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It was still dark out when Mirsy Maricela Alva López woke up her two children. “Get up,” she said. “We’re leaving.” Her eldest, 14-year-old Briseidy, protested: “Why so early?” Their flight wasn’t for a few hours, but a taxi was coming to the hotel at 6 a.m. to take them to Guatemala City’s La Aurora International Airport.
“Remember to bring your things,” Alva López said. The past 11 months of their lives fit into three backpacks of clothes. “Hurry up, son,” she told Ederson, 11, making sure he brushed his hair and smoothed it with styling gel. “Let’s pray before we leave the room,” Alva López said. “Just for five minutes.” They asked God for a safe trip and that all would go well.
Alva López, 39, had barely slept the night before, waiting anxiously for the morning so they could be on their way to South Florida. That’s where they lived before she was suddenly deported in June of last year, and the kids left their friends and school to join her in Guatemala.
In the back of the taxi, Alva López clutched the plastic bag containing an envelope with the parole documents that should give her family entry into the United States. Dressed in a burgundy belted dress with a fleeced vest and sparkly sandals, she felt grateful she had the opportunity to return.
From street vendors outside the airport, the family bought keychains with the bright-green resplendent quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala. Ederson attached the souvenir to his small crossbody Nike bag that carried a Bible. Alva López snapped a picture of Briseidy and Ederson in front of the terminal doors. Holding their Guatemalan passports, they headed inside—without looking back.
The family waited in Guatemala’s capital for their travel day back to the United States. Eduardo Say
To Alva López, leaving Guatemala after having been sent there almost a year earlier was nothing short of miraculous. In February, a federal judge found the Trump administration had unlawfully removed families like hers. And in a rare move, the government had allowed them to come back. Their circumstances were unique. Alva López and Ederson were two of the thousands of parents and children the first Trump administration had separated at the US-Mexico border in a bid to deter migration.
In 2018, the forced separation of migrant families drew widespread condemnation for violating international human rights conventions and harming kids, prompting a class action lawsuit to end the practice. That case, Ms. L v. ICE, led to a landmark settlement agreement that provided some measure of relief to the affected families, including the option to apply for temporary legal status so they could remain in the United States and seek stability.
But under the current administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown, that assurance has been shattered. Having endured unique cruelty inflicted by the US government once, separated families are again vulnerable to detention and deportation. More than 60 people protected under the Ms. L settlement have been detained and at least 16 have been deported during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
“We never went far enough to repair the original sin of the separations at the border. And now we’re perpetrating that same harm all over again.”
As Kelly Albinak Kribs, an attorney at the nonprofit Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, put it, family separation was “a stain that will live in the fabric of American society for generations to come.” And it is one unlikely to fade. Some eight years later, dozens of parents and children face a renewed threat of separation, even as they reel from the horror they survived the first time around. “We never went far enough to repair the original sin of the separations at the border,” Kribs said. “And now we’re perpetrating that same harm all over again.”
Alva López and her kids were allowed to return to the United States in May 2026.Eduardo Say
The first Trump administration initially denied the existence of a deterrence policy that punished parents by forcibly taking away their children, even though immigrant rights advocates had been documenting cases as early as 2017. Jonathan White, a longtime social worker with the US Department of Health and Human Services, first knew the policy he had heard discussed at the leadership level was being implemented when he learned that an infant not old enough to be weaned had been referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s unaccompanied children program he oversaw.
“Babies don’t wander across the Rio Grande by themselves,” he told me. The only logical conclusion was that the child had arrived at the border with a parent and subsequently had been separated. Most unaccompanied minors in the care of ORR were teenagers or, if they were younger, part of a group of siblings, White explained. But suddenly, field specialists started seeing so many seemingly unattached small children coming into the system that shelters ran out of bed space.
