Before arriving in South Texas earlier this month, Hogan Lovells partner Amy Roma had been closely following the news of asylum-seeking families being detained and separated along the U.S.-Mexico border.

But it wasn’t until she’d made it inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in the town of Dilley, the temporary home for roughly 2,400 immigrants, that she fully understood why so many residents of Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were risking everything to make it to the United States.