Three families spoke about their forced separation at the hands of U.S. immigration authorities at a prebuttal press conference hosted by Vice President Harris’s campaign in Doral, Fla., ahead of former President Trump’s Univision town hall Wednesday night.
The event featured Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) and Harris spokesman Kevin Muñoz, who panned the Trump administration’s family separation policy and introduced Billy, a 16-year-old Guatemalan who was separated from his father in 2018 and later reunited.
“After I went and ran to my dad, I hugged him and I told him I did not want this to happen ever again. And he promised me that he would not ever leave me again,” said Billy.
“And after that, we still fear. We — I go to therapists, but I still have the fear of Trump being reelected, and that same thing happening to me or other kids ever again. Kamala Harris helped us be together again, and she helped us be a family again. And I don’t want this to happen to any more kids. I was separated, and a lot more kids were separated, too.”
The Harris campaign has mostly centered its immigration and border security messaging on enforcement, drawing some criticism from advocates who want to see a starker contrast to Trump’s increasingly strident rhetoric on immigrants.
Trump is expected to repeat that message at the Univision event in Miami. He was originally slated to appear last week, but the town hall was postponed due to Hurricane Milton.
Harris was hosted by Univision in Las Vegas last week for her own town hall, in which she focused her message on the economy and health care, and touted her immigration reform proposal before segueing to the failed bipartisan Senate border security bill.
But Wednesday’s event focused on the human consequences of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which separated nearly 4,000 children from their parents for crossing the border without prior authorization.
Two of the children who spoke on Wednesday referred to “la hielera” or “ice box,” the slang name for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding cells.
“Hi, I’m Janice Adriana, and I’m here to tell my story. So when I was 6 years old, me and my mom decided to come to the USA when — to see my dad again. But then the migration officials held us in this place that’s called la hielera, which means ice box, and it’s really cold in there, and we couldn’t use beds or nothing. It was just empty. And after that, they told us that they were going to separate me and my mom, and that’s when everything bad started to happen,” said Janice Adriana.
Two brothers, Christian, 12, and Hamilton, 13, spoke of their experiences in foster care.
“She wouldn’t let us eat in the dining — in the kitchen, and she’d just bring the food to the room where we sleep, and they would take us to the park to try to have fun. But we weren’t having fun, we were having our minds with our mom. And the lady told us to speak, speak Spanish, and we lost our own language [from] Guatemala, Q’anjob’al, we lost it,” said Christian.
“And right now, so we got back with our mother. We saw her, we hugged her, we were crying, and then we and then we started to laugh for a few moments.”
The Harris campaign’s focus on Trump’s least popular border policy comes as the two sides seek to convince undecided Hispanic voters, a group with significant numbers in every battleground state.
It’s also part of a Harris attempt to paint Trump as dangerous and unstable, a portrayal that’s been difficult to stick on a candidate with near-universal name recognition.
“We are having this press conference because we want Americans to remember what Donald Trump did, not just at the border, but what he did to our country. We know that our immigration system is broken, and I can tell you, as a resident of the border, no one knows more that our immigration system is broken than those of us who live on the U.S.-Mexico border and who’ve been working for immigration reform for decades,” said Escobar.
“But what Donald Trump presents are not solutions. Donald Trump doesn’t bring policy ideas to the table. Donald Trump did not fix a broken system. In fact, what Donald Trump did was take a broken system and he obliterated it. He uses cruelty as American public policy. He dehumanizes immigrants. He calls immigrants by the most vile insults, the most offensive names, using deeply racist, ugly attacks, not once will you hear Donald Trump talking about how we should reform our outdated immigration laws.”
