‘I Think It Will Happen Again if Trump Is the President’: The Ongoing Trauma of Family Separation

LOS ANGELES — It’s been almost seven years since border agents separated Angelina from her father, and she’s been drawing just about constantly ever since.

Today, in the small apartment in west Los Angeles where she lives, she’s filling in the crevices of a plastic tiara with a black ink pen. And coloring on the tablecloth. And drawing on a white rose petal she plucked from a vase on the kitchen table. And doodling in her notebook. As I sit with her and her father, Teodoro, and ask them to recount some of the loneliest, most uncertain moments of their lives, she seems to fill in all the empty spaces around her.

If you ask why the 15-year-old doodles on everything she can get her hands on, she’ll tell you, simply, that she loves art. But the real answer is more complicated than that. It’s what she did during those long months she spent in homes with other migrant children after she was separated from her father under Donald Trump’s family separation policy.

Coloring was a tool often used to pacify children like Angelina. In the fall of 2017, when Customs and Border Patrol officials forcibly separated the 8-year-old from her father after they illegally crossed the border in Arizona, they told her not to worry. At her destination, she’d be given supplies to color and draw.

This was before the Trump administration officially implemented his “zero-tolerance” family separation policy, which was on the books from April to June 2018.

Later, the Biden administration’s review of government data would reveal that, along some parts of the border, the policy went into effect roughly a year earlier, making it difficult to capture its full impact. Under the policy, the Justice Department initiated criminal prosecutions of every adult illegally crossing the border, and because children can’t be imprisoned with their parents, they were placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is run by the Health and Human Services Department, the agency that has been responsible for the care and placement of unaccompanied minors since 2003. The goal of the policy was to deter migrant families, who had been traveling to the U.S. in large numbers, from making the journey in the first place. Last year, when asked during a CNN town hall if he would reinstate the policy in a second term, Trump said: “When you have that policy, people don’t come. If a family hears that they’re going to be separated — they love their family — they don’t come. I know it sounds harsh.”

Building on lawsuits that challenged the family separation policy, Biden administration data indicates that Angelina was one of about 5,000 children separated from their families by the Trump administration.

Even today, one of the most controversial immigration measures in modern history is not fully understood. Children like Angelina were spread across the country, sent to shelters and foster homes, and challenged with navigating a daunting immigration system without their parents. In some cases, attorneys even carried infants into court to appear before a judge, who would read out the charges against them.

President Joe Biden established a task force to locate and reunite separated families when he first took office, but reunification has proven incredibly difficult, in part because the Trump administration had no formalized process for keeping records on them. The Biden administration estimates that more than 1,400 of these families have not been reunited, though about 300 are in the process of reunification or have been contacted by the administration’s reunification task force. It’s difficult to know where the remaining families are now, but the Biden administration believes that some have reunited on their own; other children were released to family members already residing in the U.S., and some likely ended up in the U.S. foster care system. Even today, separated families continue to come forward, DHS officials told POLITICO Magazine.

While they’re no longer on front-page headlines, even families who have been reunited — like Teodoro and Angelina — have emerged from the experience with invisible scars.

What happened to Teodoro and Angelina would change the course of their lives forever. They would be separated for months, at a critical part of her childhood, with little and often no information about when or even if they’d ever see each other again. In the face of a system that showed little interest in maintaining family contact, it was up to 8-year-old Angelina, coached during the brief phone calls she managed to get with her family back home, to convince the U.S. government to reunite them.

They still have a long, uncertain road ahead to remain in the United States long term. The family is preparing to apply for asylum, and POLITICO Magazine is not using their last names to protect their identity and safety. They are deeply fearful of a second Trump presidency.

This is Teodoro’s and Angelina’s story, told as best they can remember through the most traumatic seven months of their lives. POLITICO Magazine verified documents that indicate Teodoro and Angelina were separated under Trump’s policy, and confirm that they were consequently authorized to return to the United States in 2022 under the Biden administration. We also spoke to experts in the immigration and legal space about the family separation policy and its ongoing impact on thousands of families like Teodoro and Angelina’s.

