Photos showing where Elba Luz Dominguez, Jose Francis Yanes, Blanca Nieve Vasquez, Maynor Alonso Claudino, and Natividad Zavala were apprehended by the Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, Oct. Their children, ages 7 to 16, were taken from them by Border Patrol shortly after they were detained. The other four parents from El Salvador and Honduras - Elba Luz Dominguez, Jose Francis Yanes, Blanca Nieve Vasquez, and Maynor Alonso Claudino - had similar stories: After crossing the river and requesting asylum, they had been criminally charged with illegal entry, known as 1325 in the criminal statute and punishable by up to six months in jail. It was as if the boy didn’t exist, as far as the U.S. Nearly five weeks earlier, a Border Patrol agent had taken her 7-year-old grandson, Alexander, away from her in the middle of the night as they’d slept. Natividad Zavala, a 61-year-old grandmother from Honduras, looked like she might faint. He wasn’t an immigration attorney, but here he was representing five families who had requested asylum, and now, he believed, the prosecutors were pressuring his clients to plead guilty. He worked in the criminal justice system. At age 55, his short black hair was flecked with gray and thin lines of worry formed around his eyes as he placed the stack of case files next to him on the table. Garcia, a federal public defender for the Western District of Texas in El Paso, sat down at the table reserved for defense counsel.

The three women and two men, dressed in drab blue county jail uniforms, appeared dazed and frightened as they filed into the brightly lit, nearly empty courtroom. Sergio Garcia heard the rattling of their leg restraints before he caught sight of his clients being led by a U.S.

Separation studio trial