Cindy Madrid, from right, watches her daughter Allison, 6, being embraced by Melanie Sandoval, 9, after Melanie presented Allison with gift during a news conference, Friday, July 13, 2018, in Houston.... (Associated Press) 
 
 Cindy Madrid, from right, watches her daughter Allison, 6, being embraced by Melanie Sandoval, 9, after Melanie presented Allison with gift during a news conference, Friday, July 13, 2018, in Houston. At the news conference, the mother and daughter spoke about the month and one day they were separated... (Associated Press) 
 
 HOUSTON (AP) — A 6-year-old girl from El Salvador who became a face of the Trump administration's practice of separating immigrant families at the border has been reunited with her mother. 
 
 Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid and her mother, Cindy Madrid, were separated after U.S. authorities detained them June 13 for illegally entering the United States near Harlingen, Texas. 
 
 Audio of the agonized child crying when she was separated — first published by ProPublica and later by The Associated Press — galvanized opposition to the separation of families. Alison pleaded with Border Patrol agents to call her aunt, whose phone number she offers from memory. 
 
 President Donald Trump reversed course on the splitting up of families on June 20 after a "zero tolerance" policy on illegal entry took effect in the spring. 
 
 The joyful reunion occurred early Friday in Houston. It was initially going to happen in Phoenix, where Alison was staying in a government-backed shelter, said family attorney Thelma Garcia. Madrid, 29, was released on bond from an immigration detention center in Port Isabel, Texas, not far from where she was arrested. 
 
 Alison told reporters that she felt desperate after being separated and that it felt good to reunite. Her mother echoed that sentiment. 
 
 "We are beginning to recover the time we lost," Madrid said. "We are very happy to be together as family again." 
 
 The mother and daughter plan to live with family in Houston and the mother will seek asylum, Garcia said. She may seek to move the case from immigration court in Harlingen to Houston. 
 
 Madrid said she brought her daughter to the United States in search of a better life. 
 
 "I believe she has the capacity to get by here," she said. 
 
 The administration has said that up to nearly 3,000 children have been separated at the border. Dozens of children under 5 years old were reunified under a court-ordered deadline earlier this week. The government now faces a bigger deadline of July 26 to reunify more than 2,500 children 5 and older. ||||| (Reuters) - A U.S. judge in California on Friday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to pay the costs of reuniting immigrant parents with children separated from them by officials at the U.S.-Mexican border, rather than forcing the parents to pay. 
 
 The U.S. government is working to reunite around 2,000 children with their parents, who were detained and separated as part of Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach to deter illegal immigration. 
 
 “It doesn’t make any sense for any of the parents who have been separated to pay for anything,” U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, who last month ordered that the children be reunited with their parents by July 26, said at a hearing in San Diego. 
 
 The government missed a deadline this week for getting the youngest of the children back with their parents. 
 
 Trump has made his hardline immigration policies a central part of his presidency. His administration adopted the family separation policy as part of its effort to discourage illegal immigration, but Trump bowed to intense political pressure and abandoned the policy on June 20. 
 
 A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued the administration over the family separations, said at the hearing that immigrant parents had been told by immigration officials they had to pay for their travel. One parent was initially asked to pay $1,900 to be reunited with a child, according to ACLU court papers. 
 
 Trump administration lawyer Sarah Fabian called the judge’s order on paying for the reunifications “a huge ask on HHS,” referring to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Fabian said those decisions were handled at the field level, adding that HHS, which houses the detained children, had limited resources. 
 
 “The government will make it happen,” Sabraw responded. 
 
 The judge also agreed to impose timelines on the government for reporting details about its reunification efforts. 
 
 The administration has said its initial reunifications were slowed by the need for DNA testing and criminal background checks on parents, and to determine their fitness to care for their children. 
 
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 In a filing with the court, HHS official Chris Meekins said the administration had streamlined its vetting procedures to comply with a July 10 court order, but that the swifter process could put children at risk. 
 
 Adults are no longer being DNA tested to verify parentage, Meekins said, and background checks are not being performed on adults who will be living with the children. Meekins said that, while abbreviated vetting speeds up the reunification process, it also “materially increases the risk of harm to children” and could result in children being placed in abusive environments or with adults who are not their parents. 
 
 The government said it intends to identify between six and eight locations where all reunifications will take place. The government’s filing did not say whether it intends to release families after reunification, deport them or keep them together in detention. ||||| The Trump Administration The 45th President and His Administration 
 
 Zero Tolerance Trump’s Immigration Policy at the Border 
 
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 The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe. They scream “Mami” and “Papá” over and over again, as if those are the only words they know. 
 
 The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.” 
 
 Then a distraught but determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleads repeatedly for someone to call her aunt. Just one call, she begs anyone who will listen. She says she’s memorized the phone number, and at one point, rattles it off to a consular representative. “My mommy says that I’ll go with my aunt,” she whimpers, “and that she’ll come to pick me up there as quickly as possible.” 
 
