One morning in early August, Jorge, a thirty-seven-year-old construction worker from Guatemala who lives with his wife and two children in Virginia, received a phone call from an unknown number with a Texas area code. “I don’t like answering calls from people who aren’t listed in my phone,” he told me. “I always have in my head that this isn’t my country.” This time, however, he decided to answer. On the other end of the line, the speaker identified himself, in Spanish, as a U.S. government official. “Are you bringing or receiving anyone coming to the United States?” the official asked. Jorge said no, but then a thought occurred to him: earlier in the summer, his sister in Guatemala had mentioned that her seventeen-year-old son, Pedro, might travel north to live with his grandparents in the United States. “Could it be Pedro?” Jorge asked the official. “That’s him,” the official replied.

Pedro had just been apprehended in Texas while trying to enter the country alone, and he was being held at a shelter overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (O.R.R.), which places unaccompanied children with family members living in the U.S. In Guatemala, local gangsters had threatened to kill him; to keep word from getting out, Pedro didn’t tell anyone his exact plans to flee. Before leaving, though, he copied his uncle’s number from his mother’s cell phone and eventually gave it to American authorities at the border after his capture. Pedro’s grandparents, who are also Jorge’s parents and live near him in Virginia, knew nothing about their grandson’s trip. The call between Jorge and the government official lasted less than five minutes. “We’re going to be calling back in a few days,” he told Jorge. “Answer the phone when we do.”

Pedro is now being held in an emergency shelter in Tornillo, Texas, a tent city where the government has transferred hundreds of minors in recent weeks, often under the cover of night, in an effort to address an escalating crisis. Nationwide, there are currently 13,200 children in O.R.R. custody, more than ever before, and five times more than were being held in the spring of last year. Shelters have become overcrowded not because more children are fleeing north than in years past but mainly because the Trump Administration has made it more difficult to release them. In April, the O.R.R. signed an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to share information about the legal status of children’s sponsors. Those who come forward to claim family members can now be arrested and deported if they are here illegally. As a result, immigrant families have had to make a choice: sponsor children and risk deportation, or keep their distance while children languish in government custody. As families weigh the stakes, children have been spending longer periods of time in detention. Officially, the H.H.S. claims that the average time is fifty-nine days, but according to one of the department’s own officials, who agreed to speak with me on the condition of anonymity, detained children now spend an average of seventy-four days in federal custody, more than double what it was at the start of 2016.

Jorge, who is broad-chested, with a goatee and close-cropped hair, is undocumented. After receiving the phone call in August, he told me that he spent a day thinking through his options. “The main thing at first was that I didn’t want to panic my mother,” he said. “I was going to do something to get Pedro out of detention. It was just a question of how to do it. If I’m the sponsor, and they deport me, what are my kids going to do?” His two children in Virginia—both American citizens—are twelve and six years old. He and his wife also have a sixteen-year-old daughter in Guatemala who was born just after Jorge arrived in the United States. (Before leaving Guatemala to join him, Jorge’s wife placed their daughter in the care of her mother; the couple planned to send for her when she was older.) Without legal papers, Jorge has never been able to travel home to see her. “I want to bring her here,” he said. “I’m not all here without her. But look what’s happened to Pedro. It’s a bad time to try this.”

Last week, I met Jorge and his parents, Ana and Victor, who are also undocumented, at their lawyer’s office in Virginia. Each of them wore name tags with pseudonyms written in black marker. “It’s so we can remind ourselves of what we’re supposed to call each other while we talk to you,” Ana told me. She left a small town in southern Guatemala ten years ago to follow her husband, who came to the U.S., in 1999, after Hurricane Mitch destroyed their home and the field of maize that the family tended for its livelihood. Ana, who is trim, with dark hair and big, watchful eyes, cleans office buildings at night. “I was horrified when I found out about Pedro,” she said. “I couldn’t stand the thought that he was being detained.” While his wife spoke, Victor, dressed in a plaid work shirt, cradled a black baseball cap in his hands, and occasionally checked his phone; he’d taken time off of work, in construction, to speak with me. At first, the family had been wary of dealing directly with the federal government, and Ana asked a friend with legal status to sponsor Pedro on their behalf. When the friend declined, Ana realized the family had to take the risk themselves. “I felt like I wanted to bury myself alive,” she said.

Within a few days, they came up with a tentative plan. Ana is illiterate, and the prospect of a protracted bureaucratic process intimidated her; Jorge would help her with the details. Because the government had asked for two contacts, Ana offered to serve as the primary sponsor, with Jorge as the secondary one. Both began talking regularly with Pedro’s case worker, who explained that they would need to submit fingerprints, identity documents, and proof of an income level that was sufficient to support a child. “The whole thing scared me,” Jorge said. He and Ana decided to look for a lawyer, which took about two weeks. After an initial meeting, they decided that Victor should be the secondary sponsor instead. “I wanted to stay off to the side,” Jorge said. “But I continued going with them to meet with the lawyer, and I took my mother to the offices she needed to visit to get everything in order.”

There are legitimate reasons for why the process of sponsoring an unaccompanied minor is so rigorous. In 2016, after tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America arrived at the border and overwhelmed federal authorities, the Senate issued a report detailing more than a dozen cases of children who were released to abusive sponsors, because background checks had been relaxed in response to the influx. Vetting sponsors has always been predicated on protecting children, not policing sponsors; in the past, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services made a point of stressing their independence from the Department of Homeland Security. “O.R.R. is not a law-enforcement entity,” Robert Carey, the former head of the office, told me. “It’s a social-service provider.”