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.