This family’s experience provides a window into the ongoing human toll of a policy that the United States still has not fully reckoned with seven years later. And it explains how the Trump administration approached immigration — and how the former president could approach it again as he vows to implement mass deportations if he wins the White House.

the arrival

They arrived at the Arizona border on Dec. 12, 2017, at 3 a.m. The taxi cab headlights cast a light on a large tree towering before them, the number 7 on a sign nailed to its trunk — Teodoro wasn’t sure why. This was the place where they would cross over.

It had taken 16 days to travel to the border from their home in Guatemala, where Teodoro worked as a chauffeur. Crime there had increased, and gang members believed the chauffeurs made a lot of money. Local gangs had already threatened and killed other drivers, and he feared he could be next. He and his wife, Monica, decided he should flee to America first and establish a life there. The two youngest of their three kids were too young to make the journey. But he’d take their eldest child, Angelina, 8, so she could study while he found work. He paid a coyote about $5,000 to help them make the journey.

Before they boarded the bus, Teodoro and Angelina took one last photo together in front of their church in Guatemala, the girl wearing a purple puffer coat and carrying a small backpack, trying not to think about the fact that it could be years before she saw her brother and sister again. Teodoro cried as he squeezed his wife and each one of his children tightly.

After two days on a bus, they transferred to the truck that would take them through Mexico, traveling only at night. Twenty migrants huddled together in the darkness, muttering prayers. Teodoro held Angelina close, fearful that someone might take her. He’d heard the horrific tales — many migrants never complete the trip. Some die, some are murdered, others sleep in the streets and are victims of gang violence and rape.

“That’s the only way we were safe, was praying,” Teodoro says now.

As they got closer to the U.S. border, the migrants were told to get off the truck. The group dispersed, as Teodoro and Angelina finished the last leg of the journey with another father and daughter heading the same direction. They hopped in a taxi cab in Mexico and asked the driver to take them to the border.

When they arrived, the driver stopped several meters from the towering wall and pointed to a tree positioned in front of the 30-foot border barrier. “That’s how you get over,” he said.

Teodoro lifted his daughter to climb the lower branches one by one. She stopped midway, letting him pass as they climbed higher so he could guide her across the branch hanging over the wall. The other father and daughter followed their lead.

Teodoro looked at the long drop and scanned the area around him. He spotted a pipe, sliding his body down first and encouraging the others to do the same. On the ground, they sat on the hard, dusty surface to wait to be picked up by Border Patrol.

the detention

It was just 30 minutes before they saw headlights. The Border Patrol agent hopped out of the driver’s seat and told the four of them to get into the truck. The cold air conditioning chilled their warm, tired bodies. Angelina curled up in Teodoro’s lap, as the other little girl quietly passed her a donut from her backpack. She devoured the small dessert and immediately fell asleep as they drove for two hours through the Arizona darkness.

It was still pitch black outside when they pulled up to the Customs and Border Patrol processing center. Hundreds of migrants lay on the floor, split up into rooms divided by glass walls and organized by how they’d arrived. Teodoro and Angelina were put in a room with other parents and children, who were already hunkered under foil blankets. A cart rolled by, and Angelina got a cup of noodles and a juice.

the separation

Teodoro

They were just going to take his daughter for a little while, the agent said, so she could get some rest. Teodoro hugged Angelina before she was led out of the room. A few minutes later, he was taken to another glass-walled room full of other men.

He didn’t know it yet, but this was the moment his daughter was taken from him. It’s how it often happened. There wasn’t a loud, dramatic struggle. Teodoro thought he would see her again soon. He wouldn’t.

The next morning, an agent shackled Teodoro’s hands and feet, along with seven other men in the room, loading them onto a bus. He asked an agent where his daughter was, when he would see her.

“You should’ve thought about that before you came,” the man replied.

