In the summer of 2017, Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga walked through a blaze of red sand and desert scrub, trailed by her sons Erick and Patrick, who were thirteen and fifteen. She wore a light-colored, flowing dress with a thin cotton shawl that covered her shoulders and back. In the towns along her route, from Honduras through Guatemala and Mexico, perfect strangers sought her out, drawn in by her intense eyes and her maternal warmth. Because her dresses covered her legs down to her feet she didn’t seem to walk so much as to float through space. Everywhere she went, people called her la pastora.
Keldy and her sons had begun hiking from a town called Puerto Palomas, just across the border from New Mexico, keeping watch for the white-and-green pickup trucks of the U.S. Border Patrol. The plan wasn’t to evade the authorities but to seek them out. In a small knapsack, Keldy carried a sheaf of documents held together with rubber bands—police reports, notarized court papers, newspaper clippings—which she believed made their case for asylum irrefutable. By noon, after several hours of walking, a roadway came into view: State Highway 9. When Keldy spotted a truck, she waved her arms and shouted, but the first two drove past. A third eventually stopped, and a uniformed agent emerged. In fluent Spanish, he asked if Keldy and her sons were U.S. citizens and whether they had any valid legal papers. Erick and Patrick avoided the eyes of this strange new man, even as he loaded them into the back of his vehicle.
The highway extended before Keldy and her sons in an infinite line. When they arrived at the station, in Deming, New Mexico, two hours had passed. A few agents booked them into custody. “We’re going to deport you,” one of them told Keldy, loudly enough for her children to hear. “You’re crazy, aren’t you? How could you come with your children all this way?” Patrick was a rangy, taciturn boy, who tended to shy away from confrontation. But he was becoming visibly upset, his face flushed. “We should have stayed home, even if they were trying to kill us there,” he said.
Keldy, Erick, and Patrick were given alien numbers, which, along with fingerprints and basic biographical information, were entered into the government’s database, and they spent the night pressed together in a cold holding cell. There wasn’t much to cover themselves with, just a square Mylar blanket that crinkled to the touch. Later that evening, after a shift change, one of the agents reassured them. “We’re going to request that they prepare some papers for you so that you can leave and see the rest of your family,” he said. When Keldy thanked him, she made sure to call him “sir.”
The next day, it seemed like they were about to be released when one of the agents came over and said, “Wait a second, señora. We’re seeing something here.” Another night passed in the cell. By their second day in custody, the faces of the different agents were blurring together. This time, when an agent asked to speak with her privately, away from her children, she couldn’t recall whether he was the same person from the night before. “What we’re going to do is this,” he began. “We’re going to send you to prison for five days, and while that happens we’re going to send your children to a shelter in El Paso. When you get out of prison, you’ll be able to join them.”
There wasn’t time for Keldy to formulate a question. She began to stammer. The agents seemed uncertain themselves. But they were hustling her along, leading her back to the cell to grab her belongings and say goodbye to her children. Erick and Patrick stood up and clung to the bars. Keldy tried to explain to them what was happening, taking short pauses to calm herself. Her boys were crying. They grabbed at their mother to try to keep her from the agents. Everyone was shouting. Keldy stood still while her body was fought over. The agents were yanking her out of the cell and away from her kids, but her eyes remained fixed on the taut, trembling fingers of her boys, who clutched her clothes until their grips broke.
Two decades earlier, in a port city called La Ceiba, on the northern coast of Honduras, Keldy was awoken by a noise that sounded like an explosion. She was fourteen and lived with her family in a house near the Bonito River. Heavy rains were pelting the roof, and winds lashed at the walls. Everyone in the home—Keldy, her mother, a brother, a sister, and a niece—rushed outside in time to see a bridge collapse into the river. Vehicles and their drivers disappeared under the water. One of the trucks had been carrying sacks of oranges, which were now bobbing in the current. Scattered bills floated up from the spot where another driver had sunk out of view. “Look at the money,” someone shouted, pointing first to the river and then to the sky. “What’s happening up there?”
