ON THE DAY THAT Jeff Sessions warned the world that the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy meant that immigrants apprehended at the border would be separated from their children, about 2,500 miles to the south, Evelyn took her seven-year-old daughter, Amber, and fled Guatemala. They were running for their lives.
Until recently, life had been relatively good for Evelyn in the small town on Guatemala’s border near Chiapas, Mexico, where she and Amber lived with her parents, a six-year-old son by a different father, and four siblings. Evelyn had a reliable job at a cleaning company and a boyfriend. Scarcely five feet tall, with a round face and large, sparkling brown eyes framed by loose brown curls, Evelyn looked younger than her twenty-four years, especially when she smiled. Amber was a typical, chatty little girl. But in 2017, things had turned dark for them. Evelyn’s boyfriend, a member of the Guatemalan military, had become abusive, and when she said she would leave, he threatened to kill both her and her daughter. Evelyn believed him.
She left her job and hid out at her parents’ house for two months, terrified of being found by her boyfriend. She called family members in the United States to ask for their help escaping from her situation, but they all said the same thing: Sorry, we can’t help. Then one Friday, she reached a cousin in a suburb on the East Coast who said Evelyn could come stay with her and her family. If you can make it here, we’ll help you, the cousin said. Evelyn spent the weekend looking for transportation, scrounged together the fee of 27,000 quetzales, the equivalent of a little over $3,500, that her contact demanded, and made plans to leave on Monday.
“The situation got very dangerous, to the point where, when I was leaving the house, I didn’t know if I would come back in the evening,” Evelyn told us through a translator one afternoon in the spring of 2019, seated at a round dining table in her cousin’s tidy suburban home, waiting to find out if she would be granted asylum in the United States. “With my faith in God, we left home, my daughter and I. I was risking everything.” By the time of our interview, Evelyn and her daughter had made it to the United States and had been released by authorities with conditions, while they waited to see whether they would be allowed to stay. It was Friday, the day of the week when Evelyn must remain confined to her house under terms imposed by ICE, and Amber was at school, where she attended first grade and was learning English faster than her mother could believe. The only indication of Evelyn’s ordeal was the bulky black electronic monitor strapped around her ankle, tucked under her black leggings. That, and the fear and anguish in her voice when she described what happened when they took Amber away from her.
Even before she left, Evelyn had to let go of a child. She left her six-year-old son with his father, where she felt that he would be safe and well taken care of. Amber had no father around to protect her; if she was going to survive, she would have to go with Evelyn. The journey north took ten days. With only the clothes on their backs, Evelyn and Amber woke up at dawn, and crammed into a red minivan driven by a Mexican man they had never seen before, and they drove for what seemed like forever. At one point, they switched to a bus, then back to another car, again driven by a stranger. They slept where they could—on floors, in people’s houses along the way, and, one particularly terrifying night, in the woods. Amber would fall asleep in her mother’s arms, worried but comforted by Evelyn’s embrace. Evelyn slept only fitfully, watching over her daughter, anxious about what would come next. She told Amber little, just that they were leaving to get away from the people who had threatened them. As long as she was with her Mami, it was enough.
On Wednesday, May 16, 2018, around 8 p.m., Evelyn and Amber reached the U.S. border. Just days earlier in Washington, Nielsen had signed the memorandum ordering that all adults crossing the border without legal documents be prosecuted, even if they were traveling with children. At the San Luis Port of Entry in Arizona, in a yard with fencing on both sides, Evelyn and Amber presented themselves to CBP agents, who escorted them through a gate and asked for their identification documents, which Evelyn produced. They were put into the back of a patrol car and driven for about an hour until they reached a detention center in Yuma. The first thing Evelyn noticed when she entered the hulking facility was that it was freezing. A hielera, as they called it, or “icebox.” After being asked to hand over her phone, belt, and shoes, Evelyn was led with Amber to a large room, with white concrete walls and a pale cement floor, long and narrow, like a squash court filled with women and children, some with silver Mylar blankets slung around their shoulders against the cold. As Evelyn gazed out a small window in the door, she overheard an ICE officer telling a distraught man that his son was going to be taken elsewhere because children were not allowed at this facility. When the man protested, the officer told him, “It’s your fault that you’re here. You use children to get into the United States.” Would that happen to them? Evelyn wondered as she and Amber sat, munching on the only food they were given—juice and some biscuits.
