Podcast: Torn Apart Under Trump Six Years Ago, a Guatemalan Father and Son Still Hope to Reunite

Editor’s Note: This reporting was produced in partnership with Latino USA. The following is the web version of this story.

José Gabriel Zelada, a local human rights and labor activist based in Chimaltenango, Guatemala, remembers when he first made contact with Teodoro*.

“I called him and asked him for his son’s name,” Zelada said. He told Teodoro: “I want to meet with you.”

At first, Teodoro wasn’t sure why Zelada was looking for him. Then, Gabriel said the words he’d longed to hear - that there was a chance he and his son could be together again.

“It had been years since I traveled with my son,” Teodoro said. Six years to be exact, since he’d last seen his then 14-year-old son, Miguel, inside a Texas immigration detention center near the border.

“They took my son,” he said as he remembered that dreadful day in 2019. It took Teodoro and Miguel twenty days of buses, walking and sleeping out in the open to make the journey through Guatemala, across Mexico, all the way to the Texas border. When they finally arrived, they turned themselves into immigration officers. They were separated almost immediately. 

Teodoro is Guatemalan and from a predominantly Indigenous region in the country's north. He is one of hundreds of parents who still have not been reunited with their children after they were separated from each other at the U.S.-Mexico border under the first Trump administration.

Part of the work that Zelada does is to help find deported parents whose children were left behind in the U.S. He’s a member of an international network of human rights defenders who, working with partners in the U.S., search across Mexico and Central America for families seeking to reunite.

The goal is to help locate the parents, educate them on the protections available to them, which includes access to legal assistance for rights violations, and legal support if there is a viable asylum claim that can allow a parent to return to the U.S. to reunify, or to assist with repatriation of children back to their parents in their home country if that is their wish.

Zelada has helped with dozens of cases like Teodoro’s. “They should be reunified because it was an injustice to separate these families”, Zelada said.

And there is one legal avenue that can possibly help bring them back together. Except the fate of families like Teodoro’s now lies again in the hands of the same administration that ripped them apart in the first place.

To understand how the families are working to be reunited, who is helping them, and the roadblocks they may encounter, we traveled to Guatemala to meet Teodoro and Gabriel.

Zero Tolerance

The lives of these families first began to unravel with the passing of a controversial immigration policy implemented in May 2018 under the first Trump administration, known as “zero tolerance”. The policy aimed to deter unregulated entry into the U.S. by criminally prosecuting anyone who attempted to cross the southern border, even those who legally tried to make an asylum claim.

As a result, parents immigrating with children were detained and placed into custody. Their kids were taken from them and also put into cages. Nearly 3000 children were separated from their parents during a 6 week period.

Public outcry ensued, and Trump ended the policy in June 2018. But the administration still found other ways to carry out separations at a smaller scale. 

A congressional report from 2021 states that, besides the 3000 separations during “Zero Tolerance,” there were about 1,500 other children separated from their parents before the policy was officially implemented.  And at least 1,000 additional children were separated after the policy ended – including Teodoro’s son. They were separated the year after “Zero Tolerance” officially ended.

Part of the reason Teodoro and his son left was because of the conditions in Guatemala. Teodoro wanted to work and he wanted his son to have a chance to study in the U.S. Teodoro didn’t have a chance to finish school and said in the remote area where they lived access to education is difficult. But his son loved school. 

“He’d drink his coffee, go to school and he loved to study,” Teodoro said as he remembered the early days he spent with his son in Guatemala. He says his son would come home and happily do his homework every day.

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But they were struggling. So, eventually, they decided to head to the U.S. where he’d heard he and his son would have more opportunities. 

They had no idea the reality that awaited them - like so many others. The total reported number of separated children under Trump’s first term is more than 5,000.

Many of the parents were deported back to their home countries - their children remained in the U.S., and eventually made it into the foster care system, or were released to a sponsor.

That’s what happened with Teodoro’s son, Miguel. After Teodoro was deported and he was eventually able to get in touch with an organization in the U.S., they finally spoke on the phone.

Miguel was heartbroken by the separation from his father, but Teodoro said he also told him he wanted to have a chance to stay and study. Miguel was eventually released to a sponsor in the U.S. And their separation continued.

The Family Reunification Task Force

There have been long-standing efforts to reunify remaining families, like Teodoro’s.

When Joe Biden became President in 2021, he issued an executive order creating the Family Reunification Task Force, which became responsible for identifying and reunifying separated families. The task force was an inter-agency effort, made up of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice.

The Biden administration appointed Michelle Brané, a long-time immigrant rights activist and lawyer, to oversee it.

“I was extremely nervous,” she said. “The career employees that were at Homeland Security during separations would still be there.”

