MCALLEN, Texas _ A case worker texted lawyer Ruby Powers late Wednesday with good news: A 7-year-old Central American boy separated from his mother nearly two months ago would soon be returned.
But on Thursday, the boy was still in New York, the mother in South Texas, still waiting to be reunited like many other families separated under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy.
"It's been a roller coaster," said Powers, a Houston lawyer who has been flying down to the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas to join a corps of lawyers representing immigrant parents pro bono. "If I hadn't helped her, given her a phone to call relentlessly, I don't know how she would manage it."
Thursday was the deadline set by a federal judge in San Diego for the government to reunite more than 2,500 children separated from their parents after crossing the border illegally. But government lawyers have already said they expect to miss the deadline, saying they have been unable to locate many parents, and hundreds of others have been deported without their children. They told the judge this week that they will have reunited about 1,600 families by day's end.
When Powers arrived at the McAllen bus station Thursday morning, she was greeted by a chaotic scene. Dozens of protesters opposing zero tolerance had marched from a nearby federal courthouse and were hefting signs at the station entrance that said "Keep families together" and "Break bread not families."
Inside the station, immigrant families released by the Department of Homeland Security had already started arriving with telltale manila envelopes labeled "Please help me I don't speak English."
Members of a group of local volunteers calling themselves Angry Tias and Abuelas (Aunts and Grandmothers) had hoped to distribute backpacks of supplies to the immigrants. The group had distributed such backpacks for days, but officials at the terminal suddenly prevented them from doing so Thursday.
By afternoon, large groups of migrants were being dropped off at the station by Catholic Charities, about 50 at a time, most with children, some toddling around in diapers.
"We never know when people are coming," said volunteer Joyce Hamilton, a retired teacher.
Many families at the terminal Thursday had not been separated because they arrived in the U.S. after President Donald Trump issued an executive order ending the practice. (Immigrant advocates insist the practice often continues.)
"I was still scared we would be separated," said Yvette Casares, 32, who brought her three children from Honduras across the Rio Grande on Saturday with a smuggler who she said robbed them. On Thursday, they were headed to Nashville, Tenn., where she has friends.
Dennis Urbina, 23, a salesman and single father, said he fled El Salvador with his 2-year-old son and namesake two months ago because of gang threats. He feared the gangs more than the family separation policy, he said, "because they were going to kill me." He was joining family in Virginia.
Bus tickets were in short supply Thursday due to the rush of parents being released, Powers said. After her client was freed from detention Tuesday, Powers bought her a $150 nonrefundable ticket to Louisiana, where she planned to meet her son, who was being housed in a shelter in New York. Powers flew down from Houston with a booster seat for the boy.
But then Powers spoke with the boy's caseworker in New York and, after some back and forth, it was decided to send the boy to Texas. Powers was waiting Thursday afternoon to hear when he would arrive before buying another ticket so mother and son could go to Louisiana.
"They said 10:30 p.m., McAllen, but I'll believe it when I get the flight confirmation," she said.
She and the mother, whom she identified by first name, Ana, due to her ongoing immigration case, have been staying at a McAllen motel. She helped Ana buy new clothes.
Powers extended their hotel room and delayed her return flight. She has a 7-year-old son too, and has spent the past month flying down to the valley to join what she calls a legal "relay race."
"I still have clients who are detained and fear being deported any minute. I hope people realize this is not the end of the story with the deadline today," she said.
It's difficult to determine how many separated families have truly been reunited. Lawyers at the Texas Civil Rights Project said that of the 382 families they interviewed, 73 have been reunited and released; 26 families have been reunited and detained and six families deported (half to Honduras, half to Guatemala).
Another 75 adults were still detained, and officials were trying to track down 202 adults no longer at ICE facilities who may have been deported.
"Keep in mind the hundreds of families that have not been reunited," Efren Olivares, the group's racial and economic justice program director, told a crowd of several hundred protesters outside the McAllen courthouse.
Two massive immigrant family detention centers in South Texas were packed this week. Lawyers said it's not clear why some families are released while others are detained, or whether those detained will ultimately be deported. About 900 parents were fighting deportation.
The American Civil Liberties Union has asked the federal judge in San Diego to delay those deportations to give parents time to decide how to handle their immigration cases and those of their children.
Immigrants are not entitled to lawyers in immigration court, and many don't have them, including children.
Olivares said he's also concerned that detained parents and reunited families sent to detention will be deported without having access to lawyers. Instead of considering deported parents ineligible to take custody of their children, the government should strive to reunify them with children still in the U.S., he said.
"The government keeps talking about how many families have been reunited. We should be asking how many families have not," he said, noting that at least one Honduran father separated from his children committed suicide at a South Texas jail in May. "He's never going to see his children again."
Juanita Valdez Cox, executive director of the group that organized Thursday's protest, La Union Del Pueblo Entero, said local immigrant shelters are "overloaded now that the government is trying to meet the deadline."
She said it took a herculean effort for her group to help reunite just one father and son who had been separated and sent to different states.
"I think the government thought, 'We can do this and nobody's going to care.' That's why we're here, to tell immigrants at the courthouse today that we do care and the government messed this up. They have created a crisis," she said.
The reunification efforts are even more complicated for the estimated 463 parents who were deported from the U.S. without their children.
Nazario Jacinto-Carrillo, a 32-year-old potato farmer from Guatemala, said Thursday that he still doesn't know when he'll be reunited with his 6-year-old daughter, Filemona, whom he hasn't seen since she was taken from him after they illegally crossed the California border in May.
From his village in the western highlands of Guatemala, Jacinto-Carrillo said by telephone, he keeps in contact with an attorney and Guatemalan consular officials in New York City who are trying to arrange her flight home.
He has provided copies of birth certificates of family members. The consulate, he said, has provided her a passport. Filemona also appeared at an immigration hearing in New York last week.
"I've done everything required, but there's still no explanation," Jacinto-Carrillo said. "I have no idea when I'll see my daughter again."