Hurricane Mitch was among the deadliest natural disasters to strike Honduras in a century. Whole networks of roads were wiped out, sealing villages away in sudden isolation. Keldy wasn’t especially religious as a child, but the destruction felt otherworldly. Eleven thousand people were confirmed dead, and even more were missing. Twenty per cent of Hondurans lost their homes. Before the hurricane, La Ceiba’s city limits represented the ends of the earth to Keldy. Mitch introduced her to the name of a new city: Denver, Colorado. One of her brothers, Milton, who was twenty years old and had worked at a local airport that was destroyed, had decided to go there. The last thing he had said to Keldy was me voy, as if he were leaving for the weekend.
Keldy had moved to La Ceiba as a small child. Her father was dead and her family needed money, so she dropped out of school at thirteen and started to work, spending the week as a personal assistant to a local doctor and the weekends with her mother, Amanda, who cooked and sold food at the airport. In the aftermath of the storm, her family was among the fortunate ones—their house was still intact, though, to Keldy, it seemed to have been “buried standing,” packed with mud and debris. She had to walk to the river to fetch drinking water. All the pipes had burst; water no longer came out of the tap, and no one could be sure what was safe to drink. Honduras had always been one of the poorest countries in the region—“the country of the seventies,” a former Honduran President once called it. “Seventy per cent illiteracy, seventy per cent illegitimacy, seventy per cent rural populations, seventy per cent avoidable deaths.”
Two of Keldy’s other brothers eventually followed Milton to Denver. Her eldest brother, Luis Fernando, who was in his mid-thirties and married with four young children, became the family’s lifeline. He was a police officer—one of the only professions that Mitch hadn’t decimated—and could afford to support Amanda and Keldy.
Cops usually weren’t well paid in Honduras, but the country was entering a new political era that brought a high demand for élite law enforcement. In 2002, Ricardo Maduro, an American-educated economist from the conservative National Party, became President. He was the former head of Honduras’s central bank, and had entered politics after his twenty-five-year-old son was kidnapped and murdered in San Pedro Sula. His main campaign slogan was “zero tolerance” for crime. “The mandate of the people has been abundantly clear,” he said at his inauguration. “I have been elected to fight first and foremost against insecurity. To fight against murder, against kidnapping and robbery.”
At the time, violent gangs that had formed on the streets of American inner cities were beginning to surface in Honduras. What unnerved Keldy was that she couldn’t identify whom she was supposed to avoid. A friend told her to look out for pandilleros, or gangsters. “What’s a pandillero?” she asked. “They’re the people who kill people and who kidnap girls to be their women,” the friend replied.
At first, none of these predators seemed to dress any differently than regular teen-agers. Keldy came to suspect that tattoos were hidden under their clothes, and that they had special powers for concealing their malevolence. But the fact that teen-age boys were falling under general suspicion led to police abuses. One ex-policeman who worked in La Ceiba later said that, in cases involving kidnappings, “the policy was to exterminate the kidnappers. If a search was legal, the people who were arrested were brought before the Public Ministry, along with the evidence, but there were ten legal searches out of every hundred. Other times, they detained four, eliminated three, and presented one to the Ministry.”
Luis Fernando would tell Keldy and the rest of the family when and where the police would be launching raids. There were always big press conferences afterward, with the police officers wearing balaclavas to avoid being identified for reprisals. Luis Fernando was rising in the ranks and was invited to participate in bigger operations in San Pedro Sula. “I like doing this cleanup,” he once told Keldy. “I like locking up criminals.”
For his family’s protection, he was known publicly only as Brebe. “Never tell anyone you have a family member in the police and definitely not that he works on capturing pandilleros,” he warned them. “You can’t talk about this with anybody.” Still, Keldy recognized him when he appeared on television, masked alongside the other officers. His posture was a dead giveaway, making her wonder if anyone else could spot his tells.
Keldy’s future husband, Mino Zúniga, entered her life when she was seventeen. Amanda had started working again, running a mini-mart across from a hotel in the center of town. One afternoon, Mino came sprinting down the block past her store, trying to escape a group of boys with weapons. He was handsome and tall, with dark, bronzed skin and a neat beard. Amanda stepped outside to reprimand the boys in pursuit. This was one of the strange facts of life in La Ceiba: everyone had known even the most dangerous local toughs since they were babies. “Don’t touch him,” she shouted. “He’s my son-in-law.” Mino and Keldy had never met.
