Evgeny, Evgeniia and their eight-year-old son Maksim are from Russia where they fled political persecution.
Evgeniia, speaking through an interpreter from ICE detention, said her family traveled to the Mexican border in hopes of getting an appointment under a Biden-era program that allowed people to enter the United States at a port of entry after registering with a government app.
Mr. Trump canceled that program on Jan. 20, so she and her husband decided that driving to a port of entry and asking for asylum was the only way to reach safety.
They were taken into custody immediately.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers told the couple they could leave the United States with their child and return to Russia, or they could remain in immigration detention in the United States — but their 8-year-old son, Maksim, would be taken away and sent to a shelter for unaccompanied children.
Evgeny said he was trying to save his son from a longer separation in Russia because of what he believed to be a sure prison sentence there for his political views.
“I was explaining to them, to the officers, that our lives are in danger and our livelihood would be in danger,” he said. “And at some point, I kind of lost my bearings and started to cry.”
“I was explaining that I could not be deported, because I will face grave danger in Russia,” he said.
In the end, they chose the agony of limbo in the United States over a return to a place where they saw no prospect for freedom or any future for their family.
“A few days, right?” Maksim begged his parents that day. “A few days?”
The couple, who asked to be identified only by their first names out of fear for their family back in Russia, said they tried to keep their son calm. Maksim pleaded with his father, who told the boy what he wanted to hear. “I said, ‘Yes, yes, it will be just a few days,’” Evgeny said, recounting the moment in an interview.
“Interior separation is approved,” ICE officials concluded in writing after the couple insisted they could not return to Russia. The last time Evgeny and Evgeniia saw Maksim was on May 15, in a room at Kennedy International Airport in New York City, as ICE agents led them back to detention in New Jersey.
Evgeny and Evgeniia passed their protection screening, which means the United States has determined that they cannot be deported to Russia. But as they wait for the next step, they remain in ICE detention. And Maksim is now in a foster home.
“It’s terrible, that’s what I can say,” Evgeniia said. “I wouldn’t wish it even to an enemy. It’s a constant grief and longing.”
She is allowed to speak on the telephone to her son, but she has no real answers to the first question he asks her: “Mama, when are you going to take me out of here?”
“I try to explain to him that we’re trying to do that,” Evgeniia said. “We’re talking to the officers. We’re trying to convince them. It was very hard for him to hear this information. He is crying all the time.” Before the family came to the United States, the longest she and her husband had been separated from their little boy was one week. Now it has been months.
When he first arrived at his foster home, Maksim fastidiously counted the days he was apart from his parents. But recently, he told his mother he had stopped counting. “What’s the point of counting days? We will not be united,” his mother recalled him saying recently.
Inside her ICE detention facility, Evgeniia tries to think of a hopeful future. “I’m imagining how I will hug him when we meet again,” she said of Maksim. “I even saved a couple of candies, because that’s what I was planning to give to him when I see him again. That’s what I imagine.”
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