Los Angeles to invest $10 million to help reunite children separated from parents at the border

Trump's family separation policy thegrio.com — In this June 21, 2018, photo, migrant children walk off a bus at the Catholic Charities’ Msgr. Bryan Walsh Children’s Village in Cutler Bay, Fla. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Monday, June 25, that children who range in age from newborns to 5 years old are being sheltered at this facility and His House Children’s Home in Miami Gardens. (Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced on Tuesday that the city will invest $10 million to help migrant children who were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

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The LA Justice Fund, which was created in 2016, will be increased to service the children in an effort to reunify them with their parents after Trump enacted harsher immigration policies and separated families, leaving some children jailed in cages, reports Star Tribune.

Garcetti said in a news release Tuesday that “no child should endure the trauma of being separated from their parents or the terror of not knowing if they will ever see their families again.”

“… We must do everything possible to reunify these families now,” Garcetti said.

“Los Angeles is answering cruelty with compassion — by giving hope and assistance to people in desperate need.”

Supervisor Hilda Solis said the county “will always stand with immigrants and asylum seekers.”

“No one in this country, let alone a small child, should be forced to defend themselves in court alone,” she said in a news release.

According to Solis, the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement estimates more than 100 children are in the area after being separated from their parents.

Reunifying Families

The fund will help families like Esteban Pastor and his 18-month-old son who were arrested last July after illegally crossing the southern border in El Paso and being deported. Nearly a year later, they are still struggling to find each other.

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Following his child’s hospital stay in Guatemala City, Pastor resorted to illegally entering the U.S. to find work at a Mexican restaurant in hopes that he could pay off the loan.

Border Patrol agents placed Pastor’s toddler in a federal shelter, but failed to tell him the location when Pastor was deported alone three months later in October, the Houston Chronicle reports.

“I cried. I begged,” Pastor told the Houston Chronicle, adding that “no one could tell me anything.”

Aside from two tickets for driving without a license, Pastor does not have a criminal history.

Pastor’s story highlights the devastating human effects of President Donald Trump’s homeland security policy to separate immigrant children from parents who cross American borders illegally.