What I learned crossing the border alone as a child.

By Skye Harris, especially for CalMatters

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I could feel my throat tighten with each step closer to the Aeroméxico gate at Los Angeles International Airport, knowing I had minutes left to say goodbye to my mother. I was 8, an Afro-Mexican girl from Los Angeles, born in the USA. My mother used to send me across the border to her home country. It was only going to be for the summer, but I felt banished to a place that was foreign to me, away from the person I loved most.

The separation of our family was not required by law, but by economics, which left my mother with no other choice. A single mother working in the community, she couldn’t afford childcare in the summer, so she sent me to my grandmother in her hometown of Queretaro, a modestly preserved Spanish colonial town in north-central Mexico. It would become the anchor of a bittersweet six-year cycle for an unaccompanied black child navigating two countries that somehow claimed but alienated me.

Tears clouded my eyes as we approached the flight attendants. I held my mother’s hand tightly, desperate to soak up the last warmth of her touch. We closed our eyes and said goodbye with our mouths.

I often met other children on these flights. We were the unaccompanied minors ignored by the media—we did not flee north to seek safety and prosperity; we were forced south by economic mistakes in the US We were called the invisible in Mexico. The Department of the Interior estimates that hundreds of thousands of children who are US citizens live in Mexico, many of them permanently. I sat with the other invisiblenurturing a brief relationship built on the shared pain of shipping.

Long before social media filmed children being forcibly torn from their parents, families like mine were being quietly separated. No border agents, no handcuffs. Only the trembling hands of our parents and the crushing pressure of bills, rent, and low wages force us apart for months and even years.

To understand what President Donald Trump’s mass deportations really are, we need to examine the systems that have long separated black and Native American families.

from Indian Boarding Schools and the forcible separation of enslaved families, to Japanese internment camps and mass incarceration — the divide has remained disturbingly consistent in the histories of families of color, guaranteeing them instability at far greater levels than white families.

When I watch videos of black and brown children sobbing like theirs parents are forcibly detained in ICE actionsI feel that piercing sorrow that I experienced during the years when my mother could not afford to keep me in my country. Their separation is more tumultuous and in some cases permanent. But the root is familiar.

Staggering data confirm the punitive nature of segregation systems: Black children make up only 14% of all children in the US, but more than 53% will participate in investigations by child protection services before they turn 18. One of 9 black children will be accommodated in host families.

Recent research from UCLA shows that since 1895, 96% of US deportations have been to non-European countries, meaning the parents of millions of black and brown children have been ripped away.

Family separation is known to cause long-term mental disorders in children and adolescents and is associated with substance abuse, anxiety, sexual misconduct, depression and self-harm, studies show.

My own breakup experience, though less severe, left me with a cascade of psychological wounds: childhood night terrors turned into chronic sleep problems, and a deep emotional void fueled a pattern of self-destructive behavior in my adolescence.

Conservative media personalities often fatherlessness frame as a cultural pathology affecting communities of color, ignoring the structural forces that remove parents from homes. What they refuse to face is the role of the prison state and the economic order that traps families in poverty and forces them to live apart from each other. This is why the divide has become a defining characteristic of the non-white experience in America.

Consider the displacement of millions of Afro and indigenous Mexicans and Central Americans from their homes in the last century by US corporate elites, robbing their land and resources the way Trump is doing now in Venezuela.

Consider how a militarized border always cuts off the displaced from the relatives and investments they have left behind. They cannot visit a broken home or a dying parent at home without risking permanent exile from their US-born children or losing the jobs they need to support their families. And so they have to stay here as an exploitable workforce.

Separation is lurking

These are expressions of an empire that thrives on driving families like mine into instability by tearing them apart. It is a separation that stalks us, as does the border started to howl in the interior of the country.

In the United States, we live with the consequences of this rift long before an undercover ICE agent or social worker shows up on our doorstep. My mother did not choose to send me; she was forced to do so because the American economy requires black and brown labor while systematically devaluing our humanity by denying low-income families equal access to welfare.

Yet, even during this separation, Mexico recovered parts of my spirit that the United States had taken.

My cousins, Lalo and Emiliano, made every summer bearable, wrapped me in their world and became a bridge to my Mexican roots. We cycled through ours village and I walked with my grandmother to Cheritoa Toltec pyramid that towered over her house as an ancestral guardian. I attended summer camps covered by The Mexican Social Security System — the kind of resource often unavailable in the US

The annual farewell to my grandmother also became a ritual of deep grief, beginning with a somber, three-hour bus ride to the airport in Mexico City. My grandmother hated to see me go. Unlike my mother, who hid her grief, my grandmother cried openly, as loudly as I did. I begged her to let me stay, my fingers digging into her until the last possible second before I had to step on the plane.

My childhood was defined by sorrow and separation from my cares.

Young people who live in fear of separation, or who have experienced the pain of it, need to know that we have the power to transform our grievances into united resistance, to disrupt the institutions that enforce these malicious policies. We can hold our leaders accountable for their complicity in the injustices of ICE raids. We have the collective power to dismantle the systems that benefit from the breakdown of communities.

This transformation is already planted. From Los Angeles to Minneapolis, a wave of mutual aid networks already proves that the destinies of our communities are intertwined. By joining these local collectives, we can directly cultivate the community-led change needed to protect each other.

Termination of family separation

Ending family separation, however, requires moving beyond symbolic outrage; we need to build systems that value the stability of black, brown, and immigrant families as much as anyone else.

This requires pressuring our leaders to invest in the foundations of fair systems, such as affordable child care so parents are not forced to send their children across borders to survive, housing assistance that keeps families stable, and secure pathways to citizenship for immigrants so they can freely move across borders without fear.

I refuse to allow the brokenness I experienced to become final for someone else.

I spent my life learning to live on both sides of the border, my heart stretched across countries and time zones, divided between a mother who worked tirelessly to keep us afloat and a grandmother whose love would forever mark my spirit.

This fracture took away the innocence of my childhood, but it also untied me. It empowered me to work for a vision of America that honors the tenderness of family, not the violence of separation.

A version of this essay was developed as part of Our Silence, a program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in partnership with Unseen.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.