Angelina

Angelina wasn’t sad when she left her dad, she wasn’t even scared — she would see him soon. The 8-year-old was handed a folder of her father’s documents and told to hold on to them. The agent walked her to a room with other children, and excitement welled in her chest: Maybe they could play together, like her siblings used to.

These are the types of memories that stand out as Angelina recounts her story — other children, positive reinforcements, toys, food. Distractions, things that could at least temporarily appease a child separated from her father.

When Angelina and the other kids climbed into a van, she asked the driver where they were going. He didn’t say, but he told her not to worry, that she would be able to color and draw soon.

“[Drawing] becomes their way of feeling, because they’re in these environments for so long,” said Anilú Chadwick, the pro bono director at Together & Free, which has worked with families who were separated under the Trump administration’s policy. “Time stands still — and this is for a child. The most haunting part of a shelter is not hearing rambunctious laughter or screams, it’s the dead silence.”

The building they walked into reminded Angelina of a school cafeteria. She stood in a line of a couple of dozen kids. Someone handed her a backpack of clothes and a pair of shoes. A woman, not dressed in uniform, but in civilian clothes, brushed and washed her hair, before directing her to the showers to wash up.

Angelina was now in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Trump’s policy was unique in that it created unaccompanied minors, funneling kids into an existing system and sending them to shelters or foster care after separating them from their parents. Angelina, just 8 at the time, was first placed in foster care. She remembers thinking she was safe — she had made it to the U.S., the worst part was over. She thought she would see her dad again soon.

the helpless days

Teodoro

No one would answer his questions.

He met with a woman who told him she was handling his case, but even now, he couldn’t tell you who she was — likely an attorney provided to him by the state. Teodoro was cited on illegal entry and detained for a week in criminal custody before he was transferred to a detention facility in Florence, Arizona. He says the windowless building was filled with hundreds of bunk beds — its eerie silence suffocating. The migrants hardly spoke, they just cycled through the monotonous days in silence, not knowing where the sun was overhead, except for on Sundays when they were taken out to the yard to run.

Teodoro had stopped sleeping and eating, rapidly shedding the little weight he carried on his small frame. He spent those long days in a cycle of crying and praying, before a guard took him to see a doctor.

“One thing that gets lost is the trauma experienced by the parents, who day after day sat in detention centers wondering whether they would ever see their child again or whether their child was safe,” says Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney who led the lawsuit that ended the family separation policy. “And even after reuniting, the parents had to live with their young children asking them whether they allowed them to be taken because they didn’t love them anymore, too young to understand their parents were helpless to prevent it.”

He was prescribed pills to take each day — likely psychiatric drugs that were often prescribed to separated parents — adding to his exhaustion. It was common for migrants separated from their children to spiral into depression during this period, with some even contemplating or committing suicide while in detention.

The days blurred together in Teodoro’s mind. He focused on memories of Angelina’s face.

Angelina

Angelina was taken to a home in Arizona with a guardian she calls “the elderly woman.” She doesn’t remember her name, but she remembers her short gray hair, her kind demeanor.

Angelina says she felt safe in the first home, and that she was fed and taken care of. This wasn’t always the case, says Chadwick, who worked with migrant children separated from their parents in the years after the separation policy. The shelters and foster homes didn’t have children’s medical records, so they didn’t know about allergies or specific health needs. Young kids, some infants, cried uncontrollably without their parents. In other cases, there were reports of kids being forcibly injected with psychiatric drugs, and of sexual abuse. Chadwick says that she once represented a young child who was sexually abused in ORR care.

Angelina’s days in the house were structured. She shared a room with two other girls; boys had a room down the hall. She would put on her blue or purple school uniform, depending on the day, and get on the bus each morning to go to a public school in Arizona.

She remembers the good moments the most: Trips to McDonald’s and Burger King, little tickets they received to get treats at school in celebration of a birthday. She smiles now as she remembers one of the boys being very “naughty,” always talking about all the clothes he wanted to buy. Then there was a trip to see Santa around Christmas. She got a small bag of toys filled with ponies, small purses and nail polish.