At five the next morning, they were called in for processing. The officers asked Evelyn her name and where she was from. Then they confirmed her worst fear. They were taking her daughter, the officers said. Evelyn would be tried for illegal entry into the United States and Amber would be given to her relative on the East Coast. This place wasn’t for kids, they kept saying, so she has to go somewhere else. Evelyn began to weep. She wasn’t the only one. Sobs echoed through the holding room where the women waited with their children, sipping on instant soup, their breakfast, as they bided the time until their sons and daughters would be ripped away. Through her tears, Evelyn tried to put on a brave face for her daughter about what was about to happen. You’re going somewhere with more food, and lots of kids, she told Amber. It will be better than here.
When the time came, Evelyn and Amber did not make a fuss. About an hour after eating another round of watery soup for lunch, an officer called Amber’s name. “Look miss, you know what’s going to happen now?” the officer said to Evelyn. “We’re going to take your child away. So say goodbye to her.” Don’t be afraid, Evelyn told Amber, clutching her daughter and trying unsuccessfully to hold back her tears. “You won’t be gone for very long, and I’ll be here the whole time. You won’t be alone,” she told her daughter, who could not stand to be by herself. Amber cried and silently hugged her mom one last time before she was led out of the room and over to a group of seven other children, supervised by a man and woman wearing ID badges who gave them fruit juice. Evelyn watched, tears streaming down her face, as Amber receded down a long hallway with her minders and the other kids. Amber turned briefly to look in Evelyn’s direction, a look of pure anguish and fear written in the big eyes on her small face.
And then she was gone. The next nine days were a blur of tears, cold, and nothingness. Evelyn and about fifty other mothers in the room at the hielera wept constantly. They never went outside, so nobody knew what time it was or what day it was. They stayed shut in, never showering or changing clothes, eating their instant soup. “It was like being lost in time,” Evelyn recalled months later. “All we did was cry. We prayed to God that something would happen.” The mothers were desperate to know where their children were, but most of the ICE officers had little patience for their questions. How would we know? the officers would snap, responding with disgust to what seemed like constant wailing. It’s all your fault this happened anyway. You shouldn’t have come, and you shouldn’t have brought a child. One female ICE officer was more tender. She was a mother herself, she told Evelyn, and she was sorry for what was happening to them. But she had a job to do. And her job was to follow the law.
On the tenth day, guards shackled Evelyn’s hands and feet and loaded her into a paddy wagon with ten other people. It was her first glimpse of the sun for more than a week, and after a three-hour drive, she arrived at Florence Detention Center, midway between Phoenix and Tucson. She was given food and allowed to shower and finally change out of the clothes she had traveled in, which were badly soiled and smelled like it. But when she was given something fresh to put on, Evelyn was even more humiliated than she had been in her own filthy clothing; it was a bright orange prison uniform. She was taken to a jail in nearby Santa Cruz County, Arizona, and held for four days in a cell with a metal door, five bunk beds, and a metal table in the center. There were nine other prisoners in her cell, four of them mothers whose children had also been taken.
One morning out of the blue, Evelyn and her cell mates were awakened and told to put their old clothes back on. They were going somewhere, but nobody would say where. The guards slapped the shackles on again—wrists, ankles, and a belt around the waist—and herded the prisoners onto a bus. Evelyn started to panic. She had told her daughter she would be there when Amber came back, but now Evelyn had no idea where she was or where she was going. Was this it? Were they taking her back to Guatemala? Where was Amber? Had she made it to their relatives’ house? When the bus arrived at its destination, the anxiety turned to terror. The bus had rolled to a stop on an airport tarmac, depositing the prisoners at the bottom of a staircase to a jumbo jet. Those are the planes they use to take people back where they came from, one woman said. Dozens of armed officers swarmed the plane—on the stairway and up and down the aisles—as the women, shackled and afraid, shuffled on board. It was like they were transporting El Chapo, Evelyn recalled, but this wasn’t a hardened drug kingpin with a kill count, it was a bunch of distraught moms worrying about their babies. They kept asking where they were going, and Evelyn thought she heard an officer say they were headed to Los Angeles. As the plane hurtled down the runway and began lifting into the air, Evelyn’s mind raced. She had never been on a plane before. “What if I die?” she thought. “What will happen to my children?”