When they finally did, a few weeks later, Keldy had reservations. He was twenty years older and worked at a company that offered rafting and hiking trips to tourists. Keldy already had a son, Alex, a two-year-old whose father had split. But Mino’s tenderness with Alex, combined with his confident, flirtatious edge, eventually won her over. They had their first son, Patrick, in December, 2001; their second, Erick, was born in January, 2004. Keldy considered these the luckiest years of her life. The couple had money and a house for their family; their parents and siblings were nearby. At night, wearing spike heels and a glittering silver minidress, Keldy would go out dancing.
On December 7, 2006, the day that Keldy turned twenty-three, their fortunes changed. Keldy’s brother Carlos, a former soldier who drove a bus, was killed after refusing to pay a tax to a group of thieves on his route. A year later, the global recession hit, and the American tourists who came to Mino’s company started to cancel. Those who could still afford to travel were wary for a different reason: the country’s violence was increasingly in the news. Keldy was anxious about Carlos’s killing, and Mino was growing concerned about their finances. They decided to leave their sons with Amanda and set out for the United States. They would live there for, at most, a few years, enough time to earn money to fund a more stable life in La Ceiba. One of Keldy’s brothers in Denver would hire a smuggler to help them cross the border once they made it through Mexico.
After a gruelling bus ride through Guatemala, they boarded a freight train, known as the Beast, in Mexico, near a town in Tabasco called Tenosique. The train, twenty-eight cars long, was the primary means for migrants to traverse Mexico. Bandits, rapists, and kidnappers lurked on board, scoping out potential victims. Crushed limbs and fatal falls were as common as assaults. The cars were packed, forcing many of the travellers to climb up the sides to reach the roof. Mino tied Keldy down so she wouldn’t fall off when she slept.
They left the Beast in San Luis Potosí and took a bus to Tamaulipas, approaching the border. In Nuevo Laredo, they were kidnapped by the Zetas, perhaps the most frightening of the Mexican crime syndicates. Known for beheadings and mass killings, these were ex Army commandos and cartel hitmen who had cornered the lucrative market of kidnapping and extorting migrants on their way to the U.S. The captives were brought to a series of ramshackle drop houses, where they were held while their kidnappers called relatives to demand money for their release. Keldy and Mino managed to escape and headed west. In Sonoyta, across the border from Arizona, Mino’s camouflage pants aroused the suspicions of a unit of Mexican soldiers. He was taken into custody, and only released after Keldy persuaded the local commander that he was her husband and not a sicario.
After the drama of their journey, their time in Denver was mundane, productive, and brief. Mino painted houses; Keldy prepared and sold food. Some of their earnings went toward renting a small apartment of their own. They sent the rest to Honduras. After a year, they had saved enough to buy some property in La Ceiba. In April, 2010, she and Mino took a bus to the Houston airport, where they boarded a plane to Honduras. Neither of them expected to visit the U.S. ever again. They hadn’t told the rest of their family that they were coming back; it was supposed to be a surprise.
But, just before they took off, Keldy learned that another brother had been killed: Nelsin Obed, an electrician, who was murdered on a road outside of La Ceiba. His death marked the beginning of a terrifying period. It was known around town that Keldy and Mino had worked in the U.S. and had money. Their new house was a one-story, unpainted structure near a paved road and a grocery store, the only one in the area with a perimeter wall fringed in security wire. But the plot was in a colonia called Búfalo, an area that was a short walk from a gang neighborhood. Shootings began shortly after Keldy and Mino moved in. One day, someone came by the house to tell Keldy that he liked their property and wanted it for himself.
One morning, in November, 2011, two men on a white motorcycle parked in front of Keldy and Mino’s house and took photographs. They said they would be back later to evict them. Around this time, Keldy received a call from Luis Fernando. “I’m in the middle of something sensitive,” he told her. “If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I can’t talk.” In January, 2012, Luis Fernando and his wife were shot and killed while driving in their car. There was no time to mourn. Other family members were being threatened. “I’m asking the authorities to help me,” her brother Óscar said, according to a police report filed that June. “I don’t know what to do and my fear is that they’re going to kill me.”
