(Image source from: Boston 25 news)
A Guatemalan woman who was separated with her 8-year-old daughter for crossing United States-Mexico border illegally seeking asylum was reunited on Thursday, nearly after two months.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts tweeted that the daughter, who was identified only as S.K., arrived at Boston's Logan Airport on Thursday afternoon, where she was greeted by her mother Angelica Rebeca Gonzalez-Garcia, and a crowd of supporters.
"Forgive me, my child, forgive me," Gonzalez-Garcia can be heard sobbing to her daughter in Spanish as the two embraced in a short video posted on Twitter.
The ACLU and two Boston-area law firms filed an emergency lawsuit in federal court demanding the immediate reunification of the family earlier this week. Tons filed a suit across the country after Republican President Donald Trump halted his family separation policy.
The Guatemalan mother said the lawsuit was recorded at that instance that in May the two had been comprehended crossing the border in Arizona and were subsequently sent to abstracted detention facilities, though Gonzalez-Garcia was eventually freed in Colorado and settled in Massachusetts, yet her daughter remained in a Texas shelter.
The girl was returned to her mother after her legal team, with the aid of U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark, a Massachusetts Democrat, pushed to hasten the procedure of designating Gonzalez-Garcia as the girl's legal sponsor, said Matthew Segal, legal director for the ACLU of Massachusetts.
Immigration officials had deemed the girl an "unaccompanied minor" and needed Gonzalez-Garcia to go through fingerprinting and new screening measures that her legal team argued would take weeks if not months.
"The big obstacle has been that the government was treating them as strangers and making them go through procedures that were not at all appropriate" in this situation, Segal said. "There was never any dispute that she was this girl's mother and that this was her daughter."
By Sowmya Sangam
