“Three days after they were freed, the boy started calling him “papa” again. For more than a year, six-year-old Edwin and his father, Juan, had been locked up in separate immigration facilities. The boy had been held at a shelter for unaccompanied minors—one of at least 2,800 children separated from their parents by the Trump administration under a now-defunct “zero tolerance” policy. Juan had served time for violations of immigration laws in two federal prisons and later in a detention center in West Texas. Their only connection was twice-weekly phone calls during which Juan would try to cheer up Edwin, asking him about his daily life. But nine months into their detention, in February 2019, something slipped inside the boy.

“[Edwin] wouldn’t say ‘papa ‘on the phone with me,” Juan said. Worse, he’d started calling adults at the shelter “abuelo” and “abuela”—grandfather and grandmother. It was another marker of the toll that being ripped away, quite literally, from his father was taking on the child. “I believed I was going to lose my son,” he said.” Read more at Texas Monthly here.