They landed in San Diego, and after being searched, head-to-toe, she and the other detainees were taken by bus to the James A. Musick Facility near Irvine, a minimum-security detention center known as “The Farm.” They gave Evelyn and the other ICE detainees green uniforms to distinguish them from the prisoners with red or blue uniforms on the other side of the corridor, who were there for things like DUIs or minor drug possession, failure to pay child support or prostitution. Here, there were no immigration officers; if she and her cell mates had questions, they could write them on slips of paper and tuck them into a small box in their cell provided for the purpose. Answers would often take several weeks, if they came at all. There were telephones in the cells, but you had to buy a phone card to use them, and Evelyn had no money. She had no idea that the separation policy had by then sparked an intense political controversy and generated global condemnation. All she knew was that it had been more than two weeks since the guards in Arizona had taken Amber away.
In early June, Evelyn finally spoke with an asylum officer by telephone, recounting her story of fleeing Guatemala. She would hear back in eight days, Evelyn was told. In the meantime, a cell mate took pity on her and lent her a phone card so she could contact her family. She called her cousin on the East Coast, praying to hear that Amber had arrived safely with her. But Amber wasn’t there. Evelyn’s cousin hadn’t heard a thing about the little girl, and she and her husband were shocked by what had happened to them. They would investigate and see what they could find out, she promised in the brief call. Weeks later, on June 16—four days before Trump abandoned the family separation policy with an abrupt executive order—Evelyn was shackled again and taken to a courthouse in Los Angeles, where a judge asked her why she had come to the United States and whether she was afraid of returning home. Then he handed her a sheet of paper in English that Evelyn could not read. When she got back to her cell at Musick that night, another detainee translated the paper for her. It was a deportation order, she told Evelyn, handing it back. That night, Evelyn lay awake in her cell and agonized. “What happens if they send me back, and Amber is still here? Is she being treated well? Will I ever see her again?” When an ICE officer came to her cell a couple of days later with deportation paperwork for her to sign, Evelyn refused. She demanded to know what was going on with Amber. The officer left without her signature. Evelyn sent more slips of paper through the box, asking for the whereabouts and condition of her daughter, a number she could call to get in contact with her, any shred of information about Amber.
In early July, a lawyer came to visit Evelyn at Musick. He had been retained by her cousin on the East Coast and was handling Evelyn’s case pro bono. The lawyer said he would make an official request to ICE for information about Amber and a phone number where she could be reached. They learned that the child was being held at Hacienda del Sol, a facility in Arizona run by a nonprofit organization called Southwest Key and funded by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the HHS division that holds unaccompanied alien minors. Days later, Evelyn was allowed to speak with her daughter for the first time in nearly two months. Evelyn was overjoyed to hear Amber’s voice. She sounded safe and well taken care of, and a feeling of relief washed over Evelyn for the first time in weeks. A social worker who was with Amber told Evelyn that she had a proper bed and was sleeping and eating well. But something was off. Evelyn’s normally talkative, bubbly daughter was subdued, answering her mother with one-word answers.
“How are you?” Evelyn asked her.
“Well,” Amber responded.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes.”
“How are they treating you?”
“Well.”
After a couple of minutes, Amber began to cry, and the social worker ended the call. It lasted about five minutes. Evelyn did not know what to feel. The sound of her daughter’s voice had buoyed her spirits, reassuring her that they were not so very far apart. But she still felt the intense ache of her children’s absence and wondered whether she would ever see either of them again. Evelyn could not forget that piece of paper the judge had given her—a deportation order. What would happen to Amber if she were sent back to Guatemala?
Not long after, as she was watching the news on TV in the detention center, Evelyn learned that a federal judge in California had ordered the government weeks earlier to reunify parents who had been separated from their children at the border, and was now temporarily halting deportations of the reunited families. Evelyn’s lawyer said he would file a motion to stop her removal order, and four days later he came back to Musick to give Evelyn the first good news she had since arriving in the United States: she was getting out, and would soon be reunited with Amber.
