The State Department is allowing elderly Mexicans to visit their undocumented children in the United States, reuniting families separated for years, even decades
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Romero León waits as her daughter Angelina Sánchez, 47, irons handmade pillow cases that are to be taken to the United Sates as gifts. Sánchez's granddaughter Valeria Masias Fabian, 8, watches. For many here, it is an unlikely American olive branch amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. But it has been welcomed by immigrant families grappling with a crisis that has rippled across both countries: The elderly parents of the estimated 5 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States are dying alone in Mexico while their children remain stuck on the other side of the border.
The spokesman made no mention of the generation between the Mexican grandparents and the American grandchildren. But in practice, the Palomas Mensajeras program is exclusively for elderly Michoacanos who live in Mexico and have undocumented children in the United States. Organizers warn the undocumented children not to meet their parents at the airport, where they might be asked for identification. Parents applying for visas are encouraged to list the addresses of relatives or friends who are in the United States legally, rather than provide contact information for their children illegally in the country.
“They say this is about reuniting families, that it’s safe for them even though they don’t have papers. But I don’t know,” she said.A boy dressed as a clown stands outside the Federico Hernández Tapia elementary school in Cheran. Cheran, a town of 16,000 in the hills of central Mexico, is the ancestral home of the Purépecha indigenous people. For centuries, it was an isolated dot in the state of Michoacan where the native, pre-Hispanic language was more common than Spanish.
Eutimio Jasinto Campos, 78, of Cheranastico, looks for his seat on the airplane. He has not seen his son in the United States for 18 years. It was late at night when Romero León and her 21 fellow pilgrims were guided through customs and security at the Guadalajara airport and on into the terminal.Romero León spotted an escalator. She was bewildered.“What did you pack?” Romero León asked.One man tried to imagine what it would be like to meet his grandchildren for the first time.Romero León took her place on the plane and quietly said a little prayer.
Romero León takes her first step onto an escalator at a shopping mall in Fairview Heights, Ill. Her daughter Guillermina Sánchez, 38, helps. “You’ll lose an eye from looking at that,” she said, and handed out the wooden toys she’d brought from Cheran. She was carefully choosing which parts of her life to share with her mother. That was a part that she decided to keep to herself.
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