On the morning of July 17, 2012, Keldy was walking to Óscar’s house when she saw three men running away from the property. Keldy found Óscar on the ground covered in blood, heaving but still conscious. He was able to name his attackers, who had beaten him with stones and a two-by-four. He died at a nearby hospital a few hours later. Keldy filed police reports identifying the men responsible. This led to more threats. Keldy’s family had a Dodge Ram. One day, she and Mino were watching the news and saw that someone with an identical car and a similar license plate had been gunned down while driving.
Keldy and Mino took their boys and fled. Eventually, they hid out in a small lodge that Mino’s family owned in the forest of El Naranjo, about forty minutes east of La Ceiba. Keldy’s mother and niece joined them but they told no one else. It would be two years before they left. The lodge had two floors, made of wood and stone, and was tucked away in a thicket of guava trees. Occasionally, they attended church nearby and ran errands to buy food.
One Sunday, Keldy was feeling ill, so she stayed behind with Alex while the rest of the family went to church. It was raining outside, the air muggy. Alex was napping on Keldy’s legs when she heard a voice, stern and booming. Years later, as she told and retold this story, the words she heard that day would always be rendered with perfect, unvarying clarity. God was sending her a message. “I have helped you so much,” the voice began. “How many times have I saved you? How many guns have they wanted to fire at you? I’ve been there to defend you.” She roused Alex, and the two of them hiked through the rain to the church. They arrived soaked and reborn. Her newfound strength inspired her to take another action from which there’d be no return. She travelled to a court in the capital city of Tegucigalpa to break the one universal taboo in Honduras. Under oath, she testified against Óscar’s killers.
The family-separation crisis is now one of the most infamous reference points of the Trump era. In a span of several months, peaking in the summer of 2018, the government separated some five thousand children from their parents as part of a deliberate policy called zero tolerance. Multiple government investigations, reports, and congressional inquiries followed. They revealed a design that was both deliberately cruel and callously incompetent. In May, 2018, the Department of Homeland Security instructed the Office of Management and Budget to expect some twenty-six thousand separations by September. But it put no protocols in place for simultaneously tracking parents and children, for keeping them in contact while they were separated, or for eventually reuniting them. The federal judge who presided over the lawsuit that led to the end of zero tolerance recently told the litigators, “When you first brought the case, the allegations were sensational, and it was far from clear to me that this could actually be happening.”
Keldy was one of the first parents to be separated. In July, 2017, agents in the El Paso sector had begun to execute a clandestine pilot program to see whether separating parents from their children had any impact on border crossings. The premise was that word of their suffering would spread among other migrants and discourage them from trying to cross. Fragmentary details emerged of young children being ripped from their parents’ arms before disappearing into the vast and separate shelter system set up for unaccompanied minors. Lawyers in U.S. Attorneys’ offices heard stories of adults who appeared in court, begging for information about their children. Agents at the El Paso Border Patrol insisted that they had no choice. “It is always a difficult decision to separate these families,” one of them wrote to government lawyers in West Texas. “It is the hope that this separation will act as a deterrent to parents bringing their children.”
The justification was deterrence, but the policy itself remained secret. The acting U.S. Attorney based in San Antonio, whose office was supposed to prosecute the cases coming out of the El Paso sector, didn’t learn of the pilot program’s existence for at least a year after it was suspended, in the fall of 2017. How could migrants discern the contours of a new deterrence policy if the government’s own employees weren’t sure what was happening? In August, an official in the West Texas office wrote in an e-mail, “We have now heard of us taking breast feeding defendant moms away from their infants, I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log and saw the fact we had accepted prosecution on moms with one and two year olds. The next issue is that these parents are asking for the whereabouts of their children and they can’t get a response, the courts are turning to us for help.”
Keldy was transferred to a New Mexico jail before she could make any phone calls. At this point, the rest of her family was scattered. Four years before, after testifying against her brother’s killers, she had fled with Mino and the boys to Mexico, where they were arrested and spent a week in Siglo XXI, or Century Twenty-One, the largest immigrant detention center in Latin America. After they were deported to Honduras, they immediately began preparing for another attempt. The strategy was to split up. Mino had left first, in 2016, and was already in the U.S., building boat docks in East Texas. Their oldest son, Alex, who was eighteen, had travelled with Keldy and his brothers to northern Mexico, but decided to cross with an uncle who had acquired Mexican papers, which gave them a better shot at avoiding deportation to Honduras if they were caught. Keldy and the younger boys assumed that they had a better chance of clearing the U.S. border if they moved together as a unit.
