Gonzalez-Garcia, 29, is a Guatemalan immigrant who was seeking asylum in the United States when she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in May with her three children, ages 6, 9, and 11. After surrendering to Border Patrol, her children were sent to Cayuga Centers in New York City, along with 240 other immigrant children who have been separated from their parents. Gonzalez-Garcia was detained separately in Arizona. She first spent time at a detention facility in Yuma, which many migrants call “icebox” or hielera because of the freezing temperatures. After a few days, she was transferred to the detention center in Eloy, a facility with a reputation for violence and assault. Then, on June 28, because of grassroots organizing efforts led by New York writer and mother of three Julie Schwietert Collazo, Gonzalez-Garcia made bond and was released.

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Just a week before, on June 22, Schweitert Collazo had attempted to participate in a protest where fellow moms and their babies occupied the lobby of the New York City Immigration Court. The event had finished by the time she arrived with her three-year-old, but when she got back into her car and turned on the news, she heard Orochena talking about his client—a woman who was detained in Arizona while her kids were in New York City. Something clicked.

All week, Schwietert Collazo had been working with other area mothers to gather supplies for children being detained in New York City’s Cayuga Centers. At City Councilmember Mark Levine’s office, they filled two rooms floor-to-ceiling with clothing, diapers, Spanish language books, and art supplies. But as a former social worker, Schwietert Collazo understood the importance of working on an individual level.

“The feeling of overwhelm is real,” she said. “Where do we start? How do we penetrate the system? I need to focus on this one thing I think we can do.”

She and her husband decided they would pay Gonzalez-Garcia’s bond and sponsor her in New York City while she completed proceedings to reunify with her children. Schwietert Collazo called Orochena, who picked up on the first ring. “He was floored,” she said. He asked: “There is a group of people who would want to do this?”

Schwietert Collazo created a GoFundMe page and, in less than 24 hours, had raised enough money to cover Gonzalez-Garcia’s $7,500 bond. Just six days later, they have raised $27,064, with 477 people contributing donations. That includes a donation from Schwietert Collazo’s father, a lifelong Republican and former card-carrying member of the NRA, who sent a text from a fishing trip telling her that he would donate when he returned.

Orochena said paying the bond would have never been possible without Schwietert Collazo and her community’s support. Bond for those being held in immigration detention can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $80,000—if it’s set at all. That makes paying bond one of the biggest obstacles facing detained asylum seekers from impoverished countries—which is why it was the first goal of the GoFundMe campaign.

Reflecting on the campaign’s speed and success, Schwietert Collazo said, “We live in this incredible moment where ‘ordinary citizens’ have so many means at their disposal to take action. Crowdfunding really provides an equalizing opportunity for people to be involved.” In addition to the GoFundMe, Schwietert Collazo created a Google form for those in the New York area who wanted to be involved in supporting Gonzalez-Garcia. Another organizer, Meghan Finn, planned Gonzalez-Garcia’s cross-country transportation, which is complicated by the fact that she does not have the photo ID required to travel by plane.

“This also speaks to the fact that we have more power and influence than we allow ourselves to believe,” Schwietert Collazo says. “How can you leverage your community to do something? To not be completely anesthetized by despair.”

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Standing outside Eloy just after her release, Gonzalez-Garcia’s first words were about her children. “I’m just happy I could get out so I can look for my children,” she said. “I feel like my heart had been torn into a thousand pieces when my children were ripped from my arms.”

The experience of being detained only added to the distress of separation. The women held in detention were not allowed to hug one another. Gonzalez-Garcia had not been permitted to change clothes during the 17 days she spent at the first detention facility. When she asked to call her children, an ICE officer told her, “No, there are no calls here.” When she asked another officer about their status, he told her, “You want to know something? You’re going to be deported to Guatemala and your children will be left in the hands of the government.”

In the time she was separated from her children, Gonzalez-Garcia only talked on the phone with them twice. This is in part because of limitations for when calls can be placed in detention, and difficulties connecting with the children’s caseworker. Calls are also prohibitively expensive—Gonzalez-Garcia was only able to call because her family in North Carolina was able to send her some money. The two calls that connected were three minutes each, and on one of them no one was able to speak—the entire family was crying too hard.

