A migrant family torn apart by Biden Administration immigration policies reunited in the Big Apple Thursday — after enduring a weeks-long bureaucratic nightmare that left them stranded nearly 1,000 miles apart.
Venezuelan migrant Osleydy Alvarez was all smiles as her orphaned nieces sprinted into her arms at LaGuardia Airport, more than two weeks after they were pulled apart and got lost in President Joe Biden’s haphazard migrant system.
“We’re so very happy,” Avalrez’s 18-year-old daughter, Paola, told The Post. “I know that they’ve had a hard time. They have nobody else and we’ve gone [over] 15 days without seeing them.
“Now we’re back together again.”
Yugleydis Villa Alvarez, 16, and her 10-year-old sister, Isabella Villa Briseno, were separated from their aunt and cousins at the US border in Texas.
The Alvarez family’s ordeal was first reported by Brazil’s SBT News.
It began two months ago when Osleydy and her two children left Caracas with her nieces, whose mother, Osleydy’s sister, died of cancer back in their native Venezuela in January, leaving them orphaned.
The five crossed into Colombia, then through the jungle and into Panama, largely on foot.
The single mom told SBT that she even sold popsicles at the side of the road along the way as a way to help pay for the smugglers who brought them closer to the US border.
When they crossed into Texas seeking asylum, the family was told that under Biden’s immigration policy the two youngest girls would be taken away because Osleydy isn’t their biological mother, Paola said.
“My mother cried a lot,” she said. “She didn’t want us separated because they had lost so much already and we were the only family they had left. It was difficult for them and for us.”
Osleydy and her teen children didn’t know where their little cousins were for nearly two weeks — until getting a phone call last week that they were at a federal facility in Tennessee nearly 1,000 miles away.
Meanwhile, the three remaining family members arrived in New York only to get another surprise.
The city’s overburdened migrant system split her from her mom and brother, throwing them into shelters three miles apart because, as a legal adult, Paola had to be placed apart from her mom and kid brother.
“They separated us because I’m 18,” she said. “It’s sad because I don’t really have friends here. We have a place to stay and work, and I can stay in touch with my mom. But I feel bad because we’re still not all together.”
She said city officials told them that because she’s an adult, she could not be in the same shelter as her mother and kid brother. Paola was put up at the Stratford Arms Hotel on West 70th Street, while her mom and sibling have been housed more than 40 blocks away at the Redbury Hotel on 29th Street.
Despite the teenager’s digs away from the rest of her family, all of them are at least now in the same city — including the two youngest members who just touched down at LaGuardia.
In the meantime, Osleydy has found a cooking job and Paola is helping her.
“I have 15 days here,” the teenager said Thursday. “I can see my mother but I can’t go inside [the Redbury] because people who don’t live there are allowed in. It’s hard. We’ve always been together.”
Their plight appears to counter long-running criticism from Democrats over former President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy, which included separating migrant children from their parents after they crossed from Mexico and into the US.