“It was undeniable,” White recalled. “And not only was it happening, but an effort to conceal that it was happening was ongoing.” He decided to become an internal force opposing family separations. White repeatedly shared his concerns with political appointees. He noted such a policy would potentially overwhelm the program’s capacity to care for migrant children. And he warned about the great risk of psychological injury to the kids.
White soon realized that his argument wasn’t persuasive. “Harming children,” he said, “was the purpose of the policy.” Separating families was the point. “Some parents were going to lose their children forever,” White added, “and that was designed to send a message that would deter migration by families.”
An early case involved Ms. L, an asylum-seeking Congolese woman who was separated from her six-year-old daughter. The girl wound up in a shelter for unaccompanied minors in Chicago, while the mother was detained thousands of miles away in southern California. Ms. L later became the plaintiff in a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU challenging the separations as unlawful. The initial complaint, filed in San Diego, warned that every day the child spent apart from her mother “could potentially lead to permanent emotional trauma.”
At the time, Gladis Molina was a child advocate working at the Young Center, one of the groups helping kids who had been separated. In the spring of 2018, the government assigned her to look after Alva López’s son Ederson. Molina still remembers meeting the three-year-old boy. He sat in a small case management office at a shelter in central Phoenix. Ederson had been there for a few months, since February, after being torn from his mother’s arms when they encountered Border Patrol agents in Arizona.
Molina observed Ederson, looking absent-minded and detached, almost withdrawn during a call with Alva López, who was 70 miles away in an immigration detention center. He was one of the youngest children Molina had worked with. His short legs dangled from the chair.
“He’s just sitting there listening,” recalled Molina, who came to the United States from civil war-torn El Salvador as a child. “He’s there, but not quite there.” Ederson looked around as if attempting to place the voice. Alva López tried desperately to connect with him over the phone, but he was unresponsive.
As a recent mother to a boy herself, Molina could hear the anguish in Alva López’s voice. She wondered how Alva López must have felt knowing she couldn’t tell her son when she was coming home, or that a decision she had made to travel north looking for a better life had resulted in this nightmare.
Alva López had been raising Ederson and Briseidy on her own in San Martín Cuchumatán, a rural village nestled in Guatemala’s highlands, about an eight-hour drive from the capital. She picked coffee for a living, but when the harvest season ended, she had no work and money was short. Alva López dreamed of buying a plot of land for a two-bedroom house and being able to afford gifts for the kids. She wanted them to have a good education so they could pursue their dreams; Ederson hoped to become a doctor and Briseidy a flight attendant.
In February 2018, she left Briseidy with her parents and set out with Ederson. They traveled on buses, cars, under a truck, and on foot day and night for two weeks until they reached the US-Mexico border. The arduous journey proved to be the easy part. When the border agents checked Alva López’s fingerprints in the system, they saw she had tried to enter the United States once years before without success.
They told her that because she had a prior deportation, she couldn’t continue. But not only that. The agents then informed her that they would take Ederson away. “I told them, give me the boy,” she said. “I’ll sign the deportation and go back to Guatemala.”
“I told them, give me the boy. I’ll sign the deportation and go back to Guatemala.”
Despite her objections, Alva López was sent to the Eloy Detention Center, north of Tucson. She had no idea where Ederson was or with whom. Her requests for information either went unanswered or the responses came in the form of conflicting accounts: he had been moved to Texas; he had been sent to live with a different family.
The other detained women had their own theories. Some speculated the government would no longer return the children. Alva López worried she might go crazy. “I never really knew where he actually was,” she said. She knew that if she was sent back to Guatemala alone, she might never see her son again.
In correspondence with Molina in June 2018, a shelter worker remarked that Ederson was “reluctant to come to my office to participate in the call” with Alva López. “The minor was talkative and smiling; however, he would not respond to his mother on the phone,” the worker wrote.
“I never really knew where he actually was,” Alva López said.
She knew that if she was sent back to Guatemala alone, she might never see her son again.
