The New Yorker:

On May 5th, just after midnight, a Honduran woman named Ana Rivera and her five-year-old son, Jairo, tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. They were caught scaling a fence in El Paso, and spent the night in a holding cell at a U.S. Border Patrol station with other mothers and children, a group of about twenty-five people in all. On the afternoon of their second day in detention, two male agents entered the cell. “They didn’t say anything,” Rivera told me. “They just walked over and grabbed Jairo. It felt like my son was stuck to me. He clung to me, cried and screamed. They had to pull him away.” She pleaded with the agents to tell her what was going on. The other women in the cell were too stunned to speak, Rivera told me. In the next few hours, the agents started taking other children, too. Eventually, the mothers were told that they would be reunited with their children after spending a few days in jail.

Nearly six weeks later, Rivera has not seen her son. Shortly after the Border Patrol agents took Jairo, she signed a voluntary-departure order, which fast-tracked her for deportation. She’d been confused, she told me, and thought that signing would allow her to see her son sooner. Instead, she was charged with illegal entry, held for a few days in criminal custody, in New Mexico, and then was sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) center back in Texas. On Monday, I visited her in a small, unfurnished room with white cinderblock walls at the ICE Processing Center, in El Paso, where she’s now waiting to be deported.

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