By the time Ritibh and Sándigo finished handing out supplies, it was 11 p.m., but Sándigo didn’t go to sleep. Late nights and early mornings are her time for writing, for trying to think strategically. For years, she had been pushing the county to provide crisis housing for kids she calls “the orphans of immigration,” and a Miami-Dade County commissioner recently agreed to help. Sándigo was now trying to raise money for a dorm-style building, but she worried that it wouldn’t be ready quickly enough. To speed things up, she was looking into trailers. If it came to it, she said, there was always her own house and office. “Maybe we will be sleeping like, how do you say, perros calientes?” Like hot dogs.

Before Trump was elected, Sándigo dreamed of a political solution for her young charges that went far beyond housing. In April 2016, she took some of them, including T. and her daughters, to Washington to advocate for an Obama order known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), a kind of sister action to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that would have allowed parents to apply for work permits and temporary protection from deportation in order to care for their kids. Thanks to a lawsuit and a split Supreme Court, DAPA never went into effect, and this June the Trump administration officially rescinded it.

In United States family law, “the best interests of the child” is a widely accepted standard. Judges are required to use it in every state when deciding custody cases, and dozens of states explicitly list the maintenance of family unity or family emotional ties as primary components of “best interests.” Immigration law is the exception. Children affected by their parents’ immigration cases “have no opportunity for their best interests to be considered,” writes Bridgette A. Carr, founding director of the University of Michigan Law School’s Human Trafficking Clinic. The closest option, before 1996, was that immigrants living in the United States for at least seven years could petition to cancel their removal on the grounds that it would cause “extreme hardship” for themselves, their children or other qualifying relatives. Acceptable reasons included war in the home country or serious medical needs. Hardships like being separated from your parents or having to leave your country usually didn’t count, explains Thronson, of the Immigration Law Clinic, because “that always happens in deportation — that’s just your starting point.”

In the immigration overhaul of the mid-1990s, Congress made the standard even harder to meet, changing “extreme hardship” to “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” and imposing a limit of 4,000 cases a year. Alfonso Oviedo-Reyes, a lawyer who works with Sándigo, says he’s lucky if one client qualifies a year. “They should have said a nearly impossible hardship,” he said. “No one can withstand it!”

“Generally speaking, under the law,” says Donald L. Schlemmer, an attorney specializing in immigration law, “if there’s some kind of wrong, there should be some kind of remedy — or at least you should have your day in court.” But the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the same 1996 law that raised the standard for deportation relief, made it much more difficult to use class-action lawsuits to challenge immigration policies. When Sándigo tried filing a lawsuit in federal circuit court in 2007, on which Schlemmer worked, they were told that only the Supreme Court had jurisdiction to hear such cases; when she brought the case to the Supreme Court, the clerk replied with a letter explaining that there was no jurisdiction there either. Oviedo-Reyes says that letter is their chance: proof that citizen children, unconstitutionally, have nowhere to go for redress.

Since Trump’s election, Sándigo has been combing through her list of children to see which would be good candidates for a class-action lawsuit — something that might lead to the kind of law that helped the Central American refugees she worked with. She wants the suit to reflect the variety of children’s experiences: some with both parents gone, some with one, some simply afraid of losing either. She put Ritibh’s name on her list; he was so gregarious and happy to tell his story. (“I have the tunnels under the Congress memorized,” he told me.) She also added Valerie, 17, and Matthew, 15, a sister and brother born and raised in Fort Lauderdale whose undocumented parents took them to their home country, Colombia. Once there, they were threatened by people attempting to extort the family, with its American ties. Their mother contacted Sándigo on Facebook, asking her to take the children in. “She explained that if I don’t do anything her kids would be kidnapped or dead,” Sándigo says.

Valerie was counting on being reunited with her parents through DAPA. When it failed, she says, “all my hopes went down. I just started to cry. It was bad.” Like other children in her situation, she has only one legal avenue: wait until she’s not a child anymore, and then, when she has fewer needs but more rights, try to sponsor her parents for green cards. To get her parents back, Valerie says, “I have to wait until I’m 21.”