Gonzalez-Garcia journeyed to the United States because of poverty and violence in Guatemala. Recent patterns of migration show that many Central Americans—particularly Hondurans, El Salvadorans, and Guatemalans—are fleeing not only because of poverty but extreme violence. “There is a lot of violence in Guatemala. That’s why I didn’t want my children there exposed to the Maras,” said Gonzalez-Garcia. “I told myself, ‘In Guatemala there are no opportunities, there’s no employment, there’s no jobs. I thought, this is the only way I will be able to give my kids a better life, a better future, better education.”
But she had no idea the United States government would take her children from her. “It wasn’t until the moment I went to the detention center in Yuma that I found out they were taking my kids away.” At Eloy, Gonzalez-Garcia stayed in an area called Bravo 400, where she said there were many mothers like her.

Some mothers at Eloy told Orochena that they were told their children were taken to be given showers then never returned, while others were told outright that they were being separated. One mother told him that an ICE officer told her that the immigration judge didn’t want to see her kids and that to get a court date, her children would need to be taken and then brought back—the latter of which never happened.

After four weeks of requesting visits, Orochena was able to see Gonzalez-Garcia’s children at the Cayuga Center on June 27, the day before Gonzalez-Garcia was released. Orochena asked questions to assess the kids’ well being and saw no signs of physical harm. The children were brief, answering most questions with “fine,” but when he told them “your mom is coming,” her nine-year-old girl’s face shifted and she began to cry, wiping the tears before they could fall.

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The following day, when Schwietert Collazo went to the New York Field Office of U.S. Customs and Immigration Service to pay bond for Gonzalez-Garcia, she walked into a room no larger than a walk-in closet. Signs in all-caps warned of one to four hour waits. For her, the process of filling out paperwork and waiting for it to clear took two hours, and the whole time the office buzzed. She was surrounded by people—moms with kids, men, a priest—many of whom didn’t speak English. “They’re sitting there with checks for outrageous amounts of money,” she says. “You just have to wonder: What did those people have to do to raise the money to bond somebody out?”

Schwietert Collazo knows about the ICE and INS system first-hand. Her husband immigrated from Cuba in 1980 as part of the Mariel boatlifts and has spent time in immigration detention facilities. She says her own children—ages 3, 4, and 8—are aware of what’s happening, particularly her eight-year-old daughter. “When the last presidential campaign and election was underway, Mariel was saying, ‘Is Poppy going to be deported?’ [My husband] said to me [when deciding] how far we could go in for Yeni: ‘I’ve been the one in an immigration detention center, and I know how alone you feel. One thing I wanted was to know that people cared.’”
In addition to supporting Gonzalez-Garcia, Schwietert Collazo hopes that this process can provide a template for those who want to help families being detained. “The most important change is going to happen on the micro level, and then you scale it,” she said. “We can help this one family reunite and have a semblance of a life while they go through this difficult time.”

Immediately after being released, Orochena took Gonzalez-Garcia to get new clothes. Then she began her cross-country trek with the help of a community of nine drivers, most of whom are involved in immigrant rights organizations, who have split the drive into legs ranging from 4.5 to 7 hours. She arrives in New York City today, where she will be greeted by supporters. An apartment is ready for her in Queens, and the community has organized to get her other items she needs, like a pre-paid phone.

In response to the support she has received, Gonzalez-Garcia said, “Thank you, thank you so much. I won’t be able to pay you all back, but you’ll receive blessings from God.”

When Orochena was at Eloy, he met with five other women who he had been referred to by Gonzalez-Garcia. “One parent doesn’t know where her child is, which is a huge obstacle, to get through the tape and find them. One parent has been detained for two months without a bond. Another’s bond is twice as much as Yeni’s at $15,000,” he said.

One woman he met with has a five-year-old child who is also at one of the Cayuga Centers. Schwietert Collazo says, “She is likely to be our next priority.”

