Father Michael Pucke, Trujillo’s parish priest at St. Julie Billiart Catholic Church, in Hamilton, Ohio, visited Trujillo at the Butler County jail, where he prayed and read scripture with her. Pucke has known Trujillo for more than ten years. “She’s quiet, not someone who would stand out in a crowd, but was thoughtful and had deep faith,” he said. In the jail, he recalled, she was tired, frightened, and cold. “It’s in God’s hands,” she told him.

Trujillo asked Pucke to make sure her children did their homework. “That says something to me not only about a mother’s love but how important it was that her children take advantage of what they have in this country,” Pucke said. A few days after her arrest, Trujillo was transferred to La Salle, a detention center in Jena, Louisiana. On April 19th, she was deported to Mexico. Her daughter Alexa had sketched the scene two years earlier, at the end of her letter to Senator Brown; the picture featured Alexa and her siblings watching their mother fly off in a plane, a deportee.

The Caretaker

Oregon has been home for as long as Alejandra Ruiz can remember. She wasn’t yet two years old in 1988, when her mother brought her and her older sister to the U.S. from Guatemala, fleeing that country’s civil war. The family lived in California for a short time, then settled in Portland, where her mother found work as a housekeeper.

Her mother applied for asylum upon arrival in the U.S., but her case was denied. The government issued a deportation order for Ruiz when she was still a toddler. Her mother never told her about the order—in fact, she did not find out she was undocumented until she was twenty-four-years old. Ruiz grew up thinking she was a U.S. citizen. Three years ago, Ruiz moved with her four kids to Beaverton, a suburb west of Portland. The streets were quiet and the children’s schools were nearby. Ruiz had a job at a senior-care facility, working twelve-hour overnight shifts.

Early on the morning of March 26th, ICE agents arrived at Ruiz’s house. She was still at work, but a neighbor called to tell her that law enforcement was knocking at her door; worried, she then called the local non-emergency number, to find out what was wrong. A little while later, an ICE agent called her back. He explained that she was the subject of a decades-old deportation order, Ruiz recalls. If she didn’t come to the local ICE office immediately, agents would return to arrest her. Ruiz arranged for relatives to watch her kids and went to the office.

Stephen Robbins, Ruiz’s lawyer, said that her case was the first time he noticed a shift in immigration policies under the Trump Administration. “A lot of the stories we were seeing on the news were people who might have had problems under Obama, too—Alejandra’s case was the first one where it was like, No, this is different,” he said. “During the Obama years, they might have gone to her house and said, ‘Hey, we need you to come in and do a check-in,’ but what would have happened almost certainly is they would have let her go.”

At the ICE office, as the hours passed, Ruiz kept thinking they’d soon release her. Instead, shackles were placed around her ankles, wrists, and waist, and she was taken to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, a for-profit immigrant-detention facility operated by the GEO Group, a large private-prison firm.

In detention, Ruiz barely ate—the food, mainly bread and beans, looked bad and smelled worse. Officers gave her fibre packets and pills, but she refused to take them. She spent time in the center's law library, researching her rights. Talking to her kids on the phone was excruciating. When they spoke at all, it was mostly sobs. Her twelve-year-old daughter was especially distraught.

Ruiz didn’t want her kids to know how much she feared being deported to Guatemala—a country where she knew no one. “I haven’t done anything but work here and try to live a normal life with my kids,” she said. Guatemala was a world away. “You hear the stories,” she said—fellow-detainees had told her about the rise of gang violence and lawlessness in the country. “I don’t want to go to there, I don’t want to take my kids there.”

Robbins filed a motion to reopen her childhood asylum case, and on March 30th—less than a week after her arrest—Ruiz was released from detention to wait for a deportation hearing. That weekend, she turned thirty-one. She didn’t feel like celebrating. Her kids were elated but terrified, too. Her oldest daughter, Ashley, begged to stay home from school, fearing Ruiz would be gone when she came back at the end of the day.

“I feel like everything I’ve worked so hard for was taken from me,” Ruiz said. As she awaits a decision on her case, she has another pressing concern: she lost her job at the senior-care facility during her time in detention. “I started off in a one-bedroom with my kids and worked my butt off to be where I’m at for them,” she said. Now she worries they may soon face eviction and homelessness. “I don’t have a mansion, but I have something for my kids to call their own.”

The Apple Picker

Dolores Bustamante Romero was born in a small rural town near Mexico City. She was the second of four children; her mother, who was on her own, struggled to provide for them. At sixteen, Bustamante moved in with a man in his early twenties. “He was nice, at the beginning,” she said. The couple had four kids together, but their relationship soured. “A normal day would be, ‘You’re good for nothing. Who do you think would want you like that?’ ” Dolores said. “That was a normal day.”

In 2003, when Bustamante was in her early thirties, a man at work told her that he was going to the U.S.—to New Jersey. “I can help you,” he said. “You don’t have to stay here.” She took up his offer. “It was heartbreaking, because I couldn’t bring all of my children,” she recalled. Bustamante left her three older kids with her mother—she’d send back money to support them—and set out with her youngest daughter, who was then three.

After stints cleaning offices and working in factories, Bustamante took up low-wage farm jobs: picking pumpkins, cutting watermelon. An apple-picking gig in upstate New York changed her life. A fellow-farmworker introduced Bustamante to Mujeres Divinas, an organization that helps women working in agricultural jobs. “I found out that not having documents doesn’t mean that we can’t do something,” she said. She also became an active member of her local church, and got involved with the Worker Justice Center of New York, an organization that advocates on behalf of agricultural workers.

Bustamante was finally feeling settled. She was supporting her kids back in Mexico and her daughter in New York, and she was proud of that. Then, one morning in October, 2014, she was pulled over while driving to church with her daughter, and arrested by Border Patrol.

The Worker Justice Center intervened on her behalf, and Bustamante was released from detention on an order of supervision. For the next few years, her case wound its way through the immigration courts. She paid steep fees to an attorney, who never pressed to have her case administratively closed, which, during the Obama Administration, was a common way for undocumented parents who’d committed no significant crimes to resolve their cases. In February, a new attorney named Jose Perez agreed to take her case pro bono—but by then, he said, the legal landscape had shifted. On March 15th, Dolores stood in a courtroom in Batavia, New York, facing the prospect of imminent deportation. “It felt like a death sentence,” she said, about the prospect of returning to Mexico.