While Alva López and Ederson remained in government custody, Trump’s then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions formally announced the “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute migrants crossing the border for “improper entry,” invoking the threat of family separations. The ACLU had by then found hundreds of cases of children who had been taken from their parents and placed under the care of ORR as if they were unaccompanied minors.
In court, lawyers tried to convey the urgency of the situation. “When you have little kids being separated,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project, told US District Court Judge Dana Sabraw, “18-month-olds, and they’re sitting there screaming and crying, please don’t let me be taken away, I think something needs to be done nationally.” Gelernt pleaded with the California judge, whom he said was the only person in a position to help children who had been “terrorized” by the government. Gelernt called it a “humanitarian crisis of the utmost proportions.”
In the summer of 2018, the public outcry over family separation reached a fever pitch, forcing President Donald Trump to decree the end of the practice. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said then. More than 2,800 children had been separated by that point, making up about a quarter of all kids in ORR custody. Only later did the full tally come to light: over 5,000 children had been separated. Hundreds of parents had been deported without their kids. To this day, some families still have not been reunited.
Alva López got emotional arriving in Miami. She thought she might never come back.Marta Lavandier/AP
The family took a train from Miami International Airport to West Palm Beach.Isabela Dias
“Not in our wildest dreams did we think that there were thousands and thousands of families, including babies and toddlers, who’ve been separated,” Gelernt said. “We also never dreamed that we would have to search all over the world to find these families. We’re still looking for families, and they’re still trying to get full remedy.”
Medical professionals warned that the negative emotional and psychological effects on children—toxic stress, hyperarousal, depression symptoms, socialization challenges—would extend far beyond eventual reunification with their parents. Experts called the policy “an act of state-sponsored child abuse.”
“We also never dreamed that we would have to search all over the world to find these families. We’re still looking for families, and they’re still trying to get full remedy.”
Michael Bochenek, a senior counsel to the children’s rights division of Human Rights Watch, interviewed kids and parents to document the consequences of family separation. He found that many children had developed mood swings, felt angry and anxious, woke up in the middle of the night with nightmares, started wetting the bed, or simply quit speaking. “You could see from the extreme nature of the new behaviors how traumatizing the experience of family separation had been for these children,” Bochenek said.
Those separations, Judge Sabraw said, ruptured a “sacred bond” between child and parent. In late June 2018, he sided with the ACLU and halted separations unless the parent was found to be unfit or a danger to the child. But the administration had no plan in place to reunite families, the judge said, stating that its systems to account for property were better than those for migrant children. He ordered the government to promptly reunify families, starting with kids under the age of five like Ederson.
Alva López’s sister Morelba said she knew she was going to come back.Rebecca Blackwell/AP
After trying and failing to prevent family separation, White had left ORR in March 2018 for what he described as a “demotional” role in disaster response policy. He later reflected that the 14 months he held the position of senior career official managing the unaccompanied children program had aged him 10 years.
But then the “zero tolerance” crisis blew up, and White was tapped to lead the reunification mission in response to the court order. He worked 18-hour days for a month. “We were doing everything we could to move these children as quickly as we could,” White told Congress at the time. His team eventually reunited 2,200 children who were still in the system.
On the eve of the court’s deadline, Molina got word that Alva López and Ederson would be reunified the next morning. Then, on July 10, parents started being released from detention. “Part of us were like, is this really happening?” Molina recalled.
Alva López said they took her to an office to meet Ederson after nearly five months apart. She had recently been given a photo of him. He looked healthy, with his hair combed and wearing a blue hoodie with checkered shorts, but his eyes seemed sad. Alva López couldn’t wait to hold him again.
When Ederson appeared, she felt that her three-year-old had changed. It was as if he didn’t recognize her and initially pulled away from her, crying. “He didn’t want to come with me,” Alva López recalled, as if it had just happened. “The first thing he said to me was, ‘Why did you leave me?’”
