Yet there are also preteen children, some even younger than eight, in court alone. They’re there because the administration is still separating families; children taken from their families at the border are then deemed to be unaccompanied. On July 25, I saw children as young as 10 in court with no adult.

When a child crosses alone, or is separated from parents, he or she is held alone by the Border Patrol, often in inhumane conditions. Legally, this detention is supposed to last no more than 72 hours, but in reality it can last several weeks.

Border agents then turn the child over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (part of the Department of Health and Human Services), which sends the child to its next open bed, anywhere in the country. That can be a foster family, small group home or institution.

Then the refugee agency searches for a relative or friend who will take in the child and be designated a sponsor. About a third of children in the refugee agency’s care have no sponsor.

Some have been taken from their parents. Last year a judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite families, but there is no real tracking system. And the government continues to separate families. Anthony Enriquez, who runs the unaccompanied minors program at Catholic Charities in New York, said that last summer, the New York area received 400 children at the height of the crisis — and since then, 300 more have come.

Other children have relatives who are afraid to come forward for fear they will be deported. Sponsors are becoming harder to find; without one, some children will stay in detention for the rest of their childhood. (Although many American families would like to take in such children, a sponsor must have a pre-existing relationship with the child.)

Nolberto’s case shows how much a lawyer can matter. He lived in Mixco, just outside Guatemala City, in a neighborhood controlled by MS-13.