Then, things changed. The naughty boy left — she didn’t know where he went. The two other girls also disappeared. The other children departed, one by one, until Angelina was alone. The elderly woman never talked about it, and she never asked Angelina about her family, either.

At bedtime, when there was nothing to distract her, no other kids to whisper with at night, she began to wonder when she might see her dad again. Did the other girls go back home? Were they taken to their parents?

“In the early days, when I was going into the ORR shelters to interview the children, to get information about their parents and try to find them — the older the child got, the quieter they became,” Chadwick says. “There’s just like this stillness. And I always find that the most haunting, because you could see the real-time psychological impact that these circumstances were having on the children.”

Crying became part of Angelina’s nighttime routine. She’d pull out the notebook the elderly woman gave her, filling the pages with drawings of roses and mountains as she tried to calm herself.

the photo

Teodoro

In the middle of the night, Teodoro and other migrants were shackled, put on another bus and taken to the airport. An agent said they were flying to Denver. All Teodoro could think was he was getting farther and farther away from Angelina, wherever she was.

He would spend what he believes was two months in another detention center with hundreds of migrants. It was difficult to know. The days ran together, and he was still deeply depressed, taking the drugs prescribed to him by the doctor.

Teodoro was sitting on the ground one day, dozing in and out of sleep, when out of nowhere a woman walked over to him and handed him a photo of Angelina, with a phone number scribbled on a piece of paper. It was at least a few weeks after Christmas now, but the photo was of Angelina sitting on Santa’s lap.

“She won’t stop crying,” the woman said before walking away.

For Teodoro to have received that picture, a lot of steps had to happen behind the scenes, Chadwick says. Whether it was Angelina’s foster care parent or a legal service provider assigned to her case, that person was engaged, noticing the young girl’s crying and using their ICE contacts to track down her father.

Teodoro broke down, his face collapsing into his hands. A guard asked him what was wrong, Teodoro struggling to speak through his tears. The man handed Teodoro his personal cell phone to call her — he had just five minutes. Teodoro would find these people along the way, guards who would take pity on him in moments of despair.

He cleared his throat and wiped his face before dialing the number. He couldn’t let Angelina hear his voice break.

“I’m good, I’m OK, I’m here,” Teodoro said, covering his mouth with his hand to muffle his cries. “You’re OK, don’t cry.”

He couldn’t tell her how scared he really was.

Angelina

Angelina thought they were taking her to see her dad.

It was a normal day at school when she was called into the office. A suitcase of her clothes was there, waiting for her. Her toys from Christmas had been left behind. The elderly woman had passed along a message, wishing Angelina luck. She never saw her again.

The second place was different from the elderly woman’s house. Angelina says there were more than 100 other kids, and a cast of rotating adults who took care of them — a description that matches shelter care. Signs on the walls outlined instructions for keeping the rooms tidy. Kids were often moved around to different homes or facilities without warning, sometimes due to an assessment of their needs, other times due to shelter capacity — but these reasons often weren’t explained to the kids.

At the center, Angelina shared a room with bunk beds with three other girls around her age, but there were kids of all ages throughout the building. She remembers older boys and girls, some of whom, she says, were pregnant.

She found new distractions. The young girls would talk after school. There were Zumba classes in the common area and supplies to make bracelets. There were more kids, but it was somehow even lonelier. She missed her mom, her brother and sister. She missed her dad. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know when she would see any of them again. She couldn’t stop crying.

That was when she got the first call from Teodoro. The adults at the facility allowed her to call her mom, too, just for five minutes. Her mom cried as Angelina tried to comfort her. She told her she was being fed, that she didn’t know where her dad was, but that she was OK.

the return

Teodoro

Anytime Teodoro saw the guard who lent him his cell phone, he asked if he could borrow it again to call Angelina. He was able to talk with her three more times in the weeks ahead.