Molina saw a picture of Alva López and Ederson that day at a Greyhound bus station in Phoenix in a New York Times article about the first wave of family reunifications. The boy, dressed in a striped neon green t-shirt and grey shorts, sat on his mother’s lap holding an apple as she smiled at him. They looked happy. Molina was overcome with emotion.
In that moment, she thought, a wrong had been made right. But she also knew that their relationship had been indelibly transformed. “The reunification is beautiful,” Molina said, “but then there’s the repair work that has to happen because that separation left trauma, that separation left fear, that separation left a scar in a child’s mind.”
Now, nearly a decade after that photograph was taken, Molina asks herself if justice will ever be served for that family.
Back in West Palm Beach, the family has their first dinner at home.Rebecca Blackwell/AP
When they were first reunited, Alva López and Ederson settled with one of her sisters in a West Palm Beach working-class neighborhood not far from Trump’s lavish Mar-a-Lago estate and private club. A few months later, in December, 6-year-old Briseidy came from Guatemala to join them there. Her mother and little brother “ looked tired and sad,” she told me, her eyes filling with tears. “They didn’t look the same.”
Ederson was struggling. To explain the inexplicable—that he was only one of many children who had been ripped away from their parents as they tried to enter the United States—Alva López had told him he had been away to study. When he thought of school, it took him back to being around other boys and coloring at the shelter in Arizona. So he resisted going.
Once there, he had trouble interacting with other kids and making conversation. He became unusually vigilant at home, following Alva López’s every move, as if losing sight of her would mean she would disappear again. She had to sneak out to go to work mowing lawns, planting flowers, and picking up trash so he wouldn’t see her leave. “It got into his head,” she said, “that I was going to abandon him again.”
As the family worked to repair what had been broken, President Joe Biden came into office vowing to reckon with the “moral and national shame” of family separation. His administration launched a task force to reunify families who remained separated. And it started negotiations with the ACLU to resolve the Ms. L case. In late 2023, after two and a half years, they finally reached a settlement agreement. The organization hailed it as the most important settlement in its 103-year-old history.
The settlement restricted future systematic family separations at the border until at least 2031. It also guaranteed families assistance with behavioral health, medical, housing, and legal services. Crucially, they could apply for parole status and work authorization for a period of three years while buying time to seek asylum through a streamlined process.
“This is the worst thing I have seen in my 30 years doing this work. And I hope that the history books accurately reflect just how bad a period this was, and we never see it again.”
“This is the worst thing I have seen in my 30 years doing this work,” Gelernt told Judge Sabraw during a hearing about the settlement. “And I hope that the history books accurately reflect just how bad a period this was, and we never see it again.” The judge acknowledged that some children would likely never be found and become “permanently orphaned.” He also recognized that the settlement agreement fell short of addressing the families’ trauma and loss. “It’s unfortunate,” he said before approving the 46-page compact, “but we can only bring a certain amount of justice to all of this.”
Molina, now the Young Center’s executive director, had stayed in touch with Alva López over the years and encouraged her to register as a Ms. L class member so she could enjoy the benefits of the settlement. She referred Alva López to Kelly Kelly Albinak Kribs, an attorney with the organization’s technical assistance program.
Kribs had witnessed the chaos the first Trump administration had unleashed. The images of kids finally hugging their parents after months apart were permanently seared in her brain. The thought of the ones who hadn’t been reunited still haunted her. In some cases, Kribs had seen the very young children, like Ederson, blame their parents for the separation. Families she worked with sought therapy to try to make sense of what had been done to them.
“Many of them are still piecing their lives back together,” she said, “rebuilding bonds that were, I don’t want to say lost because I don’t want to give short shrift to the power of the love between a parent and a child, but certainly damaged, harmed, diminished.”
In 2024, Alva López connected with Seneca Family of Agencies, a government contractor running a case management program that linked families with free mental health services. The referral form noted: “Separated child having behavioral issues and having difficulties adjusting to school and learning.” Ederson started seeing a bilingual therapist.