In late July, Evelyn was shackled again and transported to the Port Isabel Detention Center, an ICE facility sometimes known as El Corralón or “The Big Corral” on a former naval base in South Texas. At around midnight, they led Evelyn to a large room. There was Amber, standing quietly against a wall in a line of about thirty children, with a teddy bear and a small carry-on bag that Evelyn did not recognize. She grabbed her daughter and held on for dear life. She laughed and cried. “I love you,” they said to each other over and over again. When she could catch her breath, Evelyn pulled away and asked Amber how she was, how she had been treated. She was fine, Amber said. There were teachers where she had been staying, she said, and she had made friends. People looked after her, she said. It was the middle of the night, and the little girl was exhausted, mentally and physically. That was about all the information that Evelyn was going to get.
Soon they were on the move again. ICE agents put Evelyn and Amber into a van with three other parents and their children and they drove through the night, although nobody would tell them where they were going. They wouldn’t be separated, ICE officers said, but they weren’t going to be released either. After about six hours on the road, they came to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, the largest such facility in the United States. Situated on fifty desertlike acres on brownish red dirt dotted with dry patches of brush, the detention camp consisted of dozens of tan-colored trailers housing the women and children being held there, as well as temporary classrooms, a cafeteria, and medical and legal visitation centers.
Evelyn and Amber were detained for four months. Life was monotonous and uncertain at Dilley, where the temperature often reached 100 degrees or higher. They lived in a trailer with six other mothers and their children, all of them happy to be reunited but depressed and frustrated with their limbolike status. Evelyn felt angry and betrayed; they had told her she would get Amber back and they would be let go, but now here they were in the middle of the desert, under the constant watch of guards, eating the same food every week and being in the same place all day, every day. Amber attended school in one of the trailers marked escuela, but Evelyn’s days were broken up only by meals, TV, and playing with her daughter in a playground inside the heavily fortified fences of the detention center. In the afternoons, she would often visit the facility’s lawyers, seeking legal advice and information about the outside world, and at times just to vent. It was from the lawyers that Evelyn finally learned that there had been a public outcry in Washington and throughout the country over the Trump administration policy.
And it was at Dilley that Evelyn first realized how profoundly Amber had changed during the time they had been apart. At night, her daughter was afraid and clingy, unable to fall asleep unless Evelyn sat with her and physically held on to her. By day, Amber was impatient and cranky, crying for her grandmother back in Guatemala and asking why they had to stay here. “Please forgive me—it’s my fault this happened,” Evelyn would tell her. After months, Amber had an interview with an asylum officer and her claim of “credible fear” of returning home was accepted. Both mother and daughter had met the threshold to be considered for asylum, and would be given the chance to have their cases heard. They were released in late November, driven to the airport in San Antonio, and boarded a flight to Houston, and then on to the city where Evelyn’s cousin awaited.
Almost a year to the day after fleeing from her little hamlet in Guatemala, sitting in her cousin’s house on a peaceful, wooded cul-de-sac in the United States, Evelyn was at peace, but she wasn’t really free. The ankle monitor, which she was required to wear until her asylum case was decided, was designed to insure that she stayed within a restricted radius around her home, and she was required to check in with an immigration officer once every four weeks. She was barred from working or driving, preventing her from doing anything to provide for Amber. She was lucky to live with supportive members of her extended family who were helping her out, but it was not the same as having her own life. “It feels bad,” Evelyn said. “It feels like someone…” She trailed off, making a jerking gesture with her hand and neck as if someone had her on a leash and was pulling on it.
The scars of the separation were still fresh. At first, Amber would not walk outside, for fear of being kidnapped, and was afraid to board the yellow bus to go to school, worried that she’d be taken away and not brought back to her mother. Those fears had faded somewhat, but the nighttime terror had not; Amber still could not fall asleep without her mother holding her.
Would Evelyn do it all again? Would she run for her life to the United States, knowing that her daughter could be forcibly taken from her and that they would be separated for months, maybe forever? Evelyn said she wouldn’t. But then she hesitated.
“I would like to say to the other mothers first of all, one must not regret anything,” Evelyn said. “There is God, and there is a reason for everything, and he’s in our hearts, and he knows what we do and the reasons why we do things.”
“I feel no resentment against the government—I don’t blame the government for what they did,” Evelyn added. “I just think that this experience has made me stronger, has made me the person that I am today. And one has to have patience.”