Only a few short years ago, it was difficult to escape the Trump administration’s family separation policies and the passionate debates about them that ensued. Today’s political landscape may feel different, with the media spotlight now focused elsewhere. But in Roma’s sobering account of her experience volunteering legal assistance to women and children housed at a family detention center in southern Texas in 2018, she reminds us that behind the complex policy debates and sensational headlines are real people who, despite treacherous conditions, made their way to this country and whose humanity is her primary concern.
“While much is discussed about what happens once the families arrive and are detained, the media rarely pursues two critical questions: who are these families and why are they coming?” Roma tells us, adding that her book aims to address these questions, at least in part, by sharing the stories of seven families who came to the United States at the southern border and were detained by the U.S. government.
“I undertook to write this book so that their stories could be heard,” she says.
Just as I read By the Bridge or By the River? without any experiential knowledge in immigration issues, Roma, an energy lawyer, shares with readers that she had no expertise in the type of law affecting the women she interviewed. Alarmed by what she was reading in the media when the family separation policies went into effect, she felt compelled to act and set about learning all she could to volunteer her assistance in a meaningful way. “The need for attorneys was so overwhelming that the legal aid clinic would take anyone with legal experience willing to help,” she tells us.
On June 20, 2018, Roma’s law firm sent an email to its offices across the United States. The email noted that several lawsuits had been filed across the country challenging certain detention policies of the Department of Homeland Security and went on to discuss a project in Texas focused on representing detained immigrants at detention centers.
The firm was evaluating whether to send teams of attorneys to Texas to provide legal support for children and mothers detained at a family detention center and called for volunteers to help on this project.
“Within an hour, the volunteer slots were filled, and I was one of them,” Roma says. She then traveled to a family detention center in Texas without a clue as to how the experience would affect her personally.
What she recounts in this book are harrowing testimonials relayed to her by women who have left their native countries “by bridge” (a legal port of entry into the United States) or “by river” (via an illegal crossing of the Rio Grande from Mexico into the U.S.). Each woman has a child with her in the facility, and all have left families behind as they fled for their lives. And while she chooses seven families to focus on out of several dozen she met with (with her colleagues, the number rose to several hundred during the window of time in which they volunteered), she found that the types of threats and harms they experienced were not unique among the detained families in the detention facility.