ICE allows mother it deported without her toddler to return for his burial
ATLANTA – The funeral home doors swung open, and Wendy Hernandez Reyes inched toward the tiny white coffin cradling her 3-year-old son, Orlin. He lay frozen in a tan outfit and matching pageboy cap to cover his injuries.
The Department of Homeland Security had quietly allowed Hernandez to return to the United States late Monday, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers deported her to Honduras without him. Now she was being given three days in Atlanta to say goodbye. An ankle monitor tracking her movements blinked red above her black shoes.
When she saw the toddler lying in the satin-lined casket, she fell to her knees and began to wail.
“My God, why?” Hernandez cried. “Orlinsito, my son.”
Acting ICE director Todd M. Lyons claimed in March that Hernandez had “abandoned” her son to a “violent murderer” who killed him weeks later. ICE had arrested her after a sheriff’s deputy in Baldwin County, Alabama, stopped the car she was riding in with her sister to work. Contrary to Lyons’ assertion, Hernandez said she had begged ICE to deport her with Orlin. Instead, the child and his cousins were put in the custody of her sister’s estranged partner, Samuel Maldonado. He was a laborer who had been in the Honduran military and the father of her sister’s three young children.
Police say Maldonado drank heavily, whipped the children with a wire, and dealt the most vicious blows to Orlin. The boy had multiple broken bones and signs of sexual battery. He had been stomped on, burned with a lighter, and suffered at least 17 blows to the head. Maldonado has been charged with murder and has pleaded not guilty.
The case has stirred outrage, prompted calls for a full accounting of ICE’s actions and shone a light on the sometimes dangerous situations children are left in when their parents are detained or deported. After Orlin’s death, some Florida sheriffs who signed up to help DHS with immigration enforcement during routine matters like traffic stops said the effort should focus on serious criminals.
Escambia County Sheriff Chip W. Simmons, a Republican in Pensacola, this week endorsed a U-visa application for Hernandez, which seeks to provide a path to legal residency for crime victims so they can participate in the investigation and prosecution of crimes.
“I felt like it was the right thing to do considering the loss of her child,” he said in a statement.
ICE said Friday that the agency “does not separate families” and emphasized that officers ask parents if they want to be deported with their children. But officials did not explain what transpired in Hernandez’s case in particular, nor did they respond to questions from the Washington Post about whether officers checked on Orlin, or alerted child services, after they deported his mother. They also did not answer questions about why Hernandez was allowed to return this week – an extraordinary act, even on humanitarian grounds, given that most deportees are not allowed to return to the United States for many years, if ever.
Hernandez said she repeatedly asked to be deported with her son, and then later had difficulty regaining custody of him from Honduras because she’d been deported without her passport and other paperwork. ICE denied Hernandez was removed without “proper paperwork or documentation.”
When Hernandez saw her son’s body on Tuesday, she struggled to breathe. Then she stood over him and prayed.
A rush to return
Hernandez was running out of time to see her son.
She had been paralyzed by grief since learning of her child’s death on March 4. And she did not know how to bury him.
He was in America. She was in Honduras. The funeral home warned that because of Orlin’s injuries, autopsies and deterioration, the casket would have to be sealed this month.
A small group of strangers – lawyers, advocates, friends – assembled to help. In Pensacola, where Hernandez had lived with her son, Grace Resendez McCaffery, an advocate and bilingual newspaper publisher, started a fundraiser to pay for Orlin’s burial.
Sending him to Honduras at first seemed like the easiest option, and they managed to transport his body from Pensacola to an Atlanta funeral home for that purpose. But fundraising, negotiating his return to Honduras and the criminal investigation led to delays.
Hernandez’s pro bono lawyer, Shalyn Fluharty, reviewed her case and filed a petition instead asking DHS to allow Hernandez to return. They argued that she should be permitted to bury Orlin and support the criminal investigation into her child’s killing. Hernandez believed he should be laid to rest in Pensacola, where he was born.
On Monday, after Democratic lawmakers held an unofficial hearing that brought up the case, and following a story examining Orlin’s death in the Post, ICE agreed to let Hernandez return temporarily.
Her flight arrived at Atlanta’s international terminal, where travelers from India, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates were greeted by loved ones with bear hugs and balloons saying, “Welcome.” Fluharty waited for Hernandez with a bouquet of flowers. But she did not emerge with the crowd.
Hernandez said that after she landed, immigration officers slipped plastic handcuffs over her wrists and transported her to an office building downtown. They affixed a bulky GPS monitor to her left ankle.
