Mateo Salazar, a Bethany therapist, went to his office in the middle of the night to meet a newly arrived 5-year-old Honduran girl. (Leon rushed the baby to the hospital for an evaluation.) “They gave the baby to the case manager with a diaper bag, we signed, that was it,” Leon recalled. Jennifer Leon, a teacher at Bethany, was at the office one day when the private company that transports children from the border delivered a baby girl “like an Amazon package.” The baby was wearing a dirty diaper her face was crusted with mucus. View MoreĪcross her organization-Bethany Christian Services, one of several companies contracted by the American government to care for newly arrived immigrant children-Quintana’s colleagues were having similar experiences. She asked for help from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, who came back several days later with something unusual: information indicating that the boy’s father was in federal custody.Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
Quintana scoured his file for more information but found nothing. He had no phone numbers with him, and when she asked where he was headed or whom he’d been with, the boy stared back blankly. He was far too little to have made the journey on his own. A 3-year-old Guatemalan boy with a toothy smile and bowl-cut black hair sat down at her desk.
By the time of that initial call, their families are typically worried, waiting anxiously for news after having-in an act of desperation-sent their children into another country alone in pursuit of safety and the hope of a future.īut in the summer of 2017, Quintana encountered a curious case. Most are teens who have memorized or written down their relatives’ phone numbers in notebooks they carried with them across the border. This process usually plays out within hours of when the children arrive. As a therapist for children who are being processed through the American immigration system, Cynthia Quintana has a routine that she repeats each time she meets a new patient in her office in Grand Rapids, Michigan: She calls the parents or closest relatives to let them know the child is safe and well cared for, and provides 24-hour contact information.
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