Migrant families separated under Trump still feel the fallout and they fear his return to office

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sixteen-year-old Billy's friends at his rural high school in the South don't know he was one of thousands of children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border under then-President Donald Trump's zero tolerance immigration policy.

At school, where he plays football and soccer, Billy doesn't talk about what he went through — that his father was told six years ago that Billy was being given up for adoption and feared he would never see his son again.

With the United States on the verge of an election that could put Trump back in office, Billy wants people to know that what happened to him and several thousand other children reverberates still. Some families have not been reunited, and many of those together in the U.S. have temporary status and fear a victorious Trump carrying out promised mass deportations.

“It was a very painful thing that happened to us,” said Billy, who was 9 at the time. He did not want his full name or the state he lives in identified for fear of endangering his family’s asylum application.

Trump has made his immigration views central to his campaign, accusing the Biden administration and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, of failing to secure the southern border. Harris has not made immigration a campaign focus but has raised Trump's zero tolerance policy, one of his most contentious immigration actions as president.

The Trump administration aimed to criminally prosecute all adults coming across the border illegally. Parents were separated from their children, who were transferred to shelters nationwide.

Trump and his campaign did not say specifically whether he would revive the practice if he wins on Nov. 5. He has previously defended it, including claiming without evidence during a Univision interview last year that it “stopped people from coming by the hundreds of thousands.”

"President Trump will restore his effective immigration policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shockwaves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s press secretary.

The Harris campaign held a event this month featuring children who were separated from their families, aiming to draw attention to Trump's policies.

Billy, who spoke at the event, is part of a group of children who are sharing their stories in short social media videos to highlight the zero tolerance policy. Billy and his father also have visited lawmakers in Washington.

Billy told The Associated Press that even though he doesn't usually talk about his experiences, he and the others are “making sure that we raise our voices and that we share our stories” so something like this never happens again.

Most of the families who were separated years ago are in legal limbo, their immigration status in doubt. Under a settlement announced last year between families and the Biden administration, the families have two years to apply for asylum under a more favorable process.

As the election nears, advocates say they have heard from families who were separated expressing fears about Trump, if elected, making good on promises to deport millions of people.

“The families we serve are scared and have a lot of questions about what a new Trump administration would mean for them,” said Anilú Chadwick Soltes, pro bono director for Together & Free, an organization launched in 2018 in response to the zero tolerance policy. The group works to help separated families.

The 2023 settlement barred future administrations from using family separation as a widespread policy until 2031. But advocates have concerns.

Christie Turner-Herbas, senior adviser with Kids in Need of Defense, said she worries about exceptions to the policy being exploited and says there has to be political will to enforce it.

The Trump administration's policy deviated from the general practice of keeping families with children together when they come to the southern border.

The goal was to dissuade people by criminally prosecuting everyone who crossed the border. For families, parents were prosecuted. Kids, who cannot be held in custody, were treated as unaccompanied minors and transferred to shelters.

After an outcry, Trump said on June 20, 2018, that he was ending the policy. Six days later, a judge ordered the government to reunite the families, thousands of whom had been separated. Agencies didn’t have their computer systems properly linked, making it difficult to reunite families. Many parents were deported, complicating things even more.

When Democrat Joe Biden became president, he created a task force to reunite families. Building on efforts by groups that had sued the Trump administration, the task force identified about 5,000 children were separated, and about 1,400 aren't confirmed to be reunited with their families.

Some are in the process. Others are believed to have reunited in the U.S. but aren't coming forward, possibly fearing government interaction. For others, no valid contact information exists, so the search continues.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration that helped end family separation, puts the number of separated children closer to 5,500.

Lee Gelernt, lead counsel in that lawsuit, said the ACLU estimates that as many as 1,000 families are still apart.

“Some little children have now spent nearly their entire lives without their parents," he said.

The task force runs a website where families can register to be reunited, and it works with the International Organization for Migration to help those families with things like getting a passport to come to the U.S. The task force's director has traveled to families' home countries to do radio announcements looking for parents.

