For the past two years, Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga kept a daily ritual. Rising before dawn, she’d walk toward the border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where four bridges lead into El Paso, and visualize herself on the other side. She’s a religious woman known to friends, family, and acquaintances as la pastora, or the pastor. In Juárez, she devoted herself to the city’s population of migrants. Recently deported families would call her with the rough coördinates of where they were—highway mile markers, descriptions of intersections—and Gonzáles Brebe would take a taxi and bring them to someplace they could sleep. At migrant shelters, she was a regular presence, delivering sermons and benedictions. But each morning, standing within sight of one of the bridges, she made time to say a prayer for herself. She prayed that the border would open for a moment, just long enough so that she could finally see her children.
The last time that she had was in the fall of 2017. Her family, fleeing Honduras, had scattered across the continent. Gonzáles Brebe’s husband and oldest son, who was eighteen, had already crossed into the U.S. Her mother and niece were in Tapachula, Mexico, near the Guatemalan border. Gonzáles Brebe and her two middle sons, who were thirteen and fifteen, attempted the final leg of the journey together. It was around noon, on a hot day in September, when they flagged down a Border Patrol cruiser in the New Mexico desert. They planned to turn themselves in and apply for asylum. A day and a half later, at a holding cell in Deming, thirty-five miles north of the border, agents took her away in handcuffs, to prosecute her for the misdemeanor crime of illegal entry. Her boys screamed and cried; she still remembers the feel of their hands grasping at her clothes. The government assumed custody of her children and moved them to a shelter for minors who’d come to the U.S. alone.
Outside of a small circle of government officials, virtually no one knew that an experiment was under way. Along a two-hundred-and-sixty-mile stretch of the border around El Paso, the Trump Administration was testing what would become its zero-tolerance policy. The idea was to send a message—by criminally prosecuting immigrants for entering the country unlawfully, and, in the process, by splitting apart parents and children who were travelling together. Gonzáles Brebe and her boys were among the first families to be separated. By the time a federal judge in California ordered the Trump Administration to reunite the families, in June, 2018, more than two thousand other cases had been documented. Gonzáles Brebe’s boys had been released to their aunt, in Philadelphia. She remained stuck in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in El Paso. Lawyers at a local nonprofit, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, filed petitions to delay her deportation, but it was too late. On January 24, 2019, the government flew her to San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Within days, she was making her way north once more, through Guatemala and into Mexico. Her mother and niece were now living in the U.S., too. She was the only one left in limbo.
Three weeks ago, Gonzáles Brebe received a text message from Linda Corchado, her immigration attorney in El Paso. In February, Joe Biden had signed an executive order to create a federal task force charged with reunifying families that had been separated under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy. The details of how the order might affect Gonzáles Brebe’s case weren’t yet clear. But government sources were telling Corchado that the reunification process could begin before the fall. A week later, Corchado sent another message: “Keldy, do you know where you can get passport photos taken in Juárez?” The next series of messages came faster; Corchado was receiving more information from the Department of Homeland Security. Gonzáles Brebe was sitting in her room one morning, shortly after returning from the bridge, when Corchado texted a date and time: Gonzáles Brebe was scheduled to cross into El Paso on Tuesday, May 4th, at eight in the morning.
“Something different is passing over me now,” Gonzáles Brebe told me. We were speaking through audio memos on Facebook Messenger. I’ve known her for three years, and have visited her in U.S. detention and also in Tapachula, where she lived for several months. But hearing her now felt like I was listening to someone else. Her voice was clearer and brighter. She’s only thirty-seven years old, and, for the first time in dozens of hours of conversation, she sounded like it. “I’m returned to life,” she said.
Still, she was nervous that something might go wrong, and decided not to share the news with her children. Instead, she texted her niece a video from the Juárez side of the Paso del Norte bridge. “Blessings to you,” she began, barely suppressing a smile. She was wearing tinted glasses and a gray-black-and-white-checkered flannel shirt. Her hair, freshly cut, whipped in the wind. “I’m going over there,” she said. “I’m going all the way up until I’ll be with my children.” Then she swore her niece to secrecy. If the international bridges connecting Juárez to El Paso were a symbol of hope, they were also a reminder of the greatest trauma of her life. Waiting on the American side were agents from Customs and Border Protection. At one point, she texted Corchado, “They’re not going to set a trap for me, are they?”
