NEW YORK _ Guatemalan mom Yeni Gonzalez dropped to her knees and hugged her three kids tight Tuesday during an emotional reunion in Manhattan.
"Thank God I found them in good conditions. They were happy to see me. When they saw me they hugged me and they cried. They told me they want me to take them home soon," the migrant mom said in Spanish after the meeting at the Cayuga Centers in East Harlem.
"I want this process to be over because it hasn't been easy for them or for me," she said of the six-week separation that left her desperate for answers.
Gonzalez was separated from her two sons, ages 6 and 11, and her daughter, 9, in May after the family was detained near the U.S. border with Mexico.
Under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy for undocumented arrivals, Gonzalez was sent to a facility in Eloy, Ariz., while her kids were shipped 2,400 miles away to New York.
"The day they took them away from me I told them, 'I promise I'm gonna fight for you and I'm gonna find you,'" she said outside the center along with state Sen. Michael Gianaris, who helped welcome her to New York.
"When I saw them, I got on my knees and I hugged them and I said, 'I promised I would come get you _ and I'm here,'" she said.
Gonzalez spent four days traveling from Arizona, where she was bonded out of detention.
Queens resident Julie Schwietert Collazo helped organize the GoFundMe campaign that raised Gonzalez's $7,500 bond and also helped spearhead Gonzalez's travel to New York.
"We started something a week ago yesterday and this is really just the first hurdle. The bonding her out, the getting her across the country, through a network of amazing people _ who, many of us didn't know each other a week ago _ it took a lot of faith and it took a lot of 18-hour days in coordination," Schwietert Collazo said.
"I'm just so relieved and gratified that she's made it here, but we also know that we have a long way to go and she's not the only one," she said. "We have to keep going. We have other parents that need to be reunited with their kids."
Gonzalez will be staying in Queens pending the release of her kids, supporters said.
The children were not immediately put in her custody due to fingerprinting delays that could take two months to resolve.
Gonzalez can visit them daily until then.
A family in North Carolina has started a parallel sponsorship application to host the kids in the hope their paperwork may clear faster than Gonzalez's application, supporters said.
"We are going to start a simultaneous process to have Yeni start her own petition to have her children released to them. Whoever gets through the process first will get the children," said her lawyer, Jose Xavier Orochena.
Every adult in the household the kids are released to _ even biological parents _ must be fingerprinted, according to the lawyer.
A judge in California ruled last week that federal officials must reunify all separated families within 30 days.
