When Kelvin was a sophomore in high school, his mom called him every day during her lunch break. They had emigrated from Honduras when Kelvin was three years old, and moved every few years, roving between Texas and California. At each stop, Kelvin’s mother warned him to be careful about trusting other people—their existence in the U.S. could easily be upended by a grumpy neighbor, she said. Kelvin, watchful and quiet, never needed the reminder. He was short for fifteen, and baby-faced, and he worried that his mother’s phone calls made him seem weak.

One day, in January, 2014, she didn’t call. Kelvin feared that she might be sick. She was a maid at a motel in San Bernardino, California, not far from their apartment, and had worked extra shifts over the holidays. After school, he tried her cell phone, but she didn’t answer. He passed out on the couch that night, waiting for her to come home. The next morning, when Kelvin woke up, the apartment was empty. She finally called that afternoon, from a detention facility, and told him that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, had raided the motel and arrested all of its undocumented workers. She was being deported, she said. Her voice cracked as she promised to find someone to take care of him.

For the next two weeks, Kelvin lived alone in their apartment. When the rent was due, the landlord kicked him out. During his first night on the street, he tried to sleep on a bench behind a Mexican restaurant, his teeth chattering from the cold. The second night, he discovered an abandoned school bus and curled up on one of the seats. He briefly crashed at a friend’s place, until his mother convinced an aunt in Houston to offer Kelvin her couch. On the Greyhound to Texas, Kelvin tried to block out his surroundings, making up a story in his mind in which he was a superhero, saving lives and fighting bad guys. He called his aunt as the bus pulled into the station, but she didn’t answer. He tried again and again as he wandered wide, gray streets near the terminal. She never picked up.

He didn’t want to sleep on the streets of a strange city, and didn’t have the money for a bus back to San Bernardino. He decided to turn himself in. The cops picked him up and drove him to a concrete building in downtown Houston—the local office for Child Protective Services. They had Kelvin wait in a conference room, where, a few hours later, a man in baggy khakis and thick-soled sneakers padded through the door. He looked about sixty, with ruddy cheeks, cotton-white hair, and glassy blue eyes. His face was kind and sad. His name was James Terence Keel, but he went by Terry.

“You O.K.?” he asked.

Kelvin’s mom had been taken away two months earlier. “I’m good,” Kelvin said.

Keel is the president of the Children’s Center, a nonprofit that supports and houses children who have been separated from their parents because of incarceration, deportation, illness, or violence. The organization is based in Galveston, Texas, a small island in the Gulf of Mexico, where most of the houses are painted in pastel colors and chipped from the salt air. I first visited the Children’s Center in March of 2015. At the time, Texas had at least twenty-six facilities for underage undocumented immigrants—more than any other state. I wanted to report a story about what it was like to grow up in one of these facilities, in a state of legal suspension. I reached out to all of them, and the Children’s Center was the only one to return my call. The first time Keel and I spoke, he invited me to come by for breakfast.

It was around 10 A.M. when I pulled up in front of a gently aged white clapboard house. A basketball hoop with a frayed net stood in the driveway. Inside, eight groggy teen-age boys lounged around a long table, eating doughnuts and staring at their phones. Bob Marley played on a portable speaker. Keel had his laptop open, and two boys were urging him to take them for haircuts. One of them was Jhonny, whose hair was long on top and buzzed on both sides. He managed the playlist and ignored the others’ music requests. Marlin, skinny, with a faint mustache, poked fun at Jhonny’s haircut. The oldest of the group was Junior, who had already graduated high school and was desperate to work, though Keel would never approve of him working illegally. He said he was painfully bored, and spent his days lifting weights, pacing the boardwalk, and watching YouTube videos. For much of the morning, he spoke with a quiet self-assurance as he advised another kid on what to text a girl.

Throughout the day, boys filtered in and out of the house to use the bathroom, or to ask Keel if he could give them a ride. The mood was hectic and familiar. Most of them were from Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala—countries known collectively as the Northern Triangle, where rising gang violence and poverty has forced people to flee en masse. A few had spent stretches of time in other facilities, until a lawyer or social worker pointed them to the Children’s Center. Keel’s phone was constantly ringing, and nearly every call ended with “te quiero, hijo”—“I love you, son.” At one point, after one of the boys left the room, Keel turned to me and said, “His father was dismembered in front of him.”

Kelvin. A building at one of the Children’s Center locations.

Keel studied social work and psychology at the University of Alabama, and worked for a variety of government agencies and nonprofits in the mental-health field, before he took over the Children’s Center, in 1994, when it was a local homeless shelter. In 2003, a social worker asked if he would accept an immigrant client, a seventeen-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Word soon spread among attorneys that Keel would accept the children that other organizations considered too burdensome. One lawyer asked him to accept a seven-year-old Guatemalan who was paraplegic. He had crossed the border on the back of his grandmother, who was scheduled to be detained and deported. “Nobody else would take the child,” Keel told me. “I said, ‘I’ll take the child, but I’m going to take the grandmother, too.’ You don’t separate the child from the grandmother.” Keel placed them in one of the Children’s Center’s family shelters. “I had the authorities all over me. I had to prove that I had properly trained the grandmother to properly care for the child she had raised since an infant.”

The organization now serves more than a thousand children each year. At any given time, thirty or more of them are immigrants. They live with Keel, or at a shelter near his house, or with a local volunteer family. Keel enlists lawyers to argue their immigration cases, helps navigate the public-education system, and patches together the money to cover their college educations, often dipping into his own savings. Most shelters send kids to immigration detention centers on their eighteenth birthday, the moment they’re considered an adult. Keel allows people to stay at the Children’s Center indefinitely. “The danger is after eighteen, not before eighteen,” Keel said. “You are somewhat protected before eighteen, at least legally. After eighteen, they’re in no man’s land.”