A Father and Child Disunion

The first day after they were caught hiding in tall grass near the Rio Grande river, before they were separated, the Honduran father and his 7-year-old son were detained in an air-conditioned Border Patrol station. After a night in the thick heat of borderlands summer, the boy was shivering, and he asked his father insistently to hold him to keep him warm.

That was what the father, Mauricio Posadas Andrade, recalled in the days after border officers pried his son away from him on June 12, and after he was confined with dozens of other migrant parents in a detention center near Brownsville, Texas. For 10 days he had no communication with his namesake son, Mauricio, and no idea where he was. Seized with insomnia, Posadas imagined that the boy had been taken back to the Border Patrol “icebox” and was freezing there without him.

The relief was powerful 10 days later when he was summoned by a guard to a phone and heard his son’s small voice. Now at least he knows the boy is safe, in a climate-controlled federal children’s shelter