“I’m sorry,” she said the officer told her.
Three hours later, officers transported her to a dimly lit sidewalk outside ICE’s offices, where her sister, who had been released after Orlin’s death, had been waiting alongside a small group of supporters to take her to a rental house.
The services would be the next day.
‘Forgive me,
my love’
The strangers who had come to Hernandez’s aid in the aftermath of Orlin’s killing helped arrange a hasty service. A Honduran-trained lawyer picked out Orlin’s outfit and called a Spanish-speaking Baptist pastor from Decatur, Georgia. Fluharty rushed to buy Hernandez new shoes because hers did not fit under the GPS monitor.
White balloons shaped like stars framed Orlin’s coffin. Roses stood in a vase. Artificial candles flickered. Soft music played in the background.
Because the service had been arranged last minute, the funeral home on a busy street in Atlanta could only offer them one hour.
Orlin wore a long-sleeved shirt and a tan vest with a striped bow tie and matching pants. The clothes concealed his injuries. A new teddy bear was tucked beside him. Embroidered into the satin lining of his casket was “Principito,” or “Little Prince.”
His full name was embossed on the coffin: Orlin Josue Hernandez Reyes.
McCaffrey and Hernandez’s sister had to hold Hernandez up as she walked trembling toward her son. Once she regained the strength to stand, she stood over him and stroked his face and chest.
“I never wanted to leave you,” she whispered repeatedly. “I wanted to bring you with me. My son.”
Most of the seats in the room at Fischer Funeral Care and Cremation Services were empty. The sisters knew few people in Atlanta. Pastor Amilcar Morales stood at a lectern and told Hernandez he knew there were still more questions than answers, but to trust that God has a plan.
“We don’t know what talents and skills this little boy would have had. We don’t know what impact he would have had on the world,” he said. “But we know he was a baby and that his life was sacred.
“We know that Orlin Josue Hernandez was marvelous,” he said.
Hernandez slumped in a padded chair next to her son’s coffin and began moaning and sobbing inconsolably.
Her sister stroked Orlin’s face and whispered prayers. She remains separated from her own children, who are now in state foster care.
“Forgive me, forgive me, my love,” she whispered to him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.”
Back to Pensacola
That night, Hernandez and her sister slept in a rental house on beds with sheets decorated with the words “Mom” and “Dad.” They positioned themselves close to the wall so they could charge their GPS trackers.
When they awoke, Fluharty told her that ICE had extended Hernandez’s stay at least until Tuesday. That would give her time to return to Pensacola and perhaps bury her son.
The longtime immigration lawyer felt deeply grateful for “the kindness and humanity” of the immigration authorities who approved Hernandez’s return to the U.S. But she still believes Orlin’s death never would have happened if his mother hadn’t been deported without him.
“This entire situation never had to happen to begin with,” she said.
Reps. Ro Khanna , D-Calif., and Delia C. Ramirez , D-Ill., said in a letter to ICE and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin Thursday that they wanted “a full accounting” of how officers handled the case. The lawmakers said they wanted to know who issued an ICE statement claiming Hernandez abandoned Orlin, how her requests to be deported with her son were treated and whether anyone checked on Orlin after Hernandez was removed on Jan. 26.
“A three-year-old American is dead, and his mother was deported as she begged to keep him at her side,” Khanna wrote. “This family, and the public, deserve to know how this happened and who is accountable.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal , D-Wash., called Orlin’s death “horrific” at a Democratic Women’s Caucus hearing last week and said she will soon file a bill called “Orlin’s law” to “require ICE to stop separating parents from their children.”
Hernandez and her sister themselves have been scrutinized in the aftermath of Orlin’s death. Her sister, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she remains in removal proceedings and fears reprisal, said she was in detention when she learned her nephew had been killed. Some detainees, she said, blamed her for his death because Maldonado, the man charged in the killing, is her former partner.
“How couldn’t you know?” she said some people asked her. But she said Orlin was “like a son to me,” and that she never imagined Maldonado would act violently toward him or her own children, who were also in his care.
The sisters say Maldonado is the one to blame for Orlin’s death, but they also fault ICE and the Baldwin County sheriff’s deputy for arresting and detaining them. That morning, the deputy accused the man driving them to work of speeding. They insist he was not, and within minutes, both sisters were in handcuffs and forced to make a split-second decision about their children.
They did not want to be separated from their children, and Maldonado was the only relative in Pensacola who could take care of them.
They were grateful ICE had allowed Hernandez back to the U.S., but they said they also wanted the truth to be known.