Throughout the summer of 2018, thousands of migrant families were separated—sometimes, physically torn from each other—at the United States-Mexico border. The Zero Tolerance Policy, as it was known, was enacted by the Trump Administration in order to deter families from lawfully seeking asylum in the United States.

Between May and June 2018, federal officials deliberately separated over 5,500 migrant children from their families at the southern border, often without any plan for reunification. Parents were held in detention facilities while their children were placed in separate shelters, sometimes thousands of miles away, under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.