Grassroots organizing efforts continue on three fronts, she says. The first is to ensure support for Gonzalez-Garcia, the second is work on bond and reunification of the next person. “The third piece,” Schwietert Collazo says, “is to finalize a replication document for all these people who are talking about wanting to do something similar and providing with everything learned as part of the process.”

Correction: The article originally misstated the ages of Gonzalez-Garcia’s children. 

Davidson, 32, was employed as a youth care worker at a Tucson shelter run by Southwest Keys Programs, the organization contracted by the federal government to house immigrant children across multiple states. His job was to assist with the approximately 300 immigrant children, ages 4 to 17, living there.

As the only staff member fluent in Portuguese, he had been called in to translate for three recently-arrived Brazilian siblings ages 8, 10, and 16. The siblings were distraught. They hadn’t slept since they arrived at the shelter that morning, and staff had told them that their mother had disappeared. In Brazil, those who are “disappeared” are abducted from their homes and never seen again. They were terrified. Davidson addressed the oldest brother, “You have to be strong.” Weeping, the boy responded, “How?”

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These three children were among the more than 2,300 separated from their parents between May 5 and June 9. They are caught up in the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which separates children from their parents in order to criminally prosecute all adults who are caught crossing into the United States, even those exercising their legal right to seek asylum.

After Davidson refused to order the siblings not to embrace, he says his supervisor began to yell instructions at them in English and Spanish. According to facility policy, the siblings were then split up into different areas because of their ages and genders. When Davidson asked a case manager where the children’s mother was, she said she didn’t know, wouldn’t know for a week, and that it would be another week to speak with her. Two weeks later, on June 12, Davidson resigned.

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Davidson had been seeking post-college employment when he interviewed and subsequently began work at the shelter in February. Inspired to work there because his father was an immigrant, Davidson proposed teaching a capoeira course. Posters on the walls read: “We are all humanitarian heroes.” Davidson says, “They have a progressive corporate culture they present. They make you feel like we’re a humanitarian organization.”

The Estraya Del Norte shelter on North Oracle Road in Tucson is unremarkable in every way. Painted beige, the squat building blends into a strip of old motels, many of them abandoned. Tucsonans likely pass the building every day without noticing or wondering who is inside.  When organizers and activists finally learned there was a detention facility for immigrant children in their own community, they came together to form the Free the Children Coalition.

Last week at a coalition-led rally, several hundred protestors gathered in front of the Tucson federal courthouse with markered signs reading: “Morals Over Profit,” “We Will Not Abandon Our Children,” and “Where’s Our Humanity?”

Isabel Garcia, board member of humanitarian organization Derechos Humanos and a longtime immigration attorney, called the policy of family separation “the lowest of the low.”

“We’re here because we allowed it,” she said. “What are we going to do moving forward?”

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In 1924, Congress first passed legislation criminalizing illegal entry or re-entry, but over time, the prosecution of border-crossing has varied widely.

Border communities like Tucson have felt the impact of increased border policing in more recent years. In 2010, Arizona passed S.B. 1070, which required law enforcement officers to determine the immigration status of detained or arrested individuals if officers have “reasonable suspicion” they might be in the country without status. (The Supreme Court later struck down much of the law, and narrowed this specific provision.) Operation Streamline, a program begun in 2005, brings 70 migrants accused of illegal entry or re-entry before a federal judge almost every weekday. If migrants plea guilty to illegal entry, they are sentenced to time in detention but receive a misdemeanor rather than a misdemeanor and a felony for border crossing. In some courtrooms, prosecution of all 70 defendants, who appear before the judge seven at a time, takes as little as half an hour.

But American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Billy Peard, who has been meeting with immigrant parents held in detention in Eloy and Florence, Arizona, says, “From what I can tell, there is no precedent for systematically prosecuting adults for illegal entry or re-entry if they came over with a minor child.”

