How immigration policy robbed children of an education

Editor’s note: This story is the result of reporting that, over the last two years, investigated the effects of separation of migrant families as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Our trauma-informed reporting was conducted with respect and the trust of families interviewed. This story may contain scenes or references that could be triggering to people impacted by trauma. If you or someone you know needs mental health support, please call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988. Crisis counselors are available in English and Spanish, as well as for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Investigative journalist Joshua Phillips contributed to this story, which first appeared on palabra, the digital news site by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

By Maritza L. Felix | Edited by Ricardo Sandoval

Early in her workdays, Roselvy Hernández Treminio meticulously prepared the uniform she wore during her 10-hour shifts serving crispy tacos. By the time she returned to her home in Virginia, she was often exhausted, too tired to wash the smell of fried food out of her clothes.

The long work hours and the smell she could never quite wash out stopped bothering her after a while. She’s always known the price of hard work.

Hernández was raised in El Salvador. She grew up in a family dominated by hard-working women who baked bread, made pupusas and sold horchata to neighbors.

The hard work delivered a modest life, free of hunger but short of being comfortable.

In 2004, when she was 17, Hernández gave birth to a daughter and named her Yuleisy. Five months later, Yuleisy’s father joined the migrant trail with countless other Salvadorans traveling to the U.S. with the hopes of earning dollars to send home. His departure meant that his involvement in Yuleisy’s life shrunk to phone talk and occasional video chats, yet he maintained enough of a connection with his daughter that it would later become a lifeline for both Hernández and Yuleisy. Escalating violence in El Salvador eventually became a grave concern for Hernández, with gangs dominating entire neighborhoods. One day, what should’ve been an innocent walk to school for Yuleisy became a perilous trek. She was only 12.

“I was deeply worried when she came home terrified, saying, ‘Mommy, a car stopped on the street and tried to take me,’” Hernández recalls in an interview with palabra. “My mind raced with thoughts of what could have happened if she hadn’t come home.”

The fear that her daughter could be kidnapped or harmed led Hernández to a life-altering decision: In August 2017, she interrupted Yuleisy’s schooling, left everything behind and turned north, determined to reunite her family and forge a better life.

What Hernández didn’t know was that thousands of miles away, conservative politicians in the U.S. had planned to stop a growing influx of migrants using an unprecedented policy of detaining the minors among them in separate facilities. The parents and guardians would not be immediately told where their children were being held or what would happen to them after detention. Hernández and her daughter would be among those families.

This was all part of what officials in former President Donald Trump’s administration dubbed their “zero-tolerance” policy.

The policy would reverberate across the country. And the trauma that marked a community of young children would soon manifest in the nation’s schoolrooms.

Trauma in the classroom

After detention and separation, youths were often released to relatives, or parents if they’d managed to win their own release from immigration detention. Starting in 2018, schools around the nation saw the enrollment of unaccompanied migrant and immigrant children who’d been detained at the border and separated from their parents. Educators like Dr. Gabriel Trujillo, superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), Arizona’s third-largest public school district, said he started hearing many stories similar to Yuleisy’s —- children fleeing violence, seeking asylum and then, unexpectedly, being split from their families, going for months without knowing where they’d end up or the fate of their families.

He recalls the district being caught off guard, unprepared for the influx of migrant minors or to provide the resources these children would need to understand and succeed as they coped with the trauma of having been separated from family, and tossed into what they likely saw as an intimidating education system.

“Those students who are dealing with a lot of trauma and there was a lot of heartbreaking cases of kids being mistreated, sexual abuse, physical abuse, especially from some of the young ladies,” Trujillo says. “When you’re dealing with trauma, you’re not able to get in a space emotionally where the main priority in your life is learning.”

It is evident that trauma these students experienced has affected their learning and their ability to engage in classrooms and the community, Trujillo adds. “The most common thing that we’ve seen with those students is disengagement. Those students … are more apt to just not be disruptive at all, but just kind of sit very quietly and not participate.”

