In July, two weeks before a group of ICE officers escorted Orgullosa Pitillo and her children to the New Orleans airport to board a flight bound for Honduras, one of them gave her some advice: Leave the U.S. voluntarily or risk losing your children. She knew it wasn’t an empty threat. Seven years earlier, in May 2018, the government had taken her 5-year-old daughter, Gloria, from her after the family crossed the Rio Grande into Texas and surrendered to Border Patrol. Members of Honduras’s Afro-Indigenous Garifuna minority, Orgullosa and Gloria had faced violence back home, and they asked the U.S. for asylum. Instead, the government separated them, sending Orgullosa to a federal prison and flying Gloria to a shelter in Maryland.

Orgullosa was so inconsolable she had to be tranquilized, and

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