Now, cuffed and shackled, Keldy was a criminal defendant, charged with a misdemeanor. She had committed two phone numbers to memory—the first for Mino in East Texas and the second for her sister Claudia, who was living in Philadelphia, an asylum seeker herself. Since Mino still had no immigration papers, Claudia would have to sponsor Erick and Patrick to get them out of custody. Keldy couldn’t speak to them because, in the government’s databases, her file was severed from those of her children. Patrick and Erick were listed as “unaccompanied alien minors” who had arrived at the border alone and been transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. H.H.S. would take up their case from scratch, vetting relatives in the U.S. Keldy was part of a different system run by D.H.S. It treated her as a “single adult.”
Within a week, Keldy was moved to a detention center run by ICE on Montana Avenue, in El Paso, a complex of low-slung buildings that resembled a cross between a prison and a military barracks. The closer you got to the front parking lot, the more impregnable the space became, with thick doors under lock and key and long hallways of cinder block and Plexiglas. Deeper inside, past a small library with a few computers and a bank of phones, were dormitory blocks with dozens of bunk beds. The rooms opened onto the yard, a square plot of asphalt ringed by high walls, where the detainees were given an hour each day for “recreation.”
On the morning of October 4th, one of the guards brought Keldy to a small room with bare walls. On a metal table was a phone. Someone identifying himself as Officer Su came on the line. He spoke in English, followed by another voice piped in from somewhere else, which translated everything into Spanish. Su, an asylum officer at Citizenship and Immigration Services, was sitting in a cubicle in an office building in Arlington, Virginia. For the next two hours, Keldy would answer questions to establish whether she had a “credible fear” of persecution in her home country. It was the first hurdle to clear for asylum. The second was an actual hearing before an immigration judge.
“Please remember to speak clearly and loudly, and also take frequent pauses so the interpreter can accurately tell me everything you say,” Su told her. “Before we continue, I’m going to place you under oath.” The guard was gone; Keldy was alone in the interview room. Facing in the direction of the phone, and blinking hard at the emptiness before her, she raised her right hand and swore to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
Keldy had spent months back in Honduras gathering evidence for asylum. But speaking to a disembodied voice on the phone, she stumbled through the story. Certain details didn’t line up with the pointed sequence of questions. The asylum officer needed to establish specific facts. Who murdered her four brothers? “We never knew the names,” she replied. “It was between 2006 and 2012. The last death was July, 2012. That one brought my entire family a lot of consequences as far as persecution.”
These killings took place “five years ago,” Su pointed out. Was there still a threat to her personally?
“Yes, but we’ve been in different parts of Honduras,” she replied.
The time line was jumbled because the threats had come in waves: there were her siblings’ killings, then the fallout after Keldy testified against their killers in court. The interpreter stopped translating and tried to get Keldy to respond to the officer’s question, but she was getting nervous. “Ma’am, stop,” Su interjected. “We’re already an hour into this interview, and I haven’t gotten any information I need.”
The interview concluded at 1:46 P.M. “Is there any other reason you fear returning to Honduras?” Su asked.
“I have nowhere to go in Honduras,” Keldy said. “My family is all in Mexico or the United States.” It was another week before she learned that she had passed.
This was welcome news, which nevertheless seemed to have no immediate bearing on her situation. Ordinarily, asylum seekers who cleared this first test could be released on bond to wait for their subsequent court dates. But increasingly the government was trying to detain asylum seekers through the entirety of their legal proceedings. In one case, a Haitian professor of ethics had won asylum in an immigration court, yet was kept in ICE detention for two years while the government appealed the case. On the initial form that came back to Keldy, with a box checked to indicate that she had “demonstrated a credible fear of persecution or torture,” she was ordered to appear before a judge in a separate room at the facility on Montana Avenue, where she was already being held. The two blank lines reserved for the date and time of this court hearing read, “To be determined.”