Today, across the United States, thousands of young migrants from Central America and Mexico continue to suffer the pernicious effects of an official policy that separated thousands of families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In interviews with at least 50 formerly divided families and more than a dozen clinicians and attorneys who assisted children separated during “zero tolerance” — including those referred to as “tender age” children (under the age of 13) — palabra found a troubling unanimity: They described how young migrants exhibited behavior consistent with being in a “fear state.”

Trauma researchers explain that abruptly separating primary caregivers from children ruptures their vital, emotional attachment — causing a profound impact on their development and neurological functioning.

“I’ve had 10 year-olds tell me, ‘I’ll never be able to trust anyone — there’s bad people in the world, the world is a very dangerous place.’ If you have received that message, and have gone through experiences that have confirmed that message…that becomes embedded in your psyche; that’s embedded in how your brain and your body works,” said Dr. Monica Noriega. She is a clinical psychologist who, over the last decade, has treated immigrant children and families, and evaluated them for asylum applications.

Ahead of the November 5th presidential election, a campaign in which immigration has been a major issue, politicians once again preach about increasingly strong measures to halt unauthorized border crossings. Two important advisors to the Trump campaign, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Thomas Homan and White House adviser Stephen Miller, are on record supporting mass deportations of people without immigration authorization. Such an extreme measure would likely separate more families, since hundreds of thousands of families are of “mixed status,” meaning that citizens would have to choose between remaining in the U.S. without loved ones, or returning to their countries of origin with them.

But parents, educators and mental health clinicians warn against new policies that would potentially divide families, add new trauma, and leave unaddressed the lasting impact of forced separation of school-age children.

Parents say a starting point toward finding defenses against trauma is sufficient awareness of the damage done to the learning ability of formerly separated children — one of the least studied dimensions of a dark chapter in the recent history of migration to the U.S.

Learning interrupted

The Trump administration’s zero tolerance border enforcement policy officially started on May 7, 2018, after a pilot program the year before at border crossings in cities like El Paso, Texas.

The results are legions of students dealing with trauma associated with childhood abandonment or prisoners held in isolation. Adding to the harm is a poor accounting of the zero-tolerance episode, beginning with uncertainty over the total number of children separated. In 2021, a report by the Congressional Research Service placed the total between 5,300 and 5,500. Yet, more recently, in April 2024, the Department of Homeland Security said the Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families — created to reunite families and support their mental health — identified 4,656 separated children. As many as 1,401 remain listed as not unified with families or guardians because the government lost track of their whereabouts after release or families have not come forward to say the children are back with the adults who brought them on their migrant journey.

The Trump administration authorized the separations of detained migrant families as a deterrence — a warning to would-be migrants amid a wave of crossings by Central and South Americans fleeing crime, political violence and crumbling economies in their home countries.

In spite of this policy, migration to the U.S. reached record highs throughout the last decade. What happened was a lifetime of trauma — and the theft of a childhood education — for migrants like Yuleisly.

The 2020 report from Physicians for Human Rights, You Will Never See Your Child Again: Persistent Psychological Effects of Family Separation, found that children separated from their families often showed regressive behaviors like language loss, thumb-sucking, and trouble controlling their bladder and bowels. The American Academy of Pediatrics also notes that, without family support, children are more vulnerable to learning difficulties and long-term conditions, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even heart disease.

Belinda Hernandez Arriaga, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at the University of San Francisco’s School of Education and founder and chief executive director of Ayudando Latinos A Soñar, a cultural arts, education and social justice program, is also a licensed clinical social worker who has treated migrant children separated from their parents.

“I have kids who did really well in school in their home country…(and) they are doing horrible here,” Hernandez Arriaga says.

The problem with evaluating migrant children in U.S. schools, Hernandez Arriaga says, is that educators have failed to account for the impact of the separation experience.

