Mother Jones; Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP

In the spring of 2018, attorney Christie Turner-Herbas returned from parental leave to her job at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a nonprofit serving unaccompanied migrant children, to find that her “universe was on fire.” During the previous summer, the Trump administration had quietly started to roll out a policy, which then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions would later officially announce as “zero tolerance.” Aimed at deterring would-be migrants from heading to the United States, the infamous practice called for criminally prosecuting those who crossed the border unlawfully and, in the process, forcibly separating children from their parents and other relatives.

By the summer, KIND had sent lawyers to the US-Mexico border, including Turner-Herbas, who was tasked with leading the organization’s response to family separation. She began to meet with parents who had been sent to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. And to meet the children, who had been transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. “They were traumatized, distraught,” she says.

Looking back at that time, Turner-Herbas, now KIND’s senior director of special programs, recalls how difficult it was to leave her newborn at home while still breastfeeding, sometimes having to pump milk at an ICE facility. But unlike many of the parents she was visiting who had no idea where their sons or daughters were, Turner-Herbas took comfort in thinking, “this is a temporary time being away from my baby.” For those families, she realized even then, “it was going to take years and years to undo the damage that was done in just a few months.”

Indeed, almost six years later, the ordeal for families separated at the border under Trump’s “zero tolerance” regime is far from over—and their ability to stay in the United States is in limbo. Last year, the US government reached a settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of separated families. The final agreement didn’t include monetary damages, but awarded class members the right to apply for temporary legal status and work authorization, as well as access to certain behavioral health and housing services. The settlement also provided families with a renewed opportunity to seek asylum. (In several cases, migrants had been denied the right to ask for protection........

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