At the Denver detention facility, the other migrants began to discuss paperwork the guards were circulating. An ICE agent told Teodoro if he signed it, he would be able to see his daughter again. But other migrants told him not to sign it, that it was a paper to be deported. He scribbled his signature on the document anyway, thinking it might be his only chance.

He was taken to an airport in Florence, Arizona, his feet and hands shackled once again. Panicked chatter went down the line of migrants, as one man told Teodoro they were being sent back to Guatemala. Teodoro stopped an agent, asking where his daughter was.

“I signed a paper to see her,” he said.

The agent walked away and said he would go ask someone about it. But Teodoro was shoved along and loaded onto the plane. He knew then he was leaving without her.

He had no money, no shoe laces and no belt when he landed in Guatemala City in March of 2018. He was given five minutes to call Monica so he could tell her to meet him at a bus station in Coban. His voice shook as he told her he didn’t have their little girl.

“What do you mean? Where is she?” Monica cried. “What can we do to get her back?”

At the bus station they crumbled into each other’s arms.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” Teodoro said. His thin arms, withered from all the weight he lost, wrapped around her.

“It’s my fault, too. I’m so sorry,” she told him.

They walked to a nearby church, where they would spend the night on the floor, and they prayed.

the long months

Teodoro

Some parents returned to their home countries so traumatized, they refused to speak. Others committed suicide because they were filled with shame returning to their communities without their child.

The next four months were grueling for Teodoro. It was painful for him to try to answer his younger children’s questions. When was their sister coming back? Where was she? Why didn’t she come back with him?

He rested for just two days before returning to his job as a chauffeur and tending to their farmland. Each week at 3 p.m. on Saturdays, they waited for a five-minute phone call from Angelina, trying to glean little bits of information about where she was and how they could get her home.

They still didn’t know what state she was in or where she was living. They only knew what their 8-year-old told them — that she was OK, there was food, she was going to school. Teodoro didn’t know what to do or whom he could call, other than to tell Angelina that she must tell the other adults that she wanted to go home.

“You need to tell them you want to be deported, that your family needs you,” Teodoro said.

This was how it often worked for these families. While there was a legal service provider assigned to Angelina’s ORR facility to help her navigate the immigration system, much of the burden still falls on the children themselves to communicate between the parents, the shelter and the attorneys.

Angelina

Angelina made friends at the second home. But there were moments when she couldn’t tame the growing ache inside her. She felt deeply alone knowing that her dad was back in Guatemala. That her entire family was there without her. It made it worse when she watched other kids leave. Her family felt so far away.

“As the medical community explained, a young child’s brain structure is not equipped to handle the unbearable stress of a prolonged separation,” said Gelernt, the ACLU attorney. “Parents who have experienced a crying child left on the first day of school can only imagine what it would have been like to see a 3-year-old begging and screaming not to be taken away as their parents stood helplessly by.”

The day she was taken to court, she knew she had to do what her dad told her. Angelina and other children were placed in a large room while they waited their turns before the judge, staying quiet like the adults instructed. She met once more with her attorney to ensure she understood what was about to happen, that she still wanted to go back to Guatemala. Then she sat beside her attorney at a long table before the judge. Some of the even younger kids would cling to their legal service providers, holding their hands as they walked down the aisle. The babies had to be carried.

Angelina confirmed her name, her date of birth and her home country. Her attorney confirmed that Angelina admitted to the allegations that she had crossed the border illegally, that she agreed to be removed and wanted to be deported back to Guatemala. She wouldn’t find out until weeks later that she was going home, when they told her to pack her bags.

Angelina was taken to the airport with other kids and handed a lunch sack with juice. She was given a physical before being loaded onto the plane with strangers.

Teodoro

It was July 2018 when, without warning, Teodoro received a phone call telling him to be in Guatemala City the next morning to pick up his daughter. It had been seven months since he’d last seen Angelina — five months since he’d left the United States without her.