“What happens too often is people attribute (their challenges) to being English learners, and therefore they’re in a lower category of learning or (reason) that’s why they’re not learning as fast,” she said. “But what we’re not saying is that (it’s) because of the forced separation and the impact on the development, and the trauma that they’re enduring, that has an impact on their brain functioning…. In my opinion, it’s not that because they’re in a second language classroom, but they’re just having a hard time overall.”

Humans behind the numbers

Among the scores of children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border between 2017 and 2021 was Immers Reyes, who was among the first and youngest ripped from their parents’ arms.

In 2016, Gladys Meléndez and Ever Reyes took their then 3-year-old son from their native Honduras to Mexico, the initial leg of a protracted journey to the border and an attempt to immigrate to the U.S. While they planned their crossing, Immers’ sister, Aracely, was born, temporarily stalling the family migration. Aracely was 4 months old when the family decided it was time to head north.

But at the border, Immers was separated from his father. In more than two months of detention, the boy was in Michigan in foster care while his dad was held in Texas. Meléndez and Aracely were also detained. Upon their release and emotional reunification, documented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on a video that went viral, the family began the long — and still unresolved process — of pursuing their asylum claim before the immigration court.

Once reunited, the family lived for a short time in Houston before moving to New York City in 2019 with the help of the organization Immigrant Families Together. That’s when Immers started school, and his anxiety and behavioral problems began.

Sitting at home in Queens, New York in 2024, Meléndez’s breath catches when she hears the name Trump. She rubs her hands and blinks rapidly as her throat goes dry. It’s an involuntary reaction, she says, noting that her children’s time in detention changed everything. Seven years later, she still finds herself spending most of her waking hours watching and taking care of Immers.

“There are times when I worry because (the younger Aracely) is more normal than him, she’s calmer. I don’t correct her as much, I’m not as on top of her,” Meléndez says.

‘It was hard for them. Every time I called them they would say, ‘Mom, how we need you, Mom, how we wait for you; Mom, how we wish to have you here; this is not life.’’

Meléndez recalled her routine conversations with Immers when he first started school: “Before … he felt scared. I asked him, ‘Why don’t you want to go to school?’ He’d reply, ‘no, I don’t want to. I don’t feel well again.’ ‘Tell me why you don’t want to go to school?’ I’d ask, and he’d say, ‘no, I feel sad. I’m scared.’ I would ask, ‘and why would you be scared?’ But now, and from last year, now he gets up with enthusiasm.”

Meléndez has no definitive solutions to the many problems vexing Immers and her family.

What she does know, though, is that Immers is improving today because of intensive counseling. And she can’t stop thinking of the origins of a life-altering trauma that has split her family: It’s the parents who crossed knowingly and the baby who didn’t understand what was happening and now doesn’t know how to deal with the experience.

“Now (in school) I see him as more inspired,” Meléndez says, through a notable sigh. “He puts in more effort, speaks better, does homework, has after-school programs, but (before 2022, it was) a very difficult stage for the child.”

Struggling in silence

The youngest of three siblings, Érick Danilo Zúñiga Gonzales, was the first in his family to graduate from high school. He did not do so in Honduras, but about 3,500 miles away in Philadelphia, at Olney Charter High School. He attained this achievement after recovering, just enough, from the long-lasting effects of an arduous migration and the family’s abrupt separation at the border in 2017.

The Zúñiga family — Keldy Mabel Gonzales de Zúñiga and her three sons — arrived in the United States in September of that year, after months of travel from Honduras. The oldest brother, Patrick Zúñiga Gonzales, was 18. He crossed the border alone and joined his father in Philadelphia. Keldy and her two other sons, Erick and Mino Zúñiga Gonzales, entered the U.S. in New Mexico and immediately surrendered to U.S. border agents. They were later transported to an immigration facility in El Paso, Texas.

That’s when their nightmare began.

