Sindy Flores writes:

I am an asylum seeker from Honduras and a mother of three children. For over a month my youngest daughter was separated from her father and me by the United States government. I still don’t know where she was during that time or who took care of her.

She’s a toddler, so she can’t tell me if something bad happened to her. I don’t know if she thinks we chose to abandon her. All I know is she came back pounds thinner, with lice and a hacking cough, and she cried for days, traumatized by a government that keeps children from their parents because they are migrants.

We fled Honduras to the United States because we feared for our lives. I grew up in the capital, Tegucigalpa. In the past few years, my neighborhood has become one of the deadliest in the city. We had had run-ins with the gangs in the past. On Oct. 18, gang members came to our house looking for my partner, Kevin.

They showed me their guns and told me, “If you don’t leave in 24 hours, you know what will happen to you.”

I knew what they were capable of. When my eldest daughter was 2 years old and I was pregnant with my son, their father was murdered and his body dismembered by gang members. Even after he was killed, we got death threats. We tried moving to another town until things cooled down, but the gangs found us there and extorted us. [Continue reading…]