Pamela Florian is an attorney at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a nonprofit that provides free legal services to immigrants who have been detained in Arizona. She came on staff two years ago to work with unaccompanied minors—at the time, mostly teen-agers from Central America’s Northern Triangle who had crossed the border alone to seek asylum in the United States. A few months ago, Florian began seeing a different kind of client: small children who had entered the country with a parent, only to be separated at the border. At first, the number was relatively low. “We had a few kids a week, and those were usually people who were separated because their parents had crossed multiple times,” Florian told me.

Then, in May, the Trump Administration instituted its “zero-tolerance” policy, which calls for the criminal prosecution of all migrants, including asylum seekers, who cross the border without turning themselves in at so-called ports of entry. After they are apprehended by Customs and Border Protection, undocumented adults are briefly put in criminal custody, and then transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Their children are sent to shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (O.R.R.), an office within the Department of Health and Human Services. ICE seeks to deport people as swiftly as possible, while O.R.R. aims to place children with relatives or foster families in the United States. By all accounts, there has been little communication or coördination between the two.

Florian works closely with one O.R.R. shelter in Arizona. Since it is equipped with a nursery, it was one of the first in the area to receive young children—“tender age,” in the official parlance. “Once the policy was implemented, it was everyone,” Florian told me. “Every single shelter has tender-age children now. There are huge numbers of children who have been separated from their parents.”

Florian told me that the separation policy has dramatically changed the nature of her work. “We’re just seeing all these challenges that were not there,” she said. “It’s not because we have an influx of children”—as was the case in 2014 and 2015, when a surge of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children arrived at the border, fleeing violence. “At that time, the government was not prepared. But family separation is a problem that was created by the government.” Florian spoke with me by phone from her office on Tuesday morning to describe her experience working with young children who have been separated from their parents. Her account has been edited and condensed.

“I am an attorney for unaccompanied children; I’ve been doing this work for about two years. I have experience working with teen-agers, because teen-agers are usually the ones who come by themselves. I’ve become really good at working with teen-agers, and helping them to understand their immigration cases.

“But now, with the new policy on family separation, we have had to change our strategies as we increasingly work with younger children. It takes a really long time to build trust with tender-age children. We want to provide honest information to them, but we have to explain it in a more child-friendly way, and in a child-friendly setting, to gain the children’s trust as we try to understand their wishes and navigate our complex immigration system. We have to get creative in our approach. We find ourselves sitting down on the floor with them. We play while we talk. We sometimes use coloring books with cartoon characters, or meet in the playground in an O.R.R. facility. We have toys for different ages, things that help with stress, like little balls or gooey toys so that kids can have something in their hands to hold or be distracted by. We have dolls. We have teddy bears. We have Legos. I’m not super familiar with types of toys, so I’ll go to our social-services team: ‘I need a toy for a two-year-old.’ And they give me something that’s appropriate.

“We mostly focus on building trust—making the child feel comfortable. We’re not there to get all the information we can all at once. It takes time. So we focus on the child being comfortable, and we move on to our questions later.

“Our social-services program trains us to understand biological and brain development. We really focus on trauma-informed interviewing, so we don’t traumatize the children any more than they are. We talk about stress reactions, and how to work specifically with different age groups. We also get ethics training for working with kids, and we take into consideration cultural differences. If the child is younger, we see that he or she may speak a different language, and we try to figure out what it is so that we can call an interpreter. There are children who speak indigenous languages, so we can’t assume that everyone speaks Spanish.

“Our philosophy is that we keep eyes on every single child. Even if they are pre-verbal, we still meet with them. We do not assume that a child will not be able to talk with us. Even if they are two or three, we still meet with them in case they might be able to communicate with us. One thing that has surprised me is that some children are much more vocal than others. We have four-year-olds who say a lot more than different four-year-olds. I don’t have children of my own, so I didn’t know anything about that. But now that I’m working with kids, I see that children are very expressive, and that sometimes they can share a lot of information, even when they are very young.

“We don’t have a specific first question that we ask the kids. Everything is case by case. We have to build that trust. We try to ask: How’s their day? What movie have they been watching? What is their favorite cartoon? So that hopefully they can get to know us. Eventually, we start asking, ‘How did you come to the United States? How old are you? Do you know your parents’ names? Do you miss your parents? Do you want to go home?’ We ask about their safety, to make sure that everything is O.K. at the shelter.

“We want to be part of a friendly environment, which means that we might shift the way that we ask certain questions, or the way that we do our Know Your Rights presentations. There’s a presentation for all the kids who get to the shelter each week. We tell them, ‘You have these rights. You have the right to talk to your family this many times a week. You have the right to be safe.’ We also tell them, ‘If you reunify with a family member, this is what’s going to happen when you go to court. This is how to call to find out when you have a hearing.’ We dial the number on the phone so that they can hear how it is, and we tell them the Spanish number, too. We give them our phone numbers so that they can call us. Children who are younger than five are usually not required to be there; we meet with them individually and try to explain the process.