“They told us they were going to put an ankle monitor on us and let us out the next day. And the next day came and things changed, and then they told us it wasn’t going to be like that, that they were going to separate my mom and send us to a shelter and she would go to prison,” Érick says.

Mino and Erick remained in immigration custody in El Paso, Texas, until October 2017.

“When they separated them from me, they cried,” their mother, Keldy Mabel Gonzales de Zúñiga, recalls. “I remember them desperately crying that they didn’t want to be separated from me, and I told them this: in five days we’ll see each other. It’s only five days. Those five days turned into four years before I saw my children again.”

While in custody, Keldy Mabel called her sons every day and soon learned that the boys had been reunited with Patrick in Philadelphia. Patrick got a job immediately and took on the responsibility of caring for his brothers.

The forced separation and being treated like criminals were compounded by the news that their mother was also locked up. All this on top of horrific memories of uncles who had been murdered in Honduras.

“It was hard for them. Every time I called them they would say, ‘Mom, how we need you, Mom, how we wait for you; Mom, how we wish to have you here; this is not life,’ they told me, even the eldest. They told me, ‘this is not life, this is nothing. We are nothing here without you,’” she recalls.

For Mino and Patrick, continuing school became impossible, she adds. While Patrick wants to attend college someday even though he’s yet to earn his high school diploma, Mino abandoned education altogether. “Mino didn’t continue. He didn’t want to finish school. (His) depression wouldn’t let him,” Gonzales de Zúñiga said.

Gonzales de Zúñiga was deported to Honduras in 2017, where she immediately began the journey back to the U.S.-Mexico border. She stayed in Ciudad Juárez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, hoping to be reunited with her children soon. She took refuge in her faith. She fought her case and managed, with the help of Linda Corchado, director of legal services at the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, to re-enter the U.S. legally, but four years later.

While she was away, the difficult migration and separation had pushed Érick into the shadows. He kept a low profile at school and didn’t talk about his family. He had been a good student in Honduras, but now, faced with a language he could barely understand or speak, his grades suffered. Yet his teachers did not have enough context to help him. Only a few knew that he had been separated from his mother, but they didn’t press for more details, and he wasn’t ready to share.

Erick’s emotional reunion with his mother in 2021 garnered significant media attention, beginning with a story by The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer, who had spent three years following her journey. The story quickly gained traction, appearing in major outlets like NBC News, the Associated Press, and Mother Jones, which also included an interview with Gonzales.

“Until my mom arrived here, they found out, from one of the (television) interviews. The teachers saw us on the news,” he said. That was like a weight being lifted off his shoulders.

An interview that spoke to many

Érick later learned that his story had inspired other migrants who had learned about his tough time in school, and his rebound, from those television interviews his mother gave.

Among those motivated by that interview was Roselvy Hernández. “I want that too,” she recalls thinking as she listened to Erick’s story. She vowed to help her own daughter, Yuleisy, who experienced similar struggles.

A month after Roselvy and Yuleisy left El Salvador in August 2017, they reached Mexico’s northern border and promptly surrendered to U.S. immigration authorities in El Paso, Texas. They sought asylum, but there was no welcome sign for the American Dream.

“They treated us with harshness,” Hernández recalls. They doubted Yuleisy’s relationship to Hernández and separated them.

“From that moment, I began to suffer profoundly. I had no idea what it was like to be separated from my daughter. No matter how hard I try to forget that day, I can’t,” Hernández says, her voice breaking as she recounts an ordeal she’s shared only with family and a few supportive friends.

Hernández spent 3.5 months detained in Texas. The first two weeks were the most distressing, she says: There was no word on Yuleisy. She only learned of her teen daughter’s whereabouts when a detention center officer said, coldly, that Yuleisy had been transferred to “New York,” without further explanation of the fate of the then 13-year-old.

Hernandez was deported to El Salvador and Yuleisy, after being placed in a shelter for migrant children away from their families, was handed over to her father and relatives.