Their other kids were ecstatic and begged to make the trip with them, so Teodoro and Monica paid for the family to ride the bus from Coban to the capital. They arrived at 7 a.m. to the Guatemalan government’s immigration office, where they waited for hours for Angelina.

One of the workers noticed her first. “Here comes your daughter,” he said. Angelina sprinted through the doors and ran straight into Teodoro’s arms.

Monica wrapped her arms around both of them, and the other two kids joined in on the embrace, clinging to Angelina as tightly as they could.

today

Teodoro’s entire family wouldn’t return to the U.S. again until 2022 — this time legally. Because they are class members of a legal settlement known as Ms. L., et al. v. ICE, an organization contracted by the federal government reached out to the family, managed their paperwork and helped them get the necessary travel documents to return to the U.S. While Biden’s executive order had launched the process of widespread reunification in the U.S., the settlement formalized the procedures and helped provide repayment in the form of medical and mental health care, legal support and housing assistance. It also directed the government to continue identifying separated families, to fund their reunification in the U.S. and to provide a pathway for them to seek asylum here. Teodoro’s family now lives in Los Angeles under parole, which allows them to remain in the country on a temporary basis.

It’s been challenging for the Biden administration to reunite a number of these families. They found that some families don’t trust a government that separated them, which prevents the Biden administration from helping reunite them. As of March this year, more than 3,300 children had been reunited, about 800 thanks to the efforts of a reunification task force Biden established via executive order.

For those who are now reunited in the U.S., there is still no long-term solution. “Creating a durable immigration status for these individuals is a real challenge because we are the only authorities that we have,” says a senior DHS official, granted anonymity to speak about the policy. “We used our authority of parole to bring these families back, but that is a temporary solution. Getting legislation or something that actually creates a durable immigration status for them is critical.”

Teodoro’s family lives every day with that uncertainty, but they’re getting by with the help of a nonprofit organization — Together and Free — that supports separated families with legal and financial resources. Teodoro doesn’t like having to rely on help to pay their bills. He works at a factory down the street from their apartment, packaging jewelry. They have a roof over their heads, even though the space is tight and he worries that the area isn’t safe for his young kids.

The 2023 Ms. L. legal settlement between the Biden administration and the ACLU bars the federal government, except in specific cases where evidence suggests it is warranted, from implementing another blanket zero-tolerance policy for the next eight years. But Trump has promised mass deportation at a scale never before seen in American history, and he has sidestepped questions about whether or not he would try to bring back his old policy. A new data analysis from FWD.US, an immigration advocacy group, found that 1 in 3 Latinos are at risk of deportation or family separation under Trump’s current proposals.

The kids don’t talk much about the months Angelina was gone. They’d rather talk about school: They grin with excitement talking about their favorite subjects, the sports they like to play, their hobbies.

And as they sit here around the kitchen table talking, there’s a photo hanging on the wall behind them. It’s the one of Angelina and Teodoro in 2017, standing in front of the church on the day they left Guatemala. Teodoro was so scared to lose the original that he printed a larger copy and plastered it to the wall so none of them would forget. They pass by it dozens of times a day, a reminder of what they went through to get here.

But it’s also a reminder that it cost them parts of themselves they’ll never get back.

Teodoro says his brain is permanently “sick,” unable to stop sorting through the haunting images of those months. He still has nightmares when he tries to sleep.

Angelina gets nervous around people she doesn’t know. It’s hard for her to trust people. And she doesn’t like to be alone — panic rises in her chest when no one else is around. It’s gotten easier for her to talk about the separation. She used to break down in tears, unable to speak as she tried to recount those months. But as she’s gotten older, she’s learned she can talk through it slowly, taking breaks if she gets too overwhelmed. She wants people to know her story, to know how scared she still is.

“It will happen again if Trump is the president,” Angelina says. “He will do much worse than he did to us.”

She looks back down at her notebook, returning to her drawing.

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