It’s been over a month since Yancy’s seven-year-old daughter was separated from Yancy’s partner, José, and she still doesn’t know exactly where her daughter is. Somewhere in Florida, she tells Teen Vogue from her home in El Salvador.

José, and Yancy's daughter, Darlin, fled gang threats in their small coastal town in the Central American country on May 18, with Yancy’s brother and his daughter. The four traveled north through Mexico in the back of a freezing cargo truck, intending to request asylum when they reached the United States border.

When they got there, border agents split up the family. Yancy’s brother’s daughter went to a shelter in Phoenix, and Darlin, supposedly, to a shelter in Florida. José was shuffled between detention centers before landing in the Texas Rio Grande Valley, where he remains. Yancy tells Teen Vogue that no one has told José of Darlin’s exact location or when she might be freed from immigration custody.

Darlin is just one of an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 children who were separated from their undocumented parents at the U.S.-Mexico border under President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, which says every person crossing the border without U.S.-sanctioned documentation will be criminally prosecuted. The children were sent to shelters, sometimes thousands of miles away, a policy that has now been halted after outrage erupted across the country and internationally. Many of those attempting to cross the border are families from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, three countries in Central America suffering high levels of poverty, with violence rates higher than those of many countries at war.

The separations this year came after a 2017 pilot program separated children from their parents in Texas. The administration expanded the policy nationwide this spring, in a “haphazard fashion, designed to create chaos,” Jonathan Ryan, executive director of the Texas nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), tells Teen Vogue.

Once separated, children like Darlin sent were sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, to be placed into a system that was created to process the thousands of minors who came to the U.S. unaccompanied, often intent on being received by relatives already in the country, but was repurposed to hold kids who were forcibly separated.

A pause to this practice has been little comfort to the thousands of parents who remain without their children. While some children have been turned over to family members, thousands are still in shelters and foster homes run by the government and nonprofit groups. Yancy is just one of many parents who still don’t know where their children are, and families like hers will now have to navigate a messy, potentially expensive bureaucratic process to get Darlin back.

Even when parents and children who have been separated are identified, the process of reunification is a maze. It is unclear, even for the government, where many of these paths will lead. Like most detained parents, José is trying to navigate a bureaucratic web without speaking the language, with little ability to communicate outside of his detention center, and until recently, without a lawyer.

In late June, U.S. District judge Dana Sabraw ruled that children affected by the zero tolerance policy under the age of five must be reunited with their parents by July 10, and all children be reunited with their parents by July 26. Now, the administration is scrambling to fix a problem it created, and given its disorganization, immigration advocates say it’s already missing deadlines. On June 26, Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar told Congress that hundreds of children had been reunited with their parents and that there was “no reason why any parent would not know where their child is located,” but recently said, as reported by Vox, that he did not know the exact number who have been separated and who are under the care of the agency. The administration reportedly also lost track of some parents, according to NBC News, including those who had been deported without their children. Judge Sabraw said parents who were already deported may present a “big issue” going forward, but agreed to give the government more time for certain cases.