HOUSTON — Listening to President Trump try to explain away his indefensible policy on family separations the other week — and his latest attempts to get an immigration bill passed ASAP — I couldn’t stop thinking about Cynthia, whom I have known for most of her 35 years. Born in Monterrey, Mexico, she’s a pretty woman with a head of shiny black waves and a broad smile that obscure her killer competence and ambition. She didn’t want me to use her last name because she’s now a bigwig at a Fortune 500 Company that might not want the publicity.

What I can’t stop thinking about, in particular, is how different Cynthia’s life would have been if she had been separated from her mother while trying to cross into Texas in recent weeks instead of arriving undocumented in 1989.

Unlike Mr. Trump’s depictions of Mexican immigrants as violent drug traffickers, Cynthia’s family was like so many I knew growing up in South Texas. The family had struggled financially in Mexico — at one point Cynthia’s mother, Eva, tried to make ends meet by opening a food stand in front of their house, but they continued their slide toward destitution. First, Cynthia’s father, Jose, left for Houston in December 1989, catching a break because his own mother had crossed over in 1970 and eventually became a United States citizen, so Jose could stay here legally to care for her.

The rest of the family — Eva, Cynthia and her older sister and infant brother — piled into a car driven by a cousin and came to Houston on a tourist visa and the end of 1989. Then, like so many others, they just stayed here. In other words, the family was already separated and trying to reunite with the help of extended family already living in the United States. Cynthia could have just as easily come with a cousin or an aunt or any other trusted relative who, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, wasn’t really family at all.