This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
I felt my throat constrict with every step closer to the Aeroméxico gate at the Los Angeles International Airport, knowing I had minutes left to say goodbye to my mother. I was 8, a U.S.-born Afro-Mexican girl from Los Angeles. My mother was sending me across the border to her birth country. It would only be for the summer, but I felt banished to a place that was foreign to me, far from the person I loved most.
Our family separation wasn’t demanded by the law, but by an economy that left my mother with no other choice. A single mother working in community engagement, she couldn’t afford childcare in the summers, so sent me to be with my grandmother in her hometown, Queretaro, a modestly preserved, Spanish colonial city in North Central Mexico. It would become the anchor of a bittersweet, six-year cycle for an unaccompanied, Black child navigating two countries that in some ways claimed but estranged me.
Tears blurred my eyes as we approached the flight attendants. I held my mother’s hand firmly, desperate to absorb the last warmth of her touch. We locked eyes and mouthed our goodbyes.
Los invisibles
I often met other children on those flights. We were the unaccompanied minors ignored by the media — we weren’t fleeing north to seek safety and prosperity; we were forced south by economic faults in the U.S. We were called los invisibles in Mexico. The Ministry of Interior estimates hundreds of thousands of children who are U.S. citizens live in Mexico, many permanently. I sat with the other invisibles, nurturing a brief connection built upon the shared pain of being sent away.
Long before social media captured children violently torn from their parents, families like mine were quietly separated. No border agents, no handcuffs. Just our parents’ trembling hands and the crushing pressure of bills, rent and low wages forcing us apart for months and even years at a time.
In order to understand what President Donald Trump’s mass deportations are really about, we have to examine the systems that have long separated Black and Indigenous families across the Americas.
From Native American boarding schools and the forced separation of enslaved families, to the Japanese internment camps and mass incarceration — rupture has remained upsettingly consistent in the stories of families of color, guaranteeing them instability at far greater rates than white families.
When I watch videos of Black and brown children sobbing as their parents are forcefully detained in ICE raids, I feel that piercing grief I experienced during the years my mother couldn’t afford to keep me in my country. Their separations are more violent and in some cases, permanent. But the root is familiar.
Staggering data confirms the punitive nature of the systems of separation: Black children make up just 14% of all U.S. kids, yet more than 53% will be involved in investigations by child protective services before they turn 18. One in 9 Black children will be placed in foster care.
Recent research from UCLA shows that since 1895, 96% of deportations from the U.S. have been to non-European countries, meaning millions of Black and brown children have had their parents torn away.
Family separation is known to cause long-lasting psychological disorders in children and adolescents, and is linked to substance abuse, anxiety, misguided sexual behavior, depression and self-harm, studies show.
My own experience of rupture, while less severe, left me with a cascade of psychological wounds: childhood night terrors evolved into chronic sleep issues, and a deep emotional void fueled a pattern of self-destructive behavior in my adolescence.
Conservative media personalities often frame “fatherlessness” as a cultural pathology afflicting communities of color, ignoring the structural forces that remove parents from homes. What they refuse to confront is the role of the carceral state and the economic order that traps families in poverty and forces them to live apart from one another. That is why rupture has become a defining characteristic of the non-white experience across the Americas.
Think about the displacement of millions of Afro and Indigenous Mexicans and Central Americans from their homes in the last century by American corporate elites pillaging their land and resources the way Trump is doing now in Venezuela.
Think about how the militarized border always cuts off the displaced from the relatives and investments they left behind. They can’t visit a deteriorating home or a dying parent back home without risking permanent exile from their U.S.-born children or losing the jobs they need to support their families. And so they must stay here as an exploitable labor force.
Separation stalks us
These are expressions of an empire that thrives on funneling families like mine into instability by wrenching them apart. It is a separation that stalks us, the way the border has begun to snake into the country’s interior.
In the United States, we live with the consequences of this rupture long before a masked ICE agent or a social worker shows up at our doorstep. My mother didn’t choose to send me away; she was forced to because the American economy demands Black and brown labor while systematically devaluing our humanity, denying low-income families equitable access to social welfare resources.
And yet, even in the midst of that separation, Mexico restored parts of my spirit that the United States had taken.
My cousins, Lalo and Emiliano, made every summer bearable, enfolding me in their world and becoming the bridge to my Mexican roots. We biked through our pueblito and I hiked with my grandmother to El Cerrito, a Toltec pyramid that towered over her house like an ancestral guardian. I attended summer camps covered by Mexico’s social security system — the kind of resource often unavailable in the U.S.
The annual goodbyes with my grandmother also became a ritual of deep sorrow, beginning with a somber, three-hour bus ride to the Mexico City airport. My grandmother hated seeing me leave. Unlike my mother, who hid her grief, my grandmother cried openly, as intensely as I did. I would beg her to let me stay, my fingers digging into her until the last possible second before I had to step onto the plane.
My childhood was defined by grief and separation from my caretakers.
Young people who live in fear of separation, or who’ve experienced the pain of it, should know that we hold the power to transmute our grievances into unified resistance, to disrupt the institutions that enforce these malicious policies. We can demand our leaders answer for their complicity in the injustices of the ICE raids. We have the collective strength to dismantle the systems that capitalize on the dissolution of communities.
This transformation has already been planted. From Los Angeles to Minneapolis, a surge of mutual aid networks is already proving that the fates of our communities are intertwined. By joining these local collectives, we can directly cultivate the community-led change necessary to protect one another.
Ending family separation
However, ending family separation necessitates moving beyond symbolic outrage; we must build systems that value the stability of Black, brown, and immigrant families as much as any others.
It requires pressuring our leaders to invest in the foundations of equitable systems, such as affordable childcare so parents aren’t forced to send their children across borders to survive, housing assistance that keeps families stable, and secure pathways to citizenship for immigrants so they can be free to move across borders without fear.
I refuse to let the fracture I lived through become final for anyone else.
I’ve spent my life learning to live on two sides of a border, my heart stretched across countries and time zones, divided between a mother who worked tirelessly to keep us afloat and a grandmother whose love would forever mark my spirit.
That fracture took the innocence from my childhood, but it also unbound me. It gave me power to work for a vision of America that honors the tenderness of family rather than the violence of separation.
A version of this essay was developed as part of ‘Our Unsilencing,’ a program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in partnership with Unseen.