The family also received parole status through at least July 2027, and Alva López got her work permit. That gave her a sense of security. And little by little, Ederson improved. He grew more responsive and engaged, and after several months, the therapist thought he no longer needed support. “At first he’s shy,” Briseidy said of her brother. “But then when he gets the confidence, he starts talking, joking around, and he likes to play a lot.”
When she was deported last summer, Alva López had valid legal status until July 2027.Isabela Dias
Not long after Ederson stopped his weekly sessions, everything changed. On Thursday, June 19, 2025, Alva López woke up at 5:30 a.m. to go to work. She took a ride to the landscaping company’s office, where she and her co-workers did some cleaning before heading out for the job of the day.
Alva López and three other workers from Mexico and Guatemala were riding a truck when law enforcement officers in light brown uniforms and a car labeled “trooper” stopped them, she said. She couldn’t identify the agency, but her description matches the Florida Highway Patrol. Palm Beach County has led the state’s counties in the number of immigration arrests by FHP troopers, putting Alva López’s neighbors—and Trump’s backyard—at the epicenter of the crackdown. (FHP didn’t respond to a list of questions from Mother Jones and an initial records request returned no results.)
Alva López handed the officers her work permit and brand-new driver’s license. She thought having employment authorization would protect her from immigration enforcement. It didn’t. The officers told Alva López to get out of the truck and handcuffed her. They didn’t explain why. She said she was taken to two different jails, still hoping that it was all a misunderstanding. But then she was moved to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana. “There was no opportunity for anything,” she said. No one bothered to ask if she had children who needed care.
A few days later, Molina was at the Phoenix airport coming back from a trip to San Diego, where her mother was being treated for cancer, when she received a call from an unknown WhatsApp number. It was Alva López. ICE had put her on a deportation flight, and by that Monday morning she had landed in Guatemala—without her children.
Molina was shocked. “Her child’s fear that they might be separated again comes to happen,” she said. “It happens again.” Molina realized that previously separated families weren’t going to get a “free pass” under the second Trump administration.
Alva López was reliving a nightmare. The first time she was separated from one child. Now she had been separated from both. When she called her sister to tell them she had been deported, Briseidy started crying. Ederson didn’t want to talk to her. He handed the phone back to his aunt.
“Her child’s fear that they might be separated again comes to happen.”
Alva López was one of the first Ms. L class members to be deported during Trump’s second term. Just a few days after she found herself back in Guatemala alone, another mother was deported there with her three kids, including a 14-year-old son who had been separated from his father at the border years earlier.
The woman, identified in legal filings by the pseudonym JJA, had shown up to a routine ICE check-in appointment. She said in a declaration she was told that if she didn’t cooperate, she was going to be separated from her children. In fear, JJA signed a document in English she couldn’t understand. It was a voluntary departure form. On June 27, 2025, she and the children were put on a flight to Guatemala.
Later that same day, Judge Sabraw ordered the Trump administration to stop removing people covered by the settlement. They didn’t. “The government has not only violated the settlement by detaining and removing people,” Gelernt said, “but they’ve even violated a specific court order that stayed any removal of class members.”
By then, Gelernt and the ACLU had returned to court trying to stop the Trump administration from chipping away at the hard-won settlement agreement on behalf of some 11,800 eligible class members and their close relatives. When the government ended a critical legal services assistance contract, leaving families in a months-long limbo and at risk of losing their status, the organization got the judge to reinstate it. It did the same for the behavioral health services program that had helped Ederson. The ACLU also managed to stop the administration from charging class members parole fees, which the settlement waived, but for many it was too late.
“The government really seems to be doing everything possible to back away from some of the promises made in the settlement agreement,” said Kayleen Hartman, managing director for family unit at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND). In some instances, the government’s willingness to ignore the settlement has made class members relive the trauma of the initial family separation.
“The government really seems to be doing everything possible to back away from some of the promises made in the settlement agreement.”
