Last October, Sindy, a twenty-three-year-old mother, woke up to a normal day in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She lived with her husband, Kevin, their seventeen-month-old daughter, Grethshell, and two elementary-school-aged children from Sindy’s previous relationship. That morning, she made breakfast for Kevin and saw him off to his job as a house painter. But, as Sindy washed the dishes, gangsters arrived at her home and threatened her life—a common occurrence in Tegucigalpa, the capital of a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Sindy called Kevin at work in a panic, and they decided that she should pack their things and leave home. “Come quick,” he told her. “We’ll figure out our next steps.” She stuffed her children’s backpacks full of clothes and grabbed Grethshell’s favorite toy: a doll that had been a birthday gift from Kevin. “I left behind my two little dogs, Whitey and Stuey,” Sindy told me. The hardest part, she said, was “to tell my kids they couldn’t go to school anymore, they couldn’t see their friends anymore, that everything in their lives was going to change.”

The couple decided to head for San Francisco, where Sindy has an uncle. They took a bus through Guatemala, then traversed Mexico by rail. In Puebla, as they prepared to board a gritty train known as La Bestia with other migrants, Mexican authorities surrounded the group, beating and chasing them. In the chaos, Kevin hopped on the train, clutching Grethshell to his chest, and thinking that Sindy had already boarded. In fact, Sindy remained on the ground with the two older children, looking for her husband and toddler. For days, she and the children wandered around Puebla, searching for signs of their whereabouts. Finally, she realized that they must have continued north and started after them. As she walked, she asked fellow-migrants, “Have you seen a man with a little girl named Grethshell?”

On January 1st, Sindy reached Calexico, a city on California’s southern border, and approached U.S. Border Patrol agents. She told a tall male agent that she and her children had fled Honduras and feared that it was too dangerous to return. “I don’t care if one of your kids dies,” he said, according to Sindy. “You should have gone to Canada.” She told him that she had been separated from her husband and toddler and asked if he had seen the pair pass through Border Patrol’s custody, or if he could help her locate them. “You’re a bad mother,” he replied, according to Sindy. (“Those are terrible things to say, and we don’t condone that type of behavior,” David Kim, the assistant chief patrol agent for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s El Centro sector, told me, of Sindy’s account. “However, I’m not aware of any complaints that were lodged or filed from her.”)

Sindy and her two children were sent to a cold cell, sometimes called a hielera, or icebox. Several Guatemalan migrant women in the cell told Sindy that they had seen her little girl—they had called her by her middle name, Juliet, which was easier for them to pronounce—a few days earlier and had helped to care for her. Kevin had arrived with Grethshell on December 28th, to seek asylum; he was quickly charged with illegal reëntry because of prior deportations from some years ago. Six months earlier, the Trump Administration had pledged to stop most family separations at the border. But in Kevin’s case they took Grethshell, wailing, from his arms—to where, they didn’t say. (“This isn’t just a case of ‘Let’s separate a family for no reason,’ ” Kim, from C.B.P., told me. “A child is never going to accompany an adult when they are being charged with a crime.”)

A few days later, Sindy and her older children were released and went to live with her uncle in San Francisco. (Her own removal proceedings are pending, and she hopes to seek asylum.) From there, she ramped up her search and discovered that Grethshell had been transferred from California to Texas and placed in a federally contracted shelter for “unaccompanied” children, run by a nonprofit organization called B.C.F.S., in San Antonio. The girl, she’d been told, was in the care of a foster mother. Sindy checked every box for Grethshell’s return: she offered proof of identity, gave her fingerprints, and answered interview questions. “There’s not one piece of paper I haven’t filled out,” she told me.

But, according to Sindy, when she called the shelter, she hit a new obstacle. A person told her that she would have to pay the cost of her daughter’s return: in this case, two plane tickets to San Francisco—one for Grethshell and the other for a government guardian to fly with her. “How much is it going to cost to get her back?” Sindy asked. The person couldn’t be sure but estimated up to three thousand dollars. “But I don’t have the money!” she replied. (On Monday, a spokeswoman for B.C.F.S. denied that Sindy will have to pay for her child’s transportation.) Sindy felt caught in a paradox. “When they let me out of detention, they said I can’t work legally, and that if I did they would deport me,” she said. She didn’t know how she would get her daughter back.

Last June, amid public outcry, President Trump signed an executive order putting an ostensible end to the practice of taking children from their parents at the border. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said at the time. But advocates say that the practice has continued in quieter, more insidious forms. Many recent separations involve parents who have past deportations or misdemeanors, as was the case with Kevin. Other cases involve children who arrived with relatives or guardians who are not their biological parents. Last October, I documented the case of a five-year-old girl named Helen who was separated from her grandmother at the southern border, then sent to a B.C.F.S. shelter; in custody, officials told her to sign complicated legal paperwork giving up her right to go before an immigration judge. After a long fight to win Helen’s release, her grandmother, Noehmi, told me, “I fear there are still other children suffering. Other families are feeling this anguish, this struggle, and they need us to act.”