It was a very special Mother’s Day for Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, who was reunited with her family last week after four years apart. Gonzáles Brebe was one of the first parents to be separated from her children under the former president’s zero tolerance policy in 2017. After finally being able to return to the United States under President Biden’s family reunification efforts, she surprised her unsuspecting children, who had been living with an aunt in Philadelphia. The heartwarming video of the reunion, first aired on MSNBC last Saturday, has circulated the media since.
Four years ago, Gonzáles Brebe headed to the United States from Honduras after witnessing the murder of her brother, who was the fourth sibling in her family to die at the hands of hitmen. After the family lived in hiding for some time, her husband and eldest son successfully made it to the United States. Gonzáles Brebe followed with her other two children, aged 13 and 15 at the time. Their plan when they arrived at the border in New Mexico was to flag down a Border Patrol agent and turn themselves in to apply for asylum. A day later, agents took her away from her children. Despite the boys’ screams and cries, she was not as alarmed as she would later become because she was told the separation would only last five days.
In an interview with MSNBC last week, Gonzáles Brebe explained the events that proceeded to take place. At a processing center some days later, she asked an agent where her children were. She recalled being told “who told you that your kids would be here?” “It was there where I started feeling a strong sense of agony. I thought that my children were going to be in that place at that moment, but I didn’t see them again,” she said. She added that she felt that the agents saw her as a smuggler, “they treated me like I was not the mother of my children.”
Gonzáles Brebe was then deported to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, without her children. Her sons were transferred to a shelter for unaccompanied minors and released to an aunt in Philadelphia a year later, the same year that a federal judge ordered the family separations to end. According to the ACLU, over 5,000 children had been separated from their parents by then.
In their four years apart, Gonzáles Brebe made her way to Mexico to be closer to her family, where she spent her time helping other migrant families in Juarez. She would pick up recently deported families who would call her with the rough coordinates of their location and find them a place to sleep. A highly religious woman, she delivered sermons and benedictions at migrant shelters often, and stood at the border every morning waiting for the day she could see her children again.
Following his electoral promise to reunite the separated families, President Biden had announced that family reunifications were set to begin last week, and that others separated under the Trump administration would be able to meet in the United States. One of the first families to be reunited was Gonzáles Brebe’s. She re-entered the United States with humanitarian parole, a work authorization and a three-year reprieve from deportation. Her family was told they were gathered to discuss her ongoing legal case, but Gonzáles Brebe soon entered the room to surprise them. “I don’t want to ever separate from them again,” she said in the interview.