Years after being split up and reunited, a family gets caught in Trump’s immigration dragnet.Mirsy Alva López (center) with son Ederson and daughter Briseidy in Guatemala City. Eduardo SayIt 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 SayTo 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 SayThe 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 hisconcerns 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.San Martín Cuchumatán in Guatemala's highlands. Moises Castillo/APWhile 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/APThe 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/APAfter 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 app