Rosario spent two weeks in detention in rural Georgia, too far away to
visit. Fanny and Alejandro pleaded with her lawyer to do something, but
the lawyer was out of options. The day her mother was deported back to
Mexico, Fanny was with the family of one of Alejandro’s old friends from
school, Laura, whom Alejandro trusted to look after Fanny while he was
at work. Alejandro came to see her there when he heard the news.
‘‘I want you to be strong,’’ he told her. ‘‘Mom called earlier. She’s
already on the border.’’
‘‘Please tell me you’re playing,’’ Fanny said, and she started to hyper-
ventilate in Alejandro’s arms.
Laura’s mother came outside. ‘‘Everything’s going to be O.K.,’’ she
promised, and some days Fanny could almost believe it, and some
days she couldn’t.
The fi rst few weeks after Rosario’s deportation, Fanny and Rosario used
FaceTime or WhatsApp to speak at least once a day, but Fanny wasn’t
used to talking to her mother like this. Fanny had known for years that
her mother didn’t have legal status, but that hadn’t seemed to matter,
at least until Rosario’s arrest. One day, a daughter’s citizenship and a
mother’s lack of it amounted to little more than a
piece of paper; the next, it was an iron barricade.
Stories like theirs had been common for years in
the fast-diversifying Atlanta suburbs. Long before the
Trump administration began separating immigrant
children from their parents at the border, deportation
was dividing immigrant parents from their Ameri-
can families, never more so than under the Obama
administration. But a case like Rosario’s most likely could have occurred
only after Trump took offi ce. Rosario was a single mother who had not
broken any criminal laws since crossing the border; ICE used to priori-
tize those with serious criminal off enses and often agreed not to deport
someone if a child who was a United States citizen, like Fanny, would be
left parentless. But the Trump administration erased such stipulations
soon after Trump took offi ce, allowing a single parent, or both parents in
a family, to be deported. Which meant that the government was no longer
only dividing families but also eff ectively orphaning American children.
Deportation was throwing together new families too — kitchen-sink
households in which an aunt, a family friend, a grown-up sister or an
older brother who had just barely reached adulthood was suddenly raising
someone else’s child. This is happening often enough that last year, New
York and Maryland made it possible for immigrant parents to designate
another adult to step in if they are detained on immigration charges. A
handful of other states, including Pennsylvania, Illinois and Connecticut,
have taken similar steps or are considering them. More than half a million
children from immigrant families are being raised by extended family
members, one study found in October, but there are
no reliable estimates of how many children of immi-
grants live with people who are not related to them.
For a while after Rosario was detained, Fanny and
Alejandro tried to keep it together. Rosario had long
trusted Fanny with the bank-account and credit-card
numbers and passwords, which, as Fanny had cor-
rectly guessed years ago, were various combinationsAbove: Fanny and her brother,
Alejandro, in the Atlanta suburbs.
Previous pages: Fanny preparing
to go to her summer job at a diner,
where her boss did not realize she
was not of legal working age.Photograph by Melissa Golden/Redux, for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 45