A Border Kept Him From His Daughter. Now He’s Here to Say Goodbye.

The story of American immigration has long been one of split families — a parent travels to the United States to work; children and sometimes spouses are left home. In earlier years, migrant workers would return home at the end of the work season and then cross back. But the fortification of the border that followed the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and stepped-up security in the years since have made such comings and goings far more difficult. In many families, parents and children remain separated for years, sometimes for a lifetime.

While the past year has seen repeated cases of migrant family separations and children detained on the border under President Trump’s strict new immigration policies, the Gámez family’s difficulties spanned three presidential administrations — all of which debated but did not deliver a wide-ranging legal solution for migrant labor in the United States.

“Going home to be with a sick parent, attend a funeral or to another emergency: It happens all the time,” said Marty Rosenbluth, a lawyer who represents immigrants at a detention center in Lumpkin, Ga. “Then people get caught when they try to return to the U.S.”

What happened to Heydi has been reconstructed through interviews with her father, aunts and uncles, cousins, a family friend and her father’s lawyer, as well as information from the family’s asylum cases, federal court records and immigration authorities.

Heydi grew up in a modest concrete home in El Progreso, a town in northwest Honduras flanked by a mountain range to the east and the Ulúa River to the west. For decades the city was a hub for commercial banana plantations.

But by the time Heydi was born in March 2006, El Progreso had also become host to some of the country’s many violent gangs, including MS-13. Gang members often demanded cash payments — “taxes” — from Heydi’s family and others in exchange for guaranteeing their safety.

The instability combined with lack of opportunity led her father, Manuel Gámez, now 34, to head for the United States. In 2007, leaving Heydi behind with his parents, he sneaked across the border and traveled to Long Island, where his sister, Jessica, had settled two years earlier.