For the Lost Blog

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INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – Three children from Indiana are reunited with their mother after missing for more than 2-1/2 years.

“It is the most wonderful thing that I could ever imagine,” said Leeanna Dinkens, the children’s mother.

Dinkens talked to 24 Hour News 8 over the phone Saturday morning after reuniting with her children Sierra, Jasmine and Jaden.

I was sent this article about Jaden and Jasmine Cummins and Sierra Emberton. They were located in Mexico, apparently, which is where they were expected to be. Jaden and Jasmine apparently no longer speak English. Their mother has also re-married. The conditions they were living in were typical of family abductions – they slept on cots or on cement floors and they didn’t know what a bathtub was. I wish them and their mother the best in reuniting.

Article here

To Jennifer Aguilera-Hurtado, the U.S.-Mexico border is still as porous as a screen door, the illicit traffic between the two countries breezing through despite stretches of wall and wire, patrols of National Guardsmen and Minutemen, Arizona ire and the cruel heat of an endless desert.

“Every day, you hear about how many people are crossing the border illegally,” she says. “It’s always in the news.”

She’s not so much concerned with what or who is coming into the United States, though, but who is going out: Children, hundreds of them, snatched up and sneaked across the border by one parent against the wishes of the other and in violation of custody orders.

“This is the border crisis you never hear about,” she says.

Mexico has the highest number of international parental child abduction cases from the United States, according to the U.S. State Department. Right now, there are just under 600 open cases involving almost 900 children illegally taken by a parent into Mexico, a State Department official says.

Two of those children are Aguilera-Hurtado’s. Hannah is 3 and Teresa will be 8 on Wednesday, and their mother will be 1,535 miles and a world away in Albuquerque for that birthday.

This is an article I found about the Aguilera-Hurtado girls. Apparently their father who abducted them is broke and can’t fight more in the Mexican courts, but the kids are still in an orphanage, much like Liam McCarty. I’m not sure there’s much more I can say about the ridiculousness of that.

I have just received word that Jean Paul Lacombe has been found in France and reunited with his mother. I wish them the best in reuniting. This was the second time Jean Paul was taken by his father; the first time he was also found in France. Two abductions is two more than his father should have been allowed. At the very least he should only have closely supervised visits with his son. I also hope the judge who did not read Spanish (and apparently could find no one else to do so, Spanish speakers being so rare in Texas) and assumed a Mexican arrest warrant was a paper giving his father custody in that country is at the very least suspended from practice for some time. The new case on the site is that of Ryan Powell.