La Prensa San Diego and the Los Angeles Times have both taken deeper looks this week at a San Diego family that has been divided by the border and the country’s immigration policy.
The Muñoz family’s parents were deported to Tijuana two months ago. Their three U.S.-born children remain in San Diego, being cared for by a relative.
The Los Angeles Times story says:
Each night, Leslie, 16, and Adilene Muñoz, 8, sleep restlessly in their parents’ bed while their brother Marcos, 13, covers himself with a blanket on the floor beside them.
Across the border in Tijuana, their parents lie awake in their small third-story apartment, feeling anxious and helpless.
The family has been divided by the U.S.-Mexican border since Feb. 22, when immigration agents arrested and deported Abel Muñoz and Zulma Miranda. The couple decided to leave behind their three U.S.-born children after a relative agreed to watch over them.
“Being separated is very difficult, but why am I going to deprive them of their right to live there?” Miranda said in Spanish, sitting in the Tijuana apartment where she is living with her husband and her parents. “There is no future here. It’s a very rough life here. I don’t want that for my kids.”
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The La Prensa story (which ran before the LAT feature) offers more detail:
“We never had to ask for anything because we always had it all,” Leslie says. Now scared that it’s been two months since her parents, Abel and Zulma, have been gone and food in the house is scarce, she’s taken parental control and is running out of options.
Leslie, who speaks to her father daily with a cellular phone through a family share plan, has been thrown into the realm of bill paying, tax season and mortgages.