Advocacy groups also have been instrumental.

Justice in Motion, which works with advocates in Mexico and Central America to track down parents, uses a last known address and talks to neighbors, local businesses, hospitals, schools — anyone who might know where that person is.

But they're stuck with poor recordkeeping that's now outdated, said Nan Schivone, the organization's legal director.

Families and separated children have struggled with the fallout.

For 22-year-old Efrain, there was guilt. Efrain said his father didn't want to bring him to the U.S. in 2018, but he pushed for it. When they were eventually separated, Efrain wondered whether it would have been better if his father had been alone.

His father was sent back to Guatemala. Efrain, who didn't want his full name used because he fears the repercussions, was placed in a shelter for unaccompanied children for roughly five months.

His father has diabetes, and Efrain worried about his health. When they could do a video call after Efrain left the shelter, he noticed how much thinner his father looked.

Three years later, they reunited at the Atlanta airport. Ever since, Efrain says he's been trying to make up for lost time. He says he struggles with anxiety and loneliness, echoing the isolation he felt after being separated from his father.

“It’s like I’m alone in a room locked up,” he said in Spanish.

Billy's father, meanwhile, still cries when he talks years later about what he and his son went through. He believes people have forgotten what happened and the families' trauma.

Billy says he's found purpose in sharing what he experienced: “I know that my story holds a lot of power."

Associated Press reporter Valerie Gonzalez in McAllen, Texas, contributed to this report.

FILE - Billy and his father, no last name given, pause after speaking at a Democratic Party campaign event about their experience of being separated at the U.S.- Mexico border during the Trump administration, Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier, File)

FILE- Hamilton, no last name given, stands next to his family during a Democratic Party campaign event where he spoke of his experience on being separated from his mother when their crossed the U.S-Mexico border during the Trump administration, Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier, File)

FILE- Christian and Hamilton, no last name given, speak during a Democratic Party campaign event about their experience on being separated from their mother Clairet when they crossed the U.S.- Mexico border during the Trump administration, Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier, File)

FILE - Families that were separated at the U.S.- Mexico border during the Trump administration wait to speak at a Democratic party campaign event, Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier, File)

FILE - Billy and his father, no last name given, speak at a Democratic Party campaign event, about their experience of being separated when they crossed the U.S.- Mexico border during the Trump administration, Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier, File)

COPENHAGEN (AP) — Nearly 30 years after they killed their parents, Erik and Lyle Menendez launched a beautification project in the California prison where they're serving life sentences.

Their project was inspired by the Norwegian approach to incarceration that believes rehabilitation in humane prisons surrounded by nature leads to successful reintegration into society, even for those who have committed terrible crimes.

Norway is a long, narrow country in northern Europe, running 1,100 miles (1,750 kilometers) from north to south. It has set up small prisons across the country, which allows people to serve their sentences close to home, said Kristian Mjåland, a Norwegian associate professor of sociology at the University of Agder in Kristiansand.

The entire country has about 3,000 people in prison, he said, putting Norway’s per-capita incarceration rate at roughly one-tenth that of the United States.

Norway has some of the world’s lowest levels of recidivism. Government statistics give the proportion of people reconvicted within two years of release in 2020 as 16%, with the figure falling each year. Meanwhile, a U.S. Department of Justice survey carried out over a decade found that 66% of people released from state prisons in 24 states were rearrested within three years, and most of those were incarcerated again.

Mjåland said Norway's incarceration system is based on the principles that people should be “treated decently by well-trained and decent staff” and have “opportunities for meaningful activities during the day” — something he called the “principle of normality” — and that they should retain their basic rights.

Mjåland, whose research has focused on punishments and prisons, said that, for instance, prisoners in Norway retain the right to vote and access services such as libraries, health care and education delivered by the same providers working in the wider community.