“It was a very strange experience. Initially, I struggled to adapt, even though they tried to make me feel at home and welcome. I just wanted to be with my mom,” Yuleisy recalls.

‘I didn’t go to school to learn, to be honest. At first, I attended because I had to, but every day when I came home from school, I would cry.’

While her mother continued the struggle to return from El Salvador Hernández saw Keldy Mabel on the news hugging her family in the U.S. after her ordeal. She reached out to Keldy on Facebook and prayed for a response.

“And that’s when a light of hope opened up for me. And there I saw that God had heard that God was indeed doing, having mercy on all those mothers. From there I began to pray more and thank God for what he was doing,” Hernandez thought.

In addition, she sought out the same attorney in Texas who had helped Keldy, Linda Corchado, and with her legal advice she was able to reunite with her daughter.

In October 2021, she hugged her daughter again, who at that point was no longer a teenager, but an adult.

Like many of the other school-age migrant children who were separated from family at the border, Yuleisy is now a young adult. She lives with Hernández in Virginia. They are among the 178,000 Salvadorans living in Virginia, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.

Now 19, Yuleisy has had to mature rapidly. And despite years of therapy, she still struggles to articulate the impact of the forced separation that marred her arrival to the U.S. In an interview, she pauses, breathes deeply, and runs her fingers through her hair as she reflects on an experience that altered her youth.

“I didn’t go to school to learn, to be honest. At first, I attended because I had to, but every day when I came home from school, I would cry,” she says, recalling her class time while living with her father and longing for her deported mother. “I didn’t want to learn because my mindset was, ‘Send me back to El Salvador.’ I felt I wouldn’t stay here, that I would eventually return to El Salvador.”

Hidden scars

Yuleisy was reluctant to reveal to schoolmates that she was among the children separated from their families. She hid the pain of missing her mother from her father.

“One day I was feeling so bad. I was crying and I went to my dad’s bathroom and he lived in the basement. And I saw a Gillette (shaving blade) there. So at that moment, I felt like my life had no meaning. Why was I going to live? I wasn’t with my mom. I didn’t want to be here because she wasn’t here,” Yuleisy says.

She started cutting herself.

“I didn’t even feel pain. I didn’t even feel anything I was doing. Why was the pain and sadness, the desperation that I felt so much that I said, ‘Why am I going to live?’ For me, nothing made sense. I saw the blood, but I didn’t feel any pain or burning in my hands,” Yuleisy says, unable to contain her tears.

She recalls, however, that something told her to stop.

That was the first time. She tried to hide the scars with long-sleeve shirts, but an aunt saw her and told her father. His reprimand and sorrow were not enough. She gained weight and fell into deeper isolation.

“I tried to forget about it and wanted to do it a second time. But those voices came back to my mind telling me: Don’t do it, don’t do it. You’re not going to end your life. I was young and I know that God was the one who stopped me.” She, like her mother, describes herself as holding unwavering faith.

“My teacher would sometimes try to help, asking, ‘Can we try this method to help you learn?’ But I simply wasn’t interested,” Yuleisy says. “My attitude deteriorated over time. As I realized my mom wasn’t coming back, I grew increasingly negative.”

But on some level, her teacher had gotten through to her. Yuleisy learned English and enrolled in several schools as her family moved from city to city until she reunited with her mom in Virginia, were they both started a new life.

As she navigated life in the U.S., Yuleisy remained haunted by the sense that where she truly belonged was by her mother’s side.

After years apart from her mother, Yuleisy gradually came to terms with her situation.

“When I started high school, I faced the reality that I was staying here, so I had to do something. I found the strength to focus on my education,” she says.

An English teacher caught a glimpse of Yuleisly’s potential and took a genuine interest.

“Once, she organized an activity where we shared our stories because many of us were immigrants. I remember she asked us to summarize our stories. It was so comforting; she became a special person for me. When she read my story, she was so moved that she hugged me and said, ‘Wow! I’m amazed by your story,’” Yuleisy recalls.