Last fall, one of KIND’s clients, a 19-year-old boy from Honduras, was picked up near Houston on the way to his tree-trimming job. He had a special immigrant juvenile status for young people who have been abused or abandoned and a work permit. Yet, unidentified officers took his documents and detained him anyway. The government then started trying to remove him.
While in ICE detention, he kept having flashbacks of his late mother, who had died when he was a child. He also thought back at the time he was separated from his father at the border. “My mind constantly returned to the last time I had been locked up when my father was taken away,” he said in a legal filing, “that feeling again of being all alone in the world, of not knowing what was going to happen or why this was happening to me.”
The teenager was released after about two months. But ICE gave no reason for his detention. “The story that this case tells is really one of detain first,” Hartman said, “ask questions later.” (ICE didn’t respond to questions about this case or other detained and deported Ms. L class members.)
In June, I reached out to Anilú Chadwick, the legal strategy and pro bono senior director at Together & Free—an organization that formed in 2018 in response to “zero tolerance”—to interview her for this story. She replied in an email that she was busy trying to get a class member with valid parole status released from detention so he could attend the emergency C-section birth of his child. “The perpetuation of forcible separation upon this group,” Chadwick wrote me, “is never ending.”
Chadwick said Ms. L families are being subjected to stricter reporting to ICE and called in for more regular check-ins. “The cases seem to be coming back to life,” she said of people who have complied with requirements for years.
The kids had a hard time adjusting to life in San Martín Cuchumatán, Guatemala.Moises Castillo/AP
That was the case of Sinri Baltazar, a mother of three who was deported to Honduras last July. ICE put her on a more intensive supervision program and placed her on ankle monitors, which caused her to be fired from her janitorial job. The agency also scheduled her for 11 check-in appointments in the span of two months, which made it difficult to keep regular employment. Those conditions created a snowball effect; her landlord threatened to evict her, and she struggled to buy food. Baltazar’s hair started falling due to stress, and her kids lost weight. Her daughter, who was five when they were separated in 2018, began to wet the bed.
Immigration officers repeatedly told Baltazar that she had a voluntary departure order and pressed her to self-deport. In a moment of desperation, she said they should just send her back to Honduras, but then retracted it. Still, ICE agents took her and the children to a motel and, on the same date she had been reunited with her daughter seven years earlier, they deported her. “It was a very horrifying and traumatizing experience,” Chadwick said.
For some families, the burden of detention and the threat of re-separation prove too much. Marien Velez-Alcaide of Al Otro Lado, a legal and humanitarian aid group, said she helped a father who decided not to fight his case and agreed to leave the country because he couldn’t support his wife and two young kids while detained. The family returned to Guatemala together, but one of the children became sick and passed away. “A lot of class members are saying that they’re just going to have to go back,” Velez-Alcaide said, “because they can’t make it here.”
In court, the ACLU challenged the detention of class members as baseless. It also asked the judge to order the Trump administration to return at government expense four families covered by the settlement. One of those families was Alva López and her children.
“You would think that the Trump administration, after the pushback they got the first time from the entire world, would say, we understand this policy was wrong, we understand it was morally offensive, we will never do anything like that again, and we will try to help all these families,” Gelernt said. “But far from that. They have gone ahead and tried to get around the settlement every chance they can, including even detaining and deporting these traumatized families.”
Ederson and Briseidy arrived back home after almost a year in Guatemala.Isabela Dias
Alva López, Ederson, and Briseidy moved back in with her sister and her five children.Isabela Dias
When Alva López landed in Guatemala last summer, she returned to her parents’ home in San Martín Cuchumatán. But she couldn’t stand the thought of being separated from her kids. Ederson and Briseidy were torn: they wanted to be with their mother, but that would mean leaving their stable American life behind.
“At first I said probably I’m going to stay,” Briseidy said. “But then the next day I thought about being with my mom and my brother, and it wasn’t going to be the same if I stayed by myself. Nothing was going to be the same.”
