Twenty-five years after her son left Mexico for the United States, Irene Galicia was finally able to hug him when she traveled to New York as part of a family reunification program for undocumented migrants.
“He hasn’t changed much!” exclaimed the frail 80-year-old woman as she and her husband embraced their son Gabriel Hernandez. “I am happy to have seen my son again before I died.”
Having traveled all the way from the town of Tetelcingo, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of Mexico City in the state of Morelos, Galicia told AFP she worried she would not recognize her son after such a long time apart.
“He got married, left and we haven’t seen him since,” said her husband Esteban Hernandez.
Some 30 Mexican families took part in the family reunification event, which was organized by the Chinelos Migrant Club of Morelos in New York — with the blessing of US authorities.
Elderly parents like Galicia, whose children are among the millions of undocumented migrants living for decades in the United States, can apply for temporary visas to finally see their loved ones.
Tears, laughter and hugs abounded on Sunday as the Hernandez-Galicia family met up at a center in Queens, a huge multicultural borough of New York.
Gabriel Hernandez said he feared never seeing his parents again, especially when they both contracted Covid during the pandemic.
The 44-year-old admitted to being so nervous ahead of the meeting, that he had trouble eating and sleeping.
But with his wife and two of their four children — one of whom is a sailor in the US Navy — Gabriel was all smiles, saying the reunion was a blessing.
“I am whole now,” he said.
Supporting families back home
Like other nationalities, undocumented Mexicans in the United States work, pay taxes and sometimes own their own homes, said Aurora Morales, coordinator of the Chinelos Migrant Club, which organized the reunion.
And more than half of them have been living in the United States for more than 17 years, according to Claudia Masferrer, a demographer at the College of Mexico (Colmex).
Like Gabriel Hernandez, they send money to support families back home.
According to data from Mexico’s National Statistics Institute (Inegi), some 4.6 million Mexican households receive an average of $380 a month from relatives working in the United States.
Last year, US-based Mexican immigrants, as well as their first- and second-generation children — some 37.2 million people — sent a record $58 billion to Mexico, up 13 percent over 2021, according to the Mexican central bank.
And in the first quarter of 2023, remittances were up 11 percent year-on-year.
‘See my children grow up’
Morales says her group has helped reunite 5,000 families since 2017, operating under a commitment to US authorities that the elderly people will return to Mexico after a few weeks.
The organization works with people from remote areas in Mexico who barely know how to read and write, helping them obtain a passport, apply for a visa and overcome other bureaucratic formalities, Morales said.
“The general agreement is that these people are not going to stay, that these people are going for humanitarian reasons, to visit their relatives, from whom they have been separated for many years, but they are going to return to Mexico,” said Masferrer, the Colmex professor.
That will include Demetria Garcia Solano — who finally made it to New York after five unsuccessful attempts at obtaining a visa.
The 64-year-old was at last able to meet the many members of her family living in the United States: six of her seven children, who left Mexico in their teens, as well as five grandchildren, her mother and five brothers and sisters.
“I would have loved to come (before), I would have seen my children grow up,” she told AFP.
With tears in her eyes, she described the pain at being so far away, for so long: “It hurts a lot.”
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