Guatemalan man recalls fear, agony of separation from child
PROVO, Utah — Three-year-old Genesis Gonzalez Lopez giggled excitedly as she played with her father at a sunny Utah park, zipping down a slide again and again into his arms.
The happy scene this week in Provo, south of Salt Lake City, was a far cry from what the pair experienced on Thanksgiving, when U.S. immigration authorities took Romulo Gonzalez Rodriguez into custody at the U.S.-Mexico border and whisked away the frightened girl, with no explanation of where she’d end up.
Gonzalez had fled Guatemala with the then-2-year-old after kidnappers held him captive, ripped out his right eye and forced his family to pay a $13,500 ransom for his life. He travelled by bus and train to a San Diego port of entry to seek asylum in the United States and was separated from his daughter for seven days.
“It’s painful to be running away and come to where you think they’re going to rescue you, and they take the measure of separating children,” the father told The Associated Press in Spanish on Tuesday. “You fall again into fear and the same anguish that you’re leaving behind.”