Alva López was committed to keeping her family together—no matter where. She asked her sister to put them on a commercial flight to Guatemala. When the kids arrived, the school semester was already underway, and it took Alva López time to get the translated documents from their Florida schools. By the time they resumed their studies months later, Ederson, who was repeating fourth grade, had difficulty following the lessons in Spanish. He didn’t feel understood by the teachers and was falling behind.
In the beginning, Ederson kept asking why his mother had gotten on the truck the day of her arrest. Por qué te subiste al camiôn, mami? He even came up with a song for her using her middle name: “They deported Maricela, because of Maricela we’re in Guatemala.” He felt lost, away from friends, from his school, from a reassuring routine. “It’s your fault we’re here,” he’d say. “Because if you hadn’t gotten on the truck, we wouldn’t be here.” Alva López got Ederson a puppy to cheer him up, and he named him Tobi. Then Tobi became ill and died.
“It’s not easy at all coming back without planning,” she told me a few months after having arrived in Guatemala. Everything felt different in their single-room adobe brick house. Back in Florida, they had a bedroom the three of them shared. The kids craved burgers and sushi. They asked Alva López when they would be able to go back. Después, despuesito. Later, a little later, she would tell them, because she didn’t have a better answer.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration was pushing back on the ACLU’s motion to bring the families back, claiming the settlement didn’t shield them from detention or deportation. The civil rights group insisted that the government had to return class members to the status quo they were in before they were wronged, and to pay for it. Passing onto families the cost of redressing the administration’s mistakes would “make a mockery” of the settlement, the attorneys said.
Last fall, the government quietly agreed to bring Alva López and her children back to the United States—but it would not cover their travel expenses. Months went by, and Alva López waited for them to facilitate their return. Then, in February, Judge Sabraw stepped in. He determined that the deportations of families like Alva López’s were unlawful, involved “lies, deception, and coercion,” and violated the “spirit” of the Ms. L settlement agreement.
Judge Sabraw ordered the administration to pay for their return, including Alva López and her children. Thirteen people—between class members and their relatives—have come back to the United States so far, according to the ACLU. Baltazar, the mother from Honduras, also was able to return with her children.
Ederson, 11, said he was grateful to God to be back in Florida.Isabela Dias
The Trump administration has appealed the judge’s ruling. In an email, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said it “complies with all court orders, even as radical NGOs shop for the most favorable forum and activist judges seek to thwart our operations.” The spokesperson also said that parole is discretionary, “temporary in nature and does not confer any legal status.” They added that DHS is still working on bringing families back and that they would be returned to the same status they had before being deported.
Over Memorial Day weekend, Alva López received the long-awaited news: ICE had approved their return to the United States on parole. They had flight tickets for Thursday, May 28. They packed, said goodbye to their relatives, and went to Guatemala City, where they stayed in a hotel waiting for the travel day.
Briseidy and Ederson said they weren’t going to miss much about Guatemala other than their extended family. Ederson’s most precious memento was a gift from his uncle—a limited-edition LA Dodgers hat depicting the Last Supper and decorated with black stones.
Finally, the day arrived. After less than three hours in the air, the family arrived at the Miami International Airport. It took them almost as much time to get through customs, even though Alva López carried a letter from Kribs explaining their case. Briseidy helped translate for Alva López. They said the officers asked why she was returning to the United States if she had already been deported. Eventually, they were let through.
“While I’m happy for these families who are in the process of being returned, what about the families that we haven’t identified?”
“I thought I’d never come back here,” Alva López said, her voice overcome with emotion. “But thank God I’m back.”
The whole saga left Kribs reflecting on the “Herculean” effort it took to correct a wrongdoing for one single family. “While I’m happy for these families who are in the process of being returned, what about the families that we haven’t identified?” she said. “I’m certain there have been class members who’ve been deported who weren’t connected with a zealous advocate who could raise their case to the ACLU and seek this type of relief. How do we right those wrongs? I just fear that we never will.”
