On a rainy spring afternoon, Nery Ortega Lima, a 47-year-old Guatemalan man living in Rhode Island, held his wife’s hand at a bodega-style market while his nine-year-old daughter threw boxes of strawberry milk and some tomatoes into the family’s basket.
The market was packed with other neighbors getting their grocery shopping off their to-do lists, but for Ortega Lima, this simple errand has become heavenly after years of his family being torn apart.
The couple – who have been together since they met as teenagers in their home city of Jalapa in southern Guatemala – and their three youngest children were reunited just a few months ago for the first time in four years after advocates persuaded the Biden administration to mend more families forcibly broken by Donald Trump’s notorious “zero tolerance” policy at the US-Mexico border.
Ortega Lima and his teenage son were separated at the border in spring 2018, the father detained then deported while the boy was sent to a US shelter. After a year apart, Ortega Lima managed to get back to the US to reunite with Nery Jr, then, three years later – a total of four years after the boy said goodbye to his mother and younger sister and younger brother in Guatemala – matriarch Lilian Yanes, nine-year-old Leyla and 13-year-old Dublas all managed to be reunited in the US.
Now the five are adjusting to their new life in America together and they sat down exclusively with the Guardian earlier this month to share their experience.
“The separation was the hardest thing we’ve had to face as a family,” Ortega Lima said. “But something good was in store for us and we were repaired [as a family unit].”
“It’s an immense joy to be together again,” Yanes said. “It’s hard to explain how parts of your heart were somewhere else before.”
In 2018, father and son trekked from Guatemala to escape the rampant gang violence blanketing their village in Santa Ana, an area better known for its ancient Mayan architecture. The son, also named Nery Ortega, was 14 but had been only 13 when a gang started threatening to kill him unless he joined the group, leaving the family terrified.
After a harrowing journey across Mexico, including being crammed by smugglers into a suffocating tractor trailer with other frightened migrants for a long journey with no food, water or toilet facilities, Nery Jr and his father crossed into El Paso, Texas, but were apprehended by border patrol officers.
Ortega Lima and Nery Jr were detained with more than a dozen families in a narrow room not much bigger than his current living room, he said, gesturing to the 10-by-15ft space where he was sitting alongside a futon, coffee table and TV stand.
He recalled a “mean lady” coming into the room and yelling: “You’re all being deported!” explaining Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy that criminalized unauthorized border crossings and jailed adults after separating them from the children or babies they had brought with them. The policy led to the infamous scenes of distraught kids crowded in cages that sparked uproar against Trump, followed by news that the administration lost track of children, who were not reunited with their parents for years, or even now remain apart.
“I had no idea where they were taking us,” Ortega Lima said. All the migrants there were quickly lined up and the father only had a few moments to say goodbye to his son – while officials held on to mothers trying to get their toddlers back.
“I told my son to not be afraid and that everything was going to be OK. I told him to be a good boy,” he said.
Ortega Lima was then jailed, chained hand and foot, unable to find out for 10 days about Nery Jr, who had been taken to a shelter in New York, 2,000 miles away.
After a month in a crowded, freezing cell that he compared to an ice box, the father was deported, returning to Lilian, Leyla and Dublas and leaving Nery Jr in the US.
The boy spent his 15th birthday at the shelter, keeping despair at bay by playing soccer with the other teenage migrants there.
“I missed my family so much,” he said. After four long months at the secure shelter, Nery Jr could be taken in by his older, adult sister and her now husband, a US citizen, who live in Rhode Island.
Back in Guatemala, Nery Jr’s parents were aching to see him again.
“I couldn’t sleep not knowing how he was or if he was eating anything,” Yanes said about her son’s time in the shelter. “I didn’t know if we’d ever see each other again.”
Ortega Lima was also heartbroken.
“I had to live the worst parts under Trump as a migrant. It was the hardest thing for a father and son to experience. There were a lot of sleepless nights and I thought I would go crazy,” he said.
In September 2018, Ortega Lima was offered a chance to make an asylum request at the border with the help of lawyers at the US non-profit Al Otro Lado, which translates to The Other Side.
A long process followed but eventually he was in Calexico, California, recounting to a US asylum officer the traumatic gang-related experiences back home. Then, with other parents who had been separated from their children under the Trump administration, and following a battle between immigration lawyers and border officials over the granting of humanitarian parole, there were tears and shouts of relief, hands thrown in the air in joy as Ortega Lima and other parents were approved for entry into the US.
Nery Jr and his Ortega Lima remember 14 April 2019 as one of the best days of their lives. The teenager came back to his sister and brother-in-law’s home after classes at one of Rhode Island’s public school newcomer programs, a landing pad for students recently arrived in the country, not knowing his father was waiting there to surprise him.
Nery Jr’s jaw dropped when he saw him, Ortega Lima recalled, he dashed to him and they embraced for a long time after nearly a year apart.
“The moment was so beautiful, especially when I remembered all the difficulties I went through before it,” Ortega Lima said.
The next couple of years were bittersweet. Father and son were happy to be reunited, but the family was still not whole.
In 2021, the new administration of Joe Biden established a family reunification taskforce after more than 3,900 children were separated from their families between January 2017 and January 2021. The taskforce partnered with non-profits like Al Otro Lado to reach out to families in Central America and help them reunite in the US.
The taskforce was chiefly focused on reuniting children and parents after the years in which a combination of Trump policy cruelty and bureaucratic chaos had caused deep trauma, with some children lost in the dysfunctional system, even to this day. Biden’s team has attracted criticism for moving too slowly and abandoning a plan to compensate families financially.
Even though father and son were now back together in Rhode Island – they prefer not to disclose their exact location, over safety concerns – advocates implored the authorities to allow husband and wife, their other teenage son, Dublas, 13, and Leyla, who had not seen Nery Jr since she was five, to be reunited in America.
Dublas made it in first and, finally, in January of this year, Yanes and Leyla boarded a plane to Boston.
Ortega Lima and Nery Jr were waiting when they arrived, with a balloon that read “You’re So Special.” And in that brief moment, in the midst of travelers running to make it to their flights, a father, a mother, a son and a daughter were whole again.
“I was in tears,” Yanes said. “I remember seeing my son leave as a kid and now I saw he was a strong man.”
There wasn’t room in the car for Dublas to go to the airport so he was reunited with his mother and little sister shortly after.
Yanes is now exploring English classes and waiting for her work permit – although in another bureaucratic twist, little Leyla was sent one. Nery Jr had dropped out of class to work at a carwash to pay the bills while Ortega Lima initially suffered from vertigo doctors suggest was brought on by the stress of the separation. He improved with treatment and is working in construction now, while Nery Jr is still at the carwash everyday.
“Sometimes it can take up to four months and that’s a period of time they cannot work, the most vulnerable period there is,” said Carol Anne Donohoe, managing attorney for Al Otro Lado’s Family Reunification Project, of Yanes’s wait for her permit. “It’s not that there’s something wrong with Lilian’s case, there’s no rhyme or reason.”
Leyla is already dreaming about being a nurse, Nery Jr wants to save up to buy himself a Dodge Charger someday. The asylum cases are pending.
For now, Yanes is just grateful she can cook her Guatemalan pescado seco fish for the family, mother her children by the spoonful again after the years apart and shop for groceries together.
She noted earnestly that the US is “a hard country to get into”.
Smiling at her three youngsters, she said: “It’s a miracle just being able to hug my children once again.”