This was the first time Yuleisy felt truly supported and motivated in the U.S.

“She told me, ‘Yuleisy, keep going. I want to see you study. You’re a smart girl,’” Yuleisy adds. “We even had video calls with classmates, and she frequently highlighted our stories.”

Gradually, everything started to seem less bleak.

And, in October 2021, mother and child were reunited after her mother petitioned for asylum again.

Their embrace at an airport in Virginia remains one of Yuleisy’s most-cherished memories.

“I saw her from afar in a blue dress. I remember I could barely walk; my legs were trembling. I just looked at her, and she looked at me. The hug we shared felt like it should last forever. We embraced, and I said, ‘Mommy,’ and she called me her princess,” Yuleisy recalls.

“I found a grown-up girl,” Hernández says. “The little girl I had left when we were separated was no longer there. She had grown up. I missed her hair, her height. When I saw her, I was surprised. This wasn’t the little girl I last hugged.”

Yuleisy graduated from high school in 2022 and aspired to continue her studies, but financial constraints posed a challenge.

“I wanted to apply for college, but I couldn’t afford the classes. I wasn’t working at the time, and my mom had many stresses — car issues, food, bills, clothes. She would say, ‘I can help you,’ but I saw how hard it was for her to manage everything. I told her I would save money to pay for classes and, God willing, study in the future.”

When Roselvy got home so exhausted that she didn’t have the energy to wash her work uniform, reeking of fried food, she knew all that effort was worth it. She knew (knows) it was all for her daughter’s future. She dreams of becoming a nurse, her eyes lighting up with a broad smile as she speaks.Yuleisy laughs easily, while she nervously runs her fingers through her tangled hair. As the conversation moves to her passions, cosmetology and fashion, her hands move more animatedly, reaching out to touch everything she envisions. Yet the moments of emotional freedom are often interrupted by memories of anxiety and pain. She cries deeply, her face contorts and tears stream down her cheeks. She gently wipes them away and insists that she is happy.

“As they say, after the storm comes the calm,” Yuleisy says.“Everything we went through made us stronger. When we finally reunited, we experienced a happiness we can’t even explain. It all served as motivation for us to keep fighting together.”

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Maritza L. Félix is an award-winning independent journalist, producer, and writer in Arizona. She is the founder of Conecta Arizona, a news-you-can-use service in Spanish that connects people in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico primarily through WhatsApp and social media. She is the co-founder, co-producer, and co-host of Comadres al Aire. @MaritzaLFelix

Joshua E. S. Philips is an award-winning investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, broadcast producer and author of the book, “None of us were like this before: American soldiers and torture. @joshesphillips

Olga L. Jaramillo, born in Colombia, is an independent visual storyteller based in the Washington D.C., metropolitan area. With a background in economics, she transitioned into photography, bringing her social awareness and experience in Latin American socioeconomic development into her visual work.
Through photography, short films, and text, she explores the intricate relationships between identity, culture, and migration. Olga’s most recent work focuses on the intergenerational impact of migration on the families of migrant mothers from Central America. Her multimedia documentary project “Dos Mundos,” begun in 2019, was awarded the Women Photojournalists of Washington’s inaugural Butterfly Grant in 2024. @olgajarsa

Ricardo Sandoval-Palos is the Public Editor – ombudsman – for PBS, the nation’s leading public media outlet. An award-winning investigative journalist and editor whose career has spanned four decades, Ricardo was the founding editor of palabra. @ricsand

Daniel Robles is a graphic designer with over two decades of experience in visual arts, photography, illustration, advertising and marketing. He is a native of Sonora, Mexico, with an associate’s degree in Graphic Design and Advertising. An award-winning designer of advertising campaigns and audiovisual projects, Robles has been the creative director of Conecta Arizona since its founding. In his spare time he enjoys cycling, street and documentary photography. @danroblesfoto