Even for returned families, being back on US soil may be far from a resolution. Lawyers and advocates I interviewed worry that more people might fall through the cracks once the current contract for legal services expires, especially as looming settlement-mandated deadlines hit. With their parole status set to run out in the next several months, thousands of class members could be left in a legal limbo and exposed to immigration enforcement. And for the vast majority of families, asylum remains an elusive promise. “It’s a perfect storm,” Chadwick of Together & Free said. “It feels like a race against the clock.”
Alva López was relieved to return but she still worried about her immigration status.Isabela Dias
The sun sat low in the sky by the time Alva López, Ederson, and Briseidy arrived at her sister’s home in West Palm Beach. The house, where Morelba has lived for 14 years, looked familiar—the wall hangings with verses from the Psalms; Salomón, the parakeet. Soon, Morelba returned from church, and the two sisters embraced and cried. “I knew you would come back,” Morelba said. “I knew it. God gave me a dream that you were with me again, and so it was.”
They ate pepián de pollo and drank pineapple agua fresca. But there were reminders that Alva López and her kids had been away for several months. The bunk bed Ederson and Briseidy used to share in one of the three bedrooms was gone. And when Alva López went to hug the youngest of Morelba’s five children, the two-year-old girl dodged the embrace. It reminded her of how Ederson behaved when they first reunited after the separation.
“Little by little we are healing the wounds,” she said, “and putting everything back in its place again.”
The neighborhood was also changing. Alva López noticed new construction sites and family homes giving way to luxury condominium and hotel developments. What struck her the most was the silence. The streets felt eerily quiet, and the shops looked empty.
“But it’s not that it’s closed,” Morelba said. “It’s because people are afraid to go out.” On the last day of school before summer vacation, Morelba drove her minivan to Northboro Elementary to pick up kids who weren’t her own and drop them off at home because parents didn’t feel safe leaving the house—even to buy groceries. Just the day before, she had seen an ICE car driving around. Now that Alva López had returned, people in the community were calling to ask how she did it and for her lawyer’s number.
Alva López is looking forward to working again, maybe back to landscaping where she was making $14 an hour, and hoping to earn enough money to find their own place close to her sister. But without a work permit, she feels vulnerable. Fearing that she might be whisked off again, Ederson doesn’t want her to work outside. The last Alva López knew, of the three people in the truck with her when she was arrested, two had also been deported, and one was still in detention.
Still, it was a relief to be back in the United States. Maybe they could buy time until a change in the presidential administration. But that reprieve proved short-lived. The day after their return, Kribs talked to Alva López on the phone. She welcomed her back to the United States and asked Alva López to send her photos of the forms the immigration officers had stamped at the airport.
Kribs reviewed the documents and called back with devastating news. She told Alva López that they had only been admitted into the country for two weeks. That was a lot less time than her pre-deportation parole status, which was valid through another year, afforded them. After everything her family had gone through, they could soon be right back to square one, having to reapply for permission to stay in the country. In the meantime, they would be unprotected.
“It is outrageous to me that the government essentially admitted their mistake when they agreed to return Mirsy,” Kribs said, “and yet she has to go through the bureaucratic process of re-applying for an immigration status she’s entitled to and that they erroneously stripped her of.”
When she got the news, the fragile world that Alva López had created and had fought for came crashing down. In the house, the smell of fried chicken filled the air, and the kids played, oblivious. Standing outside by herself, feeding lettuce leaves to a pet rabbit, Alva López couldn’t hold back tears. “I don’t want to go through the same thing again,” she said. “I have to keep waiting and waiting and waiting. It’s a never-ending story.”
Eduardo Say contributed reporting from Guatemala.
The lawyer told Alva López that her family had only been admitted into the US for a few weeks.Isabela Dias