Despite these concerns, Brané chose to take-on the role. She stayed in her position for about three years.

“Everybody was extremely supportive of this and that’s when you found out how many people had not been happy about the policy of separating families,” Brané said. “There were also people who were very worried that they were going to be somehow blamed, or held accountable.”

Brané estimates that close to a thousand families were reunified through the task force.

“We also were able to identify a lot of families that had not previously been identified as separated,” she said.

Brané left her post in mid-2024. By then, there were still hundreds of families who had not been found and reunited. Among them were Teodoro and his son Miguel.

“ The overwhelming majority of the family reunification cases that we support, there's very limited, or incomplete information about the parents who were separated from the children and it makes it extremely difficult to verify the information and locate the separated parents,” said Nan Schivone, legal director of Justice in Motion, an immigrant rights org that works with people like Zelada.

“ This particular family, several defenders, worked on this case because the information that we got from the government was so bare bones that it really took a while to identify the community of origin for the family.

Zelada was able to help compile pieces of information and finally find Teodoro earlier this year – a complicated process that he’s had to go through for many other separated families.

“ We didn't know where they were,” Brané said. “In most cases the parents had been deported or removed from the United States, and there's no follow-up once that happens.” In a number of cases, the government had also failed to keep track of the children’s whereabouts after deporting the parents.

“The reunifications were much more complicated, both logistically, just in terms of finding the parent and finding the child and figuring out how we were gonna get them back together,” Brané said.

For years, Teodoro continued to live his life without his son by his side, wishing he could one day see him again. When he met Zelada, a new hope was born. Teodoro is now waiting to see if the U.S. government will approve his parole and allow him to return to the U.S. to reunite with Miguel. But that process takes time.

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As 2024 slowly came to an end, Brané and others were concerned that Trump would win the election and undo their work—or worse.

Then, on Inauguration Day 2025, Donald Trump eliminated the family reunification task force. One of the architects of family separation, Tom Homan, is back in the administration – and has said that the administration will not hesitate to separate and deport parents whose children are U.S. citizens.

The Ms. L Settlement Agreement

However, despite the official task force being eliminated, the partnering organizations continued the work with government funding. And that is because those duties were part of a court agreement reached in 2023 under Biden, as part of a class action lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the U.S. government on behalf of the separated families.

It was known as the Ms. L settlement agreement, and it set out a number of requirements that the federal government needed to carry out for those separated, and for reunified families.

“The families have access to a parole status to be present in the U.S. to reunite with their children,” said Schivone, from Justice in Motion.

That parole status is key, as it allows families to remain in the U.S. for a set amount of time with their children. It also creates a path for parents who were deported without their children to return and reunite with them on U.S. soil. Parents, like Teodoro, who is now anxiously in the process of reunification.

“If God allows, one day I’ll see him again,” he said. 

The agreement also set out a few other provisions, including “some counseling, some medical benefits  and then access to legal services,” said Schivone.

New Wave of Deportations

After months of the new Trump administration taking swipes at the Ms. L agreement, a court found that they had violated the agreement when they terminated two contracts that provided legal and social services to Ms. L class members and ordered that they continue those services and remedy the damages. 

Then, the Trump administration escalated those attacks on the Ms. L settlement agreement when they deported eight Ms. L class members.

On October 14, the ACLU filed a motion in court demanding that the U.S. government immediately return to the U.S. at least four families that were protected by the Ms. L settlement agreement and who the administration recently deported.

“ What we are asking the court to do is very straightforward,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the ACLU. “We believe that these families were removed illegally and we're asking the court to order the government to facilitate their return back to the United States.”

Lee has been working with the ACLU since the beginning of family separation.

“These families are still being targeted,” Gelernt said. “This is the worst thing I have ever seen in my 30-plus years doing this work [as a civil-liberties attorney]. It was gratuitous cruelty at its absolute worst and I had hoped that it would end immediately, but it hasn't.”

These iterations of the Trump administration’s accelerating immigration enforcement tactics and targeting of separated families are concerning for people like Teodoro, who is still hoping that his parole application will be approved so he can re-enter the U.S. to finally reunite with his son.

If he manages to be granted re-entry into the U.S., he and his son could once again be at the mercy of the administration’s will. It’s a trauma that is exacerbated over and over for families that are still trying to heal, with no end in sight. 

We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about family reunifications, the status of parole applications for separated families and about the elimination of the Family Reunification Task Force, but we did not hear back.

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This episode was produced by Reynaldo Leanos Jr. and edited  by Julieta Martinelli. It was mixed by Julia Caruso and Leah Shaw  Dameron. Fact checking for this episode by Roxana Aguirre.