I sat in a small, sterile waiting room of the Adelanto immigrant detention center in the high desert northeast of Los Angeles last week, facing a little girl. She wore a purple dress and a floppy white bow clipped to her shiny brown hair. Her legs were too short to reach the ground.
I'd come with a church group to visit detainees — to lend them an ear, offer cheer and perhaps put money on their phone cards. The little girl had come with her stepdad, a skinny white guy who works as a software engineer, to see her mom.