By the late fall of 2017, the pilot program in El Paso was attracting more attention. A senior staffer at the Department of Health and Human Services noticed a pattern and e-mailed Kevin McAleenan, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Not only was the department running out of bed space for unaccompanied children in government shelters, the staffer pointed out, but a significant share of the children entering H.H.S. custody didn’t appear to be unaccompanied at all. That fall, Miguel Torres, a magistrate judge in El Paso, voiced his own misgivings in open court. “I’ve probably done thousands” of these cases, he told lawyers. “This is a newer phenomenon.”
In November, four parents and a grandmother from Honduras and El Salvador appeared before Torres. Each had been charged with a misdemeanor for illegal entry, but none of them seemed to care about the outcome of the case. They claimed that the Border Patrol had taken their children, and that they had no idea where the children were. Their lawyer was a public defender from Mexico City named Sergio Garcia, who had first come to the U.S. in 1981, to study English at the University of Utah. His clients were so desperate to reunite with their children that they were willing to plead guilty to anything. “Instead of giving them due-process rights to a hearing on asylum, or refugee status,” he told Torres, “the government is just kidnapping their children.”
For weeks, Torres had been seeking an explanation for why so many parents seemed to be getting separated from their children and then kept in the dark on their whereabouts. The government prosecutors insisted that nothing was out of the ordinary. From the bench, Torres disagreed, saying, in reference to the parents, “I would be very worried as well if it was me.” There were some two hundred and eighty parents who’d been separated from their children under the initiative. Having twice been denied bond, Keldy was still in detention on November 18th, waiting for her hearing before an immigration judge, when C.B.P. ended the El Paso pilot.
Stopping the pilot had a perverse consequence for her. Without a scandalous new policy to concentrate public attention, Keldy was just another single adult from Central America languishing in ICE detention. On Montana Avenue, she was assigned to a dormitory block known as 8D, with about thirty other women who were given orange jumpsuits and strict instructions. Each group of detainees moved through the space as a unit. They ate together, shared a recreation hour, and lounged around the dorm and talked. Contact with the other groups was forbidden. Sometimes, they would pass one another in the hall, or overlap briefly in the commissary. When a woman lingered over her food and tried to make conversation, a guard was usually on hand to shout a reprimand: “You’re here to eat, not to socialize.”
By April, 2018, six months had passed since Keldy’s preliminary asylum screening, yet she was still in detention, waiting for a hearing before a judge. Mino had put money on her phone so that she could call her sons every week, at a rate of eighty-five cents per minute. From their short, awkward calls—full of silences, monosyllables, repressed sobs—she could tell that they were floundering without her.
Of all the places in the U.S. where Keldy could have applied for asylum, El Paso was one of the worst. On average, roughly a third of asylum seekers were given relief in immigration courts across the country, but immigration judges in El Paso had granted asylum just three per cent of the time between 2013 and 2017. One judge called the city’s immigration court system the “bye-bye place.”
Unlike criminal defendants, immigrants aren’t automatically granted a lawyer. The longer Keldy remained in custody, the harder it was to find someone who could help her get out. Occasionally, the other detainees would see Keldy crying softly to herself or staring off into space with bloodshot eyes. But she never seemed despairing. “God is the only one who can help us,” she told one of them.
Coming from someone else, that may have sounded fatalistic or zealous, but because Keldy spoke the words the other women took them as a sign of spiritual vigilance. She led prayer sessions each day in the yard, where dozens of women joined her. They approached her to ask whether she saw them in her dreams. Some of them now called her la profeta, the prophet.
Two female guards watched Keldy with growing annoyance. One of them had red hair, the other blond. The detainees called each guard La Miss, attaching the Spanish article to the English honorific. But they secretly nicknamed the blonde La Chucky, because her swept bangs resembled those of the murderous toy doll in the horror-film series. Both guards found endless excuses to sanction Keldy. They confiscated her Bible, barked at her in front of the others, and cut her prayer services short. At night, lying on their cots in the barracks where they slept, Keldy and the others speculated in hushed voices about why these two guards were so fixated on her. The harsher they were, the more Keldy stood out as an undimmable force. After a few months, even detainees who weren’t religious or whose Spanish was weak stayed close to her.
