text: And it matters hugely for the reunification prospects that they face with their kids because the government has had no plan for how to reunite parents and children. The people who have been actually doing the work to reunite parents and kids have been advocates and lawyers. And so there is a real danger right now as parents go from criminal to immigration custody that they are losing the very advocates who are responsible or who are able to help them reunite with their kids.
  And so you're catching people - I mean, this is a moment to be - in which we need to be very, very vigilant because you're catching people who could potentially be floating into a very dangerous sort of limbo. As you say, fine, it's great news that criminal charges are being dropped, but now they're kind of going into this fog of immigration detention. And they're in many cases going to face that long process not only without their kids but without a lawyer to represent them and to help advocate for them as they try to figure out where their kids are.
  BLITZER: Right. When they're in criminal custody, there is a federal public defender who is in charge of their cases. But people who are going through immigration proceedings aren't given a lawyer. It's up to them to find a lawyer. And so if they're in immigration detention and they have to first find a lawyer from inside detention, it's extremely difficult obviously. And so one of the ways that I'm seeing parents in immigration detention find lawyers to represent them and to help them find their kids has been through word of mouth inside immigration detention facilities.
  So some of the clients I've met, I've met through lawyers who only found out about these women because they had other clients in that detention facility who said, you know, there are a bunch of women here who have no representation and who are missing their kids. And so what I mean by falling off the grid is, you know, imagine a parent going into immigration detention with no contacts, no sense of even how to begin contacting or locating a lawyer. And now they're inside a cell trying to kind of put the pieces together. And their best hope, really, is that someone else on the inside who knows a little bit more and has gone through a little bit more of this process knows a lawyer who can help them.
  GROSS: My guest is Jonathan Blitzer, who's currently in El Paso reporting on the crisis at the border. He covers immigration for The New Yorker. We'll talk more after a break. And Ken Tucker will review the new Jay-Z/Beyonce album. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
  GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Jonathan Blitzer, who covers immigration for The New Yorker. He's in El Paso, Texas, where he spent the past couple of weeks reporting on the crisis at the border. He's interviewed parents in detention who were separated from their children after crossing the border illegally.
  BLITZER: El Paso is especially important because it is where the administration first tested out its zero tolerance and family separation policies in the summer of 2017. So the government officially announced all of this in May, but there were reports for months and months about families who'd been separated at the border. And a lot of those reports came out of this particular patch of the border in West Texas.
  And what has since come out is that the administration decided to test out what this would all look like here. And so you're in a place - sort of in one sense the laboratory for where this policy first began. And it's now a place that is feeling the current chaos of the administration trying to rejigger the policy in ways that are really acute and dramatic to see.
  GROSS: You know, there was that audio tape that a reporter from ProPublica recorded of children - one of the places where they were being held - crying, and it broke people's hearts. And I think it really mobilized people to question the wisdom of the policy separating parents and children. From your reports - you know, you've been talking to women who were separated from their children, and you talk about how much these women are crying.
  BLITZER: I've never in my life seen anything even remotely like this. I mean, I've been meeting women who are crying so violently they can barely speak. I'm meeting women whose hands are shaking, who look at me with kind of a vacant gaze. It's extremely upsetting to see.
  There was one instance that particularly shook me involving a mother who I had met - this is last week. She and I met on a Wednesday, and on Wednesday, she hadn't heard anything about her kid. She didn't know where her kid was. She had some ideas, but she wasn't sure. She hadn't spoken to him. This is a 9-year-old kid she had been separated from and she hadn't seen since May 26, so almost a month. And she was just devastated. I mean, she looked physically ill. She hadn't been sleeping. She looked like a fundamental part of her was missing. It was scary to see, physically.
  And then we met again two days later, and we met because there is still more complexity in her - involving her case and how this administration now might be dropping the criminal case against her and sending her to immigration detention. Anyway, just, there's - she's got a long road ahead of her. But that morning, she spoke to her kid on the phone. This was for the first time now in close to a month. And it was like she clicked back into being. I've never seen anything like this. I mean, it was, like, just by virtue of having spoken to her kid, her eyes kind of started to zero back in on me. Her skin looked different. Her hair just seemed - just every - she seemed revitalized.
  Now, she is still a shell of her former self because she's still not with her kid, and she still doesn't have answers about how she's going to reunite with her kid. And there were parts of the conversation she had with her kid that were extremely concerning. Her kid, who's now in a government shelter, appears to be treated well, is getting food, is - you know, he seemed OK. He seemed in OK spirits. Obviously, he's scared. He wants to see his mother. But he told her that three days after they were separated, while he was in government custody, someone hit him because he wasn't eating, and he wasn't eating because he was so scared and he was so upset.
  So she's hearing this, and as a mother, this is tearing her apart. At the same time, she is so profoundly relieved that she could even hear his voice that that alone was enough to - it almost gave her the kind of energy to talk to me about the other stuff. So, I mean, what I'm seeing these women go through is - it's nothing short of torture. I don't know how else to put it.
  GROSS: So the women we've been talking about crossed the border illegally with a child or with children. What are the legal ways to seek asylum if you're crossing the border from Mexico?
  BLITZER: There are two ways you can come into the U.S. and seek asylum, essentially. One is through what's called an official port of entry. So that is, essentially, a government checkpoint. It can be at an international bridge, at a kind of officially designated area, and you would go to officials from Customs and Border Protection, and you'd say, I'm seeking asylum. And they would give you a preliminary screening, and if you pass that screening, you would then be admitted into the country, pending a full hearing before an immigration judge. So that's one way to do it.
  The other way to do it - and, in fact, quite a common way to do it - is for people to cross the border anywhere they can - once they cross the border, to either turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents, or when they're arrested, tell Border Patrol agents that they seek asylum, and the same process should hold.
  So what the government has done is it's trying to discourage people from entering that way, and it is part of a much broader war that the government is waging on asylum in general. So what the government is doing is it's saying, OK, you've crossed the border illegally. You didn't come through an official port of entry, so what we're going to do first is we're going to charge you with a crime. The crime is illegal entry, and you are going to face a judge. You're going to serve a few days in the custody - in criminal custody, and then once that is done, we will pass you over to immigration authorities, and then you'll sit in immigration detention. And if you've got asylum claim and you want to wait it out, good luck. That's up to you. Your kid will have been separated from you by then. And you can see - you know, if and when you get an attorney to represent you, you can see whether or not your asylum claim passes muster.
  And there are backlogs - immense backlogs in the immigration court system, so you've got months and months of delays if you want a judge to hear on your asylum claim. And one of the things the Trump administration has been doing for people seeking asylum is it's saying, we're going to detain you indefinitely while we wait to see whether or not a judge can rule on your asylum claim. So these parents face months in immigration detention to see whether or not their asylum claim will pass muster, and during that time, their kids are elsewhere.