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Davidson said the atmosphere at the shelter became “more intense” and “more authoritarian” after Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ “zero tolerance” announcement in May. Previously, he said, many Guatemalan children who came to the United States without their parents were prepared to enter a shelter. “They were very compliant, they kept their heads down.” But then under zero tolerance “kids started coming in who didn’t know the drill, who were ripped from their parents. Laws were rolling out differently day to day,” Davidson says. “If case managers didn’t understand, you can imagine what kids didn’t understand.”

“You know that audio clip everyone’s listening to of kids’ crying?” Davidson says. “That’s something we were experiencing every day—those were the sounds of the evening as we were preparing to go home.”

Two days prior to the arrival of the Brazilian siblings, three kids ran away. Davidson witnessed the most acute behavior from children referred to by staff as “of tender age,” those under 12. Kids ran around, cried through the night, and hit teachers. One child demonstrated problematic sexual behaviors, grabbing at his teachers’ genitalia. He was 6.

“I call it a triple threat of trauma,” Davidson says. “Escaping traumatic experience in their countries, becoming traumatized entering, and then again in facilities. When you combine that with underpaid and untrained workers, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

The short- and long-term health consequences of separating children from their parents were confirmed by Dr. Eva Shapiro, a Tucson pediatrician of over 40 years. “A parent’s role is to mitigate these dangers,” Shapiro said. “Robbed of that buffer, children are susceptible to learning difficulties, depression, and chronic conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, heart disease, and other chronic diseases.” She continued, “Officials at the Department of Homeland Security claim they are acting to protect the best interest of minor children, but the White House and Department of Justice have vocally supported the idea of family separation as a deterrent to keep migrant families from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Last week, Tucson mother Daisy Pitkin awakened when her 3-year-old son cried out from a nightmare. After consoling her child, she sat on the edge of his bed as he fell back asleep and nearly had a panic attack. “I thought: What would happen if nobody came?” she said. “What would happen if a stranger came? That’s happening to children right now.”

Pitkin was one of 17 parents who brought their small children to a “Play Date” last week at Republican Rep. Martha McSally’s Tucson office. She said that contacting elected officials is “a foundational democratic act,” and that the parents’ chief objective was to find out the Congresswoman’s stance on the separation policy. For an hour, parents read stories, led children in songs, and helped kids make art.

When parents asked staff to call her D.C. office or try to reach the Congresswoman on her cell, their requests were denied. Staff told constituents that the office had two caseworkers: one for veterans’ issues and one to handle housing issues of elderly constituents. “When we asked what happens if one of her constituents comes asking about immigration, they said, ‘We don’t have anyone here who can talk about that,’” Pitkin said.

Another organizer and mom, Margot Veranes, said staffers asked why the group didn’t make an appointment or come when Congress wasn’t in session. “We don’t feel that this can wait,” Veranes said. “This needs to stop in the next five minutes ’cause every moment it’s happening to a new child—and the trauma for these kids and parents is going to be lifelong.”

In response to the “Play Date,” Congresswoman McSally’s chief of staff released a formal statement accusing the group of being led by “radical activists” and breaking into the office. “Events like these distract from the many issues our country faces and make it harder for our community to come together to address them,” the statement read.

Veranes, whose children are 6 months and 2 years old, argues that this is exactly the issue our country needs to address. “We’ll try anything to make this stop,” she said. “We have the luxury of being parents who are unified and we stand in solidarity with parents who don’t know where their kids are.”

The office handed out opinion forms, which many parents and some children filled out. One, from a 10-year-old, read: “Please try to stop this. It’s really wrong.”

On Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order purporting to end family separation that in reality just opened the door to the mass and prolonged incarceration of children along with their families—and potentially simply delaying family separation. This policy also contradicts a 1997 federal court decision that children accompanied by their parents cannot be held for more than 20 days. Moreover, the Trump administration has no plan to reunite the thousands of children whom it previously took from their parents.

“There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,” said a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

One of the Tucson Play Date organizers, Reverend Alison Harrington of Southside Presbyterian Church, a mother to 4- and 6-year-old daughters, explained the new policy this way: “What the president said is ‘We won’t separate families, we’ll incarcerate them.’ My hope is that this is a moment of awakening for many people so they can begin to see what’s truly happening in our nation.”