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I sometimes think of what would have happened if I had let that first phone call go to voicemail. The line was unstable and I could discern only half the words, but I knew immediately why she was calling. For weeks, I’d been receiving dozens of calls like hers.

In the summer of 2020, I was working as a paralegal in Austin, Texas, remotely filling out asylum applications for migrants who were trapped in a dangerous limbo. A landmark policy of the first Trump administration—euphemistically called the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” or MPP—was keeping tens of thousands of immigrants stateless and often homeless in Mexico’s border regions while their asylum cases were adjudicated in U.S. border courts. Over half lost the chance to pursue asylum because they never received notice of their court date, or they fell victim to “routine” kidnappings, assaults, or sexual violence by cartel members. All of them were desperate for legal aid.

As much as I tried to stop it, my number had been passed around the Mexican borderland all summer, and I was inundated with calls. By the time Irma, a Venezuelan asylum-seeker who’d recently been deported from the U.S. border to Mexico, first contacted me, I had a standard answer: We were at capacity. I could not help anyone. (Irma asked that her name be changed for this because she fears retaliation from the U.S. government).

But she didn’t give me the chance to turn her away. Within minutes, she told me that her son had died after Mexican immigration officials deported him to Colombia. He’d had a respiratory complication related to his diabetes, she explained, possibly triggered by coronavirus. She began to cry.

“Tell me,” she asked in Spanish, “how can I bring his ashes to me?”

I remember pausing. I knew I had to tell her I couldn’t help her—I was under direct orders not to accept clients. But somehow, I couldn’t do it. She seemed so sure, already, that I could help. Irma spoke to me like she already knew me and loved me, as though I had already been kind to her. She called me “mija”—my daughter. She seemed to hold no mistrust toward me and my halting Spanish, no shard of suspicion that I could use to create the usual distance around myself.

After that call, I convinced my supervisor to make a rare exception for Irma and provide her with limited assistance with her asylum case. For months, we talked almost every night as I helped her prepare for her scheduled asylum hearing at the U.S. border—a hearing that would be delayed over and over again as COVID-19 shut down courtrooms across the country. I never figured out how to bring her son’s ashes to her. They remained in Colombia—as did his widow and daughters, pinned between familiar horror and new violence.

But Irma kept waiting for her day in court. Over the next years, I became transfixed by her asymmetrical struggle against the U.S. immigration system. As she moved to the U.S., reunited with her family, gained legal status—got almost everything she’d wanted—and lost it again, I kept answering her calls.

More than five years later, when U.S. forces struck Caracas, Venezuela, and seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to face narco-trafficking charges in federal court while continuing their unprecedented attack on asylum-seekers inside the United States, I’ve found myself increasingly unable to share her faith in American justice. As I watched the havoc caused by the vagaries of the U.S. immigration system, I kept returning to the same questions. Had I helped? Could anyone help? Was there enough justice left in the U.S. immigration system—enough order, enough impartiality—for help to be possible? Or had she just traded one set of dangers for another?

When Nicolás Maduro first assumed power in 2013, Irma was working as a campesina—a small-scale rural farmer—in Venezuela. She was happy then, she told me in our early conversations, marveling daily at the process of growing living things from the earth. At first, she was optimistic about Maduro, who had been a bus driver in Caracas and who she thought would serve the “humble.”

“Maduro, I knew him as a man who knew the people’s needs, because someone who drives a bus has passengers get on every day and hears their comments and........

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