3 years after separation, her son is back but her life is not

When Leticia Peren bid her 15-year-old son, Yovany, good night in a Texas Border Patrol station three years ago, he was still small enough that she, standing less than 5 feet tall, reached down a little when she placed her hand on his shoulder and urged him to rest.

Earlier that night, the two of them had concluded their long journey from Guatemala by walking for hours in the whistling desert wind, losing sight of their own feet in mud that felt like quicksand. The Border Patrol agents who apprehended them outside of Presidio, Texas, placed them in separate cells. Exhausted, Peren fell into a deep sleep but woke up to a new nightmare.

Yovany was gone, sent to a shelter in Arizona. Peren had no money and no lawyer. When she next saw him, more than two years had passed.

At the time of their reunification, Yovany was the last remaining child in custody who the federal government considered eligible to be released. The bonds broken during their 26 months apart — when Peren was a voice on the phone more than 1,500 miles away, as Yovany made new friends, went to a new school, learned to live without her — have been slow to regrow.

By the time they were reunited, her son had matured into a young man, taller than her and with a deepening voice, one he could use to hold a conversation in English. Peren, frantic during the time it took to get him back, had lost some of her hair and developed a condition that, when triggered by stress, caused her face to sag on one side.

Years after the mass separations of migrant families spurred a national outcry because of the trauma they caused, much of the public outrage over the policy eased as thousands of parents and children were eventually reunited.

But for families like Peren’s, swept up by the Trump administration’s most widely debated attempt to deter immigration, the story did not end when the policy did.

To some degree, Peren and her son are lucky. They are being sponsored by an affluent family who took them into their spacious house in a well-heeled Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood. Volunteer groups have acted as informal social workers, tracking down doctors to provide free

RYAN CHRISTOPHER JONES / THE NEW YORK TIMES Leticia Peren prays Feb. 2 while attending a Spanish Mass at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Brooklyn, N.Y. Years after the mass separations of migrant families spurred a national outcry, thousands have been reunited and the public outcry has eased. For Leticia and her son, the reunion has taken place but is not without heartache.