In February 2024, for New York, Piper French wrote “Left Apart,” a story about the parents who had been separated from their children at the border under the Trump administration and, under President Biden, still hadn’t been reunited. It was bipartisan in its apportioning of blame and optimistic in its search for accountability in a way that now feels quaint. Because, as we should have known, things can always get worse.
Now, Piper returns to report on the separated families who, despite a series of protections promised to them by the federal government, are being torn apart again: harassed by immigration authorities, placed in detention despite their legal status, and sometimes deported. The family at the center of Piper’s story talks about the trauma they suffered in 2018, when Gloria, then 5 years old, was sent to a shelter more than a thousand miles away from her mother. Gloria suffered nightmares for years and would wet herself whenever she heard sirens. Slowly, though, during the Biden years, she was able to make a new life in the United States with her mother. And then Donald Trump was reelected, his government unleashed a “massive deportation dragnet,” and Gloria and her mother ended up back in ICE custody. “How can you explain to a child why this has happened twice?” one lawyer asked Piper. It’s a question that, no matter how grim things looked, no one was asking in 2024.
—Christopher Cox, features editor, New York