 An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children. More than 2,300 of them have been separated from their parents since April, when the Trump administration launched its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which calls for prosecuting all people who attempt to illegally enter the country and taking away the children they brought with them. More than 100 of those children are under the age of 4. The children are initially held in warehouses, tents or big box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities. Get Our Top Investigations Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter. 
 
 Condemnations of the policy have been swift and sharp, including from some of the administration’s most reliable supporters. It has united religious conservatives and immigrant rights activists, who have said that “zero tolerance” amounts to “zero humanity.” Democratic and Republican members of Congress spoke out against the administration’s enforcement efforts over the weekend. Former first lady Laura Bush called the administration’s practices “cruel” and “immoral,” and likened images of immigrant children being held in kennels to those that came out of Japanese internment camps during World War II. And the American Academy of Pediatrics has said the practice of separating children from their parents can cause the children “irreparable harm.” 
 
 Still, the administration had stood by it. President Donald Trump blames Democrats and says his administration is only enforcing laws already on the books, although that’s not true. There are no laws that require children to be separated from their parents, or that call for criminal prosecutions of all undocumented border crossers. Those practices were established by the Trump administration. 
 
 Attorney General Jeff Sessions has cited passages from the Bible in an attempt to establish religious justification. On Monday, he defended it again saying it was a matter of rule of law, “We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws.” A Border Patrol spokesman echoed that thought in a written statement. 
 
 In recent days, authorities on the border have begun allowing tightly controlled tours of the facilities that are meant to put a humane face on the policy. But cameras are heavily restricted. And the children being held are not allowed to speak to journalists. 
 
 The audio obtained by ProPublica breaks that silence. It was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who “heard the children’s weeping and crying, and was devastated by it.” 
 
 The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable. Read More DHS Chief is Confronted With ProPublica Tape of Wailing Children Separated from Parents A reporter turned on the audio recording as Kirstjen Nielsen defended the Trump administration’s immigration policies at a White House briefing. 
 
 The child who stood out the most was the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl with a phone number stuck in her head. At the end of the audio, a consular official offers to call the girl’s aunt. ProPublica dialed the number she recited in the audio, and spoke with the aunt about the call. 
 
 “It was the hardest moment in my life,” she said. “Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. She’s crying and begging me to go get her. She says, ‘I promise I’ll behave, but please get me out of here. I’m all alone.’” 
 
 The aunt said what made the call even more painful was that there was nothing she could do. She and her 9-year-old daughter are seeking asylum in the United States after immigrating here two years ago for the exact same reasons and on the exact same route as her sister and her niece. They are from a small town called Armenia, about an hour’s drive northwest of the Salvadoran capital, but well within reach of its crippling crime waves. She said gangs were everywhere in El Salvador: “They’re on the buses. They’re in the banks. They’re in schools. They’re in the police. There’s nowhere for normal people to feel safe.” 
 
 She said her niece and sister set out for the United States over a month ago. They paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide them through Guatemala, and Mexico and across the border into the United States. Now, she said, all the risk and investment seem lost. 
 
 The aunt said she worried that any attempt to intervene in her niece’s situation would put hers and her daughter’s asylum case at risk, particularly since the Trump administration overturned asylum protections for victims of gang and domestic violence. She said she’s managed to speak to her sister, who has been moved to an immigration detention facility near Port Isabel, Texas. And she keeps in touch with her niece, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, by telephone. Mother and daughter, however, have not been able to speak to one another. 
 
 The aunt said that Alison has been moved out of the Border Patrol facility to a shelter where she has a real bed. But she said that authorities at the shelter have warned the girl that her mother, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, might be deported without her. 
 
 “I know she’s not an American citizen,” the aunt said of her niece. “But she’s a human being. She’s a child. How can they treat her this way?”
– A 6-year-old girl from El Salvador who became a face of the Trump administration's practice of separating immigrant families at the border has been reunited with her mother, the AP reports. Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid and her mother, Cindy Madrid, were separated after US authorities detained them June 13 for illegally entering the United States near Harlingen, Texas. Audio of the agonized child crying when she was separated—first published by ProPublica—galvanized opposition to the separation of families. Alison pleaded with Border Patrol agents to call her aunt, whose phone number she offers from memory. President Donald Trump reversed course on the splitting up of families on June 20 after a "zero tolerance" policy on illegal entry took effect in the spring. The joyful reunion occurred early Friday in Houston. Madrid, 29, was released on bond from an immigration detention center in Port Isabel, Texas, not far from where she was arrested. Alison told reporters that she felt desperate after being separated and that it felt good to reunite. Her mother echoed that sentiment. "We are beginning to recover the time we lost," Madrid said. "We are very happy to be together as family again." The mother and daughter plan to live with family in Houston and the mother will seek asylum, Garcia said. The government now faces a deadline of July 26 to reunify more than 2,500 children 5 and older. A US judge has ordered the Trump administration to pay for the reunifications after one parent was apparently asked to pay $1,900 to see a child again, Reuters reports.