Norway also operates open prisons, some on islands where there is a lot of farm work and contact with nature. The most famous is on the island of Bastoey, “which is very beautifully located in the Oslo Fjord,” Mjåland said.

Even Anders Behring Breivik — who killed eight people in the 2011 bombing of a government building in Oslo, then gunned down 69 more at a holiday camp for left-leaning youth activists — has a dining room, fitness room and TV room with an Xbox. His cell wall is decorated with a poster of the Eiffel Tower and parakeets share his space.

The idea of creating normal, humane conditions for people in prison is starting to spread in the U.S. as well.

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, for instance, has in recent years been trying to apply certain elements of the Nordic approach, and unveiled a program it calls “Little Scandinavia” in a prison in Chester in 2022.

The Menendez brothers’ case was again in the public spotlight Thursday when the Los Angeles County district attorney recommended that their life-without-parole sentences be thrown out. Prosecutors hope a judge will resentence them so they can be eligible for parole.

If the judge agrees, a parole board must then approve their release. The final decision rests with the California governor.

Their lawyer and the LA district attorney argued that they have served enough time, citing evidence that they suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their entertainment executive father. They also say that the brothers, now in their 50s, are model prisoners who have committed themselves to rehabilitation and redemption.

Both point to the brothers' years of efforts to improve the San Diego prison where they have lived for six years. Before that, the two had been held in separate prisons since 1996.

In 2018, Lyle Menendez launched the beautification program, Green Space, at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. His brother, Erik Menendez, is the lead painter for a massive mural that depicts San Diego landmarks.

“This project hopes to normalize the environment inside the prison to reflect the living environment outside the prison,” Pedro Calderón Michel, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told the AP in an email Friday.

The Menendez brothers' work is ongoing, with the ultimate goal of transforming the prison yard “from an oppressive concrete and gravel slab into a normalized park-like campus setting surrounded by a majestic landscape mural,” according to the project's website.

The final product will include outdoor classrooms, rehabilitation group meeting spaces and training areas for service dogs.

The prison system recently launched the “California Model” in the hopes of bringing similar projects across the state to build “safer communities through rehabilitation, education and reentry,” Calderón Michel wrote.

The brothers' lawyer, Mark Geragos, said he believes Lyle Menendez learned about the Norwegian model during his university classes. Lyle Menendez is currently enrolled in a master's program where he's studied urban planning and recidivism, and Geragos said his client hopes the beautification will make reintroduction into society easier for people who are paroled.

“When you’re there in a gray space that is not very welcoming, it’s disorienting to some degree,” Geragos told The Associated Press on Friday. “And also you have the issue that the terrain is not something that’s welcoming or helpful in terms of being acclimated and being re-acclimated into a community.”

Dominique Moran, a professor at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. said she found in her research that introducing green spaces in prisons improves the wellbeing of prisoners as well as correctional staff.

“Green spaces in prisons reduce self-harm and violence, and also reduces staff sickness,” said Moran, author of “Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration.”

Moran has studied prisons around the world, and said in an emailed statement that in the Scandinavian approach, “people go to prison AS punishment, not FOR further punishment."

“The deprivation of liberty is itself the punishment," she said. "There should not be further punishment through the nature of the environment in which people are held.”

Gera reported from Warsaw, Poland, and Dazio from Los Angeles. David Keyton contributed from Berlin.

FILE - Lyle, left, and Erik Menendez sit with defense attorney Leslie Abramson, right, in Beverly Hills Municipal Court during a hearing, Nov. 26, 1990. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)

This undated image provided by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shows a mural inside the prison yard at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, where Lyle and Erik Menendez launched a beautification program in 2018. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)

The Menendez brothers built a green space in prison. It’s modeled on this Norwegian idea

The Menendez brothers built a green space in prison. It’s modeled on this Norwegian idea

This combination of two booking photos provided by the California Department of Corrections shows Erik Menendez, left, and Lyle Menendez. (California Dept. of Corrections via AP)