Detained and separated from son for two months, immigrant mom still wants to make US home

SKAGIT COUNTY, Wash. -- Yolany Padilla left Honduras for America with her 6-year-old son in May.

She wanted to come to the United States for a better life -- but that is not what she found.

"When I came here, I didn't think I would be separated from my child," she said through a translator.

Padilla and her son crossed at the Texas border. She was sent to a detention center in Washington state. Her son was sent all the way across the country to New York.

"They only told us it would be a small amount of time," she said.

Instead, it ended up being about two months.

Padilla said she while they were separated, she never lost hope she would be reunited with her son.

And that day finally came.

"That day I had in my mind I would tell him a lot of things, but I couldn't say anything."

Padilla and her son are reunited, but she said things are different now.

"It's not the same as it was before. He only wants to be by my side."

Padilla said her son told her that while he was detained in New York, he was forced to sleep with the lights on, given only a tiny blanket and constantly woken and yelled at, and surrounded by the cries of other children.

But despite the hardship she and her son faced in the last two months, she said she still wants to make the United States her home.

"After every bad thing, there is something good."