Toward the end of April, 2018, when the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy fully went into effect, Keldy started to notice more women claiming to have been separated from their children. By the start of May, she counted around twenty mothers in and around her unit. All of them were inconsolable, too traumatized to speak in full sentences. They sat off by themselves, moaning. It would be several days, at least, before they had any inkling of where their children were. Keldy knew enough not to try to talk the mothers down. She sat and cried with them. Some of the women knew about her own children, but many didn’t. She volunteered the information only if asked. To everyone, though, she said the same thing: “Someone will come and help us. I’m going to make sure of that.”
Inside the facility, the women were not allowed to have notebooks or to carry around files, so Keldy obtained loose sheets of paper. At first, she took down the names of the separated mothers in her own unit. The columns were neatly ordered, the penmanship careful. Her plan was to mail the list to lawyers, ICE officials, and public figures who might be able to help. There had been scattered news reports about family separation, but very little public awareness of the true dimensions of the situation. As word of Keldy’s list got around, women from other units began to contact her. There were furtive handoffs of information in the hallways and in the cafeteria. Keldy would receive strips of paper with the information she needed. “I finally realized that no one was going to help us find our kids,” she said. “We’d have to do it on our own.”
Because Keldy had been one of the first mothers to be separated under the Trump Administration, she wasn’t just a victim of the policy but also a witness to its accumulating horrors. On May 20th, in one of the facility’s white cinder-block visiting rooms, Keldy gave her list to Mary Kay Mahowald, a staffer at a small nonprofit in El Paso called Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. Mahowald was a Franciscan sister from Minnesota in her early seventies, but behind her benign, grandmotherly façade was an activist’s razor-sharp mind. Each time the guards waved her in for client visits, she lingered in the warren of meeting rooms and cells, maximizing her time with the detainees and gathering as much information as she could. As a precaution, Keldy had also mailed a copy of her list to the office at Las Americas. On the top-left corner of the envelope, for her return address, Keldy put her full name and alien number. There were ten names on the list, including her own.
The day after the handoff, Keldy had her first and only asylum hearing, in one of the large halls of the detention center that were used for court appearances. The room was virtually empty, with heaps of chairs scattered toward the back. Near the front, two plastic tables were angled before a slightly raised podium, where the judge, William Abbott, sat in a black robe. He rejected nearly ninety per cent of the claims he heard—not the highest rejection rate in the district, but close.
The outcome of a case often depended on the mood of an immigration judge. On May 21, 2018, Abbott struck Keldy as aloof and impatient, and the proceedings moved quickly. Keldy didn’t have a lawyer to represent her, so she sat alone at her table, waiting for her turn to speak. To one side was the ICE attorney arguing for her deportation; behind the two of them, a lone guard stood facing the door. The only other person in the room was a translator. The whole proceeding was over in less than an hour. Her asylum claim was denied.
For the next week, Keldy was too stunned to plot her next steps. The judge had kept returning to details that struck her as irrelevant. He seemed fixated on the fact that her brothers had been killed by different people, for different reasons, as though this proved some inconsistency in her own account. There was a gulf she couldn’t understand between the reality of her life and the tight, legible plotlines the judge seemed to be expecting.
On June 6th, she went to the library to write a final plea to an official inside the Montana Avenue facility who was managing the timing and paperwork of her eventual deportation. “Good morning and blessings to you, señor deportador,” she began. “The judge denied my asylum claim because he says I don’t have evidence and that I’m lying.” In the next two paragraphs, she begged the deportation officer for his help. There was no one to go home to in Honduras. The sicarios who’d tried to kill her once would be waiting. At the same time, she went on, “I’ve spent almost nine months here, and I can’t stand it anymore not to be able to see my children.” The letter was forceful but formal, and she left a line for her own signature at the bottom. After printing it out, she took her pen and went back over one line, drawing a circle around it for emphasis: “What is it that you all need for someone to get asylum? Do I have to come here injured or dead?”
Eight months later, the government deported her. She would have to begin her journey again. As long as her children were in the United States, that was where she would be going. ♦
This is drawn from “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.”
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