WASHINGTON — Angelica Gonzalez-Garcia answered the call from an unknown number with suspicion.
She was scared and alone in a small apartment in Framingham, desperate to find her 7-year-old daughter after they had been separated a month earlier without any explanation at an Arizona detention center. At the time, in mid-2018, the public was only becoming aware of what immigration lawyers along the US-Mexico border had long suspected: The US government was splitting migrant families apart not by incompetence or chance but as a matter of policy, a form of deterrence, as then Attorney General Jeff Sessions described it, to discourage others from coming north.
While Gonzalez-Garcia was shuffled from immigration facility to immigration facility, her daughter managed to call her grandmother in Guatemala from a shelter in Texas. The mother tried to connect with the girl by phone, and was able to reach an acquaintance willing to house them in Massachusetts. When Gonzalez-Garcia was released in Colorado, a social worker guided her to the airport for a flight to Boston.
Yet, no one — not the federal officials, the asylum officers, or the advocates — could tell her how to get the government to return her daughter.
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