WaPo: “NASHVILLE — She sat on the edge of a picnic table outside the Comfort Inn and waited for the hearing to begin.
“Hello?” Magdalena Hernández Pérez said into her phone. “Can you hear me?”
On the screen flashed the face of a judge in California, the man deciding whether she would see her daughter again, more than five years after they were separated by U.S. Border Patrol agents.
“Hello?” she tried again. She wore a blue work uniform and pink lipstick that she hoped would make her look more American.
There was no response. Her hand trembled, then the screen turned black.
The Biden administration had brought Magdalena from Guatemala to the United States to reunite with her daughter, a reversal of the Trump administration’s policy of family separation that had torn them apart.
But now a county judge’s question loomed over their future: Was Magdalena the right person to raise her own child?
In between shifts at the hotel’s laundry room, she had written a statement to read at the hearing. She held the paper in her right hand so it didn’t blow away in the wind.
“I promise I can take care of my daughter,” she wrote.
“I have permission to be in this country legally,” she wrote.
“I have permission to work here.”
But the call wasn’t connecting. Somewhere in California, Magdalena knew, strangers were discussing whether her child was better off with a foster family.
“In the matter of Mildred Analy Hernández Pérez,”the case file began.
“Fifty-fifty,” is how her social workers had described Magdalena’s chances at the hearing.
Outside the Comfort Inn, across the street from the Tennessee Titans’ massive football stadium near downtown Nashville, Magdalena shook her phone. The screen was still frozen.
U.S. Border Patrol agents had taken her9-year-old daughter from her in December 2017 at an immigration detention facility in Arizona. They were among the first migrant families to be separated by the Trump administration — and now had endured one of the longest separations.
Between 2017 and 2018, the United States took about 5,000 migrant children from their parents. In most cases, the children were sent to live with relatives in the United States and the parents were deported.”