Dozens of Ukrainian kids fleeing the conflict in the country have ended up being separated from their guardians at the US border with Mexico, the New York Times has reported on Tuesday.
Volunteers working in Tijuana have told the newspaper of at least 50 such cases since the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine. All of them involved minors, who couldn’t travel with their parents but were entrusted to older siblings, relatives or friends of the family to make the journey to America.
The separations reportedly occurred despite the guardians having all the needed notarized paperwork attesting that the children were wilfully handed over to them by their parents.
According to the paper, the authorities have been assuring the children’s helpers that the checks, aimed at making sure that the minors aren’t being trafficked, would take just a few days, but the kids apparently ended up disappearing in the system for weeks and being moved to shelters inside the US.
“They told us we would be separated for one or two days,” Iryna Merezhko, who traveled with her sister’s 14-year-old son Ivan, told the New York Times. This happened in early April, but the pair has been unable to reunite to this day. It took Merezhko a lot of effort to simply find out that the boy had been transferred to a children’s shelter in California.