An illegal immigrant mother who says she was separated from her still-nursing 11-month-old daughter filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration Thursday arguing she was put through unfathomable trauma which hurt her chances to make a good asylum case.
The Trump administration has said it didn’t separate nursing children from parents, pushing back against reports earlier this year involving an unnamed migrant woman from Honduras who had supposedly had her child taken.
Now there is a name to attach to such an allegation.
Leydi Duenas-Claros says her infant daughter, identified in court papers only by initials L.M.D., “was still breastfeeding” when the two were “forcibly separated” by border agents.
The episode was so traumatic that it left her unable to make a proper case for asylum when she had the chance, she says. Now she wants a judge to prevent her from being deported, and to order a do-over of her asylum case.
And she says she’s still separated from her daughter, and wants an immediate reunion.
“Ms. Duenas-Claros was not able to articulate the full range of factual circumstances underlying her credible fear claim of returning to El Salvador on account of the trauma precipitated by her continued separation from L.M.D.,” she says in her lawsuit.
The woman said she’s the mother of five children, all U.S. citizens, including L.M.D., the youngest, who was born in the U.S. in July 2017.
But Ms. Duenas-Claros, 30, is not a citizen. She left the U.S. and was back in El Salvador earlier this year, but says she fled in May after deciding that her brother-in-law, who she says is a known MS-13 gang member, “would kill them.”
She says the man raped her when she was 12, and abused her father and one of her children.
Ms. Duenas-Claros also said her sister, who was married to the MS-13 gang member, fled him and came to the U.S. where she was granted asylum based on his abuse. Ms. Duenas-Claros said she can’t understand how her own claims of fear of the same man were rejected by both an asylum officer and an immigration judge.
Her case challenges a number of assertions by the government, which said it doesn’t separate nursing children and parents, and also said it has reunited all parents separated during the zero tolerance border chaos who are eligible to be reunified.
Customs and Border Protection wouldn’t comment on its decisions.
The administration is fighting back against a number of lawsuits stemming from the family separations, which were a consequence of the zero tolerance border policy in place this spring.
A judge in California ordered reunification of thousands of parents and children, while cases in other federal courts — including Washington, D.C., where Ms. Duenas-Claros sued — are arguing over the handling of individual plaintiffs.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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