland security has suggested that the nearly 2,000 children who have been seized at the border since April were taken for their own safety. How could the government know that their parents were not their captors?
.. As the guards lined up the families on Tuesday night, Moore saw a woman breast-feed a toddler in the middle of the road.“There was no place for privacy,” Moore said, so she did it in the headlights of Border Patrol vehicle.
.. Her daughter was 2, Moore said. “She said they’d been on the road for a month, and they were from Honduras. I can only imagine what dangers she’d passed through, alone with the girl.”
Moore had been to Honduras; it is a place so dominated by gang violence and poverty that National Geographic once wrote the country’s people have lost “their right to grow old.”
.. “It was very quick,” he recalled. The mother set the girl down, and an agent began to run gloved hands across her body.
“The mother stoically had her hands against the vehicle, and the girl was crying,” Moore said. “Neither were saying words. Nothing could be said with her. She needed to be with her mother.”
He took two shots, moments apart. He understood at once that they were the photos he had been waiting for
.. According to new federal policies, he said, she would be taken from her mother when the van reached its destination. They would not reunited until their case had wound through the courts, and then likely only to return to the country they had fled.
.. He wanted to be optimistic — to believe that for some reason the girl would not have to spend weeks or months in the state of mind he had witnessed for only a few seconds, when she stood by herself in the road.
“I don’t know what the truth is,” Moore said. “I fear they were split up.”
Mother says baby taken from her while breast-feeding at Texas immigration detention center
A breast-feeding baby was taken from her mother’s arms at a Texas detention center and the mother was handcuffed for resisting, the woman’s attorney says.
.. The attorney, Natalia Cornelio, told CNN the woman from Honduras sobbed Tuesday as she recounted how her daughter was taken from her. The mother is awaiting prosecution for entering the United States illegally.
.. about 500 children have been separated from their parents
.. Some parents are being told, ” ‘We’re going to separate your kids so they can bathe.’ And that’s not true,” Nogueras said.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department’s Southern District of Texas declined to comment about how many children had been separated from their parents or the how they were separated.
Trump Threatens Nafta, Honduras Aid Over Migrant ‘Caravan’
In tweets, the president brings trade deal into play over annual protest that has caught his attention
President Donald Trump on Tuesday warned that the North American Free Trade Agreement was “in play” and threatened to end aid to Honduras and other Central American countries if an organized protest march of 1,000 asylum seekers traveling through Mexico reaches the U.S. border.
.. “Cash cow NAFTA is in play, as is foreign aid to Honduras and the countries that allow this to happen. Congress MUST ACT NOW!”
.. The “caravan of people” Mr. Trump attacked Tuesday is an annual event that leaders say aims to raise awareness about the tens of thousands of Central Americans who, facing gang violence and political unrest in one of the world’s most violent areas, flee every year to Mexico or the U.S. Many are turned back, extorted or kidnapped along the way.
.. Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray responded to Mr. Trump’s comment Sunday with a tweet of his own denying that his government was doing nothing to control migration. “Every day Mexico and the U.S. work together on migration throughout the region. Facts clearly reflect this,” he said. “Upholding human dignity and rights is not at odds with the rule of law.”
.. Mexican and U.S. officials, facing national elections this year, have pressed for a relatively quick deal on Nafta, while their Canadian counterparts have held out for an agreement that would preserve key structures from the existing Nafta, including a dispute-settlement system that can challenge tariffs levied by the Trump administration.
.. Mr. Trump’s threat to cut aid to Honduras is one of a series of such warnings he has issued in the first 14 months of his administration, on which he hasn’t always followed through.
The U.S. plans to send $65.8 million in aid to Honduras in fiscal year 2019, according to the State Department, though none of those funds have yet been obligated or spent.
Homeland Security Chief Resisted White House Pressure on Immigrant Program
White House officials were pushing the Department of Homeland Security to announce this week that they were ending those protections for Honduras and Nicaragua ..
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly telephoned Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke and pressed her on the matter, a White House official said. The official said the point of his call was to get her to make a decision, saying she was delaying too long. Others said the pressure from the White House was to end the protections.
“As with many issues, there were a variety of views inside the administration on a policy. The acting secretary took those views and advice the path forward for TPS and made her decision based on the law,” said Jonathan Hoffman, spokesman for Homeland Security.
.. Mr. Kelly, when he was Homeland Security secretary, offered a limited extension of the same protective status for Haitians earlier this year and advised immigrants protected by the program to prepare to leave. He also signaled that protections for people from other nations were likely to end, as well.
.. “The White House came down on her really hard” before and after the decisions were announced.
.. On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the protected status for Nicaragua would end, but the roughly 5,000 immigrants in the U.S. under the program would have until January 2019 to either leave the country or apply for another immigration status if they are eligible.
.. Ms. Duke is expected to leave the agency when a permanent successor is approved by the Senate. Mr. Hoffman, however, said he knew of no plans for Ms. Duke to leave.