I don’t really know what happened to me in 2018 or how it really affected me. I was 10 then, when I was separated from my mother at the border.
We had just come to the U.S from Honduras. We’d stepped into Texas, turned ourselves in to Border Patrol agents, and asked them for help. Instead, I was taken from my mother a few hours later.
I later found out that she was put on trial for crossing illegally and locked up with a lot of other immigrants. I was put on a plane and flown to someplace I didn’t know. My mother didn’t know either. We were separated for over two months.
The experience was formative — and traumatic.
I’ve been thinking lately that trauma can make you forget. But it seems it can also make you remember, not always in good ways.
Trauma can make you forget. But it seems it can also make you remember.
The memory of my own agonizing journey has come flooding back since Donald Trump’s reelection. Trump’s loss in 2020 had brought some relief. Joe Biden became president, and his Justice Department settled a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union had brought over the family separation policy — or, to be more honest, the systematic practice of tearing thousands of parents and children away from each other.
My mother and I were part of the ACLU suit. The legal relief we’ve gotten has included government-funded psychotherapy, as well as a special, renewable immigration status called “parole.” Parole hasn’t made us permanent residents. But it has opened the door for us to stay in the U.S. We also have an asylum case in immigration court. If we win, we can eventually get American citizenship.
Until recently, this stability took an edge off the wounds of separation; it put the bad memories on the back burner. Now the edge is back. I don’t know what will happen next.
A year ago, Trump defended his 2018 family separation policy during an interview with Univision. Separation had stopped people from coming to the U.S. “by the hundreds of thousands,” he claimed.
Since then, he’s also suggested that he could cancel the lawsuit settlement or slow its implementation. His Justice Department could also tell immigration judges they can’t consider domestic violence against women as a reason to grant asylum. Trump did this when he was president the first time around.
The ACLU and other groups say they it will fight any such moves, but my mom worries constantly.
As for me, my therapist and I are doing a lot of talking about my memories.
In Honduras, before we came north, I was a quiet little kid, but still had lots of friends. And I was very close to my mother. When I was 9, she had a partner who was violent. One night, I woke up to the sound of them arguing in the kitchen. A moment later, I heard a loud thud. The next morning I saw a long scratch on the fridge and a machete on the ground nearby.
My mother didn’t say anything — I think she didn’t want to worry me — but I could tell she was afraid that next time he would kill her. I know now that this is why we left Honduras: to save her life.
During our weekslong trip to the U.S., my mother seemed frightened. But since I was so young, the journey started out being fun for me in many ways.
From Guatemala, we crossed the river late at night into Mexico on a speedboat. My mother worried that I’d fall in the water, but I was only thinking about the refreshing breeze after the tropical daytime heat. And I enjoyed myself even when we first got to Texas and were put in a fenced-in room with other people.
Many kids my age were detained there. We were given foil blankets, all silvery and shiny. We played fairy tale games with them. One girl put the foil on her head to make a crown, like a queen. I made a cape around my shoulders and was a witch, trying to snatch the queen’s crown without getting caught by her protector kids.
Then, suddenly, the fun came to a screeching halt. I was led away from my mom into another room. Someone in there mentioned that they were going to be deported. I started crying, went up to a guard, and asked if my mom and I were going to be deported too. He wouldn’t look at me. He just gave me some snacks: an apple and a package of cheese crackers with peanut butter in them.
I would cry myself to sleep longing for my mother.
Outside, the night was enveloped by a thick darkness. I didn’t know whether it was early in the morning or late at night. I was put in a car with a woman who spoke only English and taken to a home. She gestured at me to take a shower and to leave my clothes outside. When I came out, my clothes were gone, including my pants with my two bills of Honduran lempira, the currency from home that I always carried as a good luck charm. The clothes I was given were many sizes too large, so baggy as to be uncomfortable.
Adults I didn’t know, many of whom didn’t speak my language, kept directing my movements, this time into yet another car. I wondered where we were going, but I was told nothing.
I desperately hoped we were going back for my mother. We arrived at an airport, and I yearned to find her on the plane, but she wasn’t there.
No one gave me any more information, and I sobbed in desperation. A 15-year-old girl sitting next to me, the only one who spoke Spanish to me, was in the same situation. She held my hand throughout the flight. After we landed, I never saw her again.
I later found out the place I ended up in was in Virginia. It was a shelter for teenage girls, including a 16-year-old who was pregnant. They didn’t have clothes for girls my age. An 11-year-old girl from Guatemala was my only peer. She seemed nervous and hardly talked.
When night fell, I would cry myself to sleep longing for my mother. I wondered how she was doing, in a country she barely knew, separated from her family — separated from me.
I didn’t speak much to the others, but a girl named Jimena mothered me, comforting me and combing my hair. We had to wake up every day at 5 a.m. to clean our rooms. Dragging the large vacuum from the first floor to the second floor was too much for me, and she helped.
Jimena was one of the only girls there who I was comfortable around. Then she left, and I missed her like I missed my mother. It was a loss after loss, each on top of the next.
Almost immediately after, I was reunited with my mom, I forgot a lot of what happened to me. Still, the effects were with me, even then.
My mother told me I had night terrors for weeks, where I bolted upright and screamed in my bed. I would wake up early in the morning, she said, and pretend to clean the house. I was apparently just acting like I had at the shelter, living, no doubt, in a way that had become normal to me. I don’t remember any of it.
Six years later, my mom and I are still in the U.S. I’m in high school and taking college-prep courses.
On the one hand, I think I’m doing well. On the other, I’m questioning my mental well-being. I’m less attached to people than I was before the separation. I’ve had trouble developing friendships; I often feel they’ll only be temporary.
Since I started high school, I’ve been forgetting things more and more. Once I was chatting with a friend about a book we were reading, and she told me things I said I’d liked about it, but I didn’t remember saying those things. I recently got a calendar to record my school assignments because I keep forgetting them; my mind goes blank.
My therapist told me these could all be after-effects of the separation.
In my English class we’ve been reading a novel, “The Memory Police,” by Yoko Ogawa. It’s about a police force that goes around seizing mundane objects that people are forbidden to have, like flowers, pets, and family photographs. Anyone caught with these sorts of items is disappeared or put to death. In class, we work together through questions raised by reading the book: Who controls these Memory Police? What is the government trying to accomplish with them? Why would it want its people to forget their history — even personal history?
In the novel, the memory police take things away. In real life, I have struggled to cast off the pall of what I have hung on to. My own memory keeps things that I wish it wouldn’t. Like cheese crackers with peanut butter. Like apples. I don’t want to even look at those foods anymore, much less eat them.
Especially with Trump coming into office again, with my and my family’s future cast into doubt, I wonder what things our own government might try to make us forget if it could. And what may we end up remembering, even against our will?
