#family-separation

#family-separation

If Harris did feel sophomore jitters, then Amity, his 2025 follow-up, certainly doesn't show them. This is a smart, sensitive and very assured novel, albeit one that doesn't stray radically from the winning formula of its predecessor. Once again, Harris takes the Reconstruction-era deep south as his setting, and African American characters, recently and tenuously liberated from slavery are the driving force of his narrative.

Carlos, the main subject, is one such case: originally from Mexico, he crossed the border at the age of nine with his three brothers and his parents. Now in his late 30s, Carlos has spent all of his adult life in America, yet there is no legal pathway for him to citizenship. A tragedy looms large. Jorge, one of Carlos's siblings, was deported to Mexico after a minor driving offence, leaving behind his partner and his son.

He could smell unwashed bodies in the cramped room he shared with 40 detainees. He listened as men, many of them arrested at car washes or outside Home Depots, cried in the night for their loved ones. Minguela, 48, lay in the chilly downtown Los Angeles ICE facility known as B 18 and thought about his partner of eight years and their three children.

"Even if I would stay there [in Romania], I didn't know exactly what to do there further. And I decided that it's going to be better for me here not to know what to do yet."

A federal judge in San Diego ordered the Trump administration to reinstate social and legal services for families separated at the border, ruling it violated a court settlement.

Dozens of masked ICE agents were back in immigration court on Tuesday rapidly vanishing immigrants from their legally mandated court hearings and leaving devastated families in their wake.

"It's psychological," Romero said, speculating about the timing of the raids, which coincided with a holiday meant to celebrate family.

Instead of holding my wife's hand in the delivery room, I was crouched on a detention center floor, whispering through a crackling phone line as she labored alone.

"My husband has tried to pass the English exam a few times but his medical condition got in the way. The announcement that they are making the English requirement harder made us both devastated."

The chaotic scene in Worcester escalated as neighbors confronted ICE agents detaining a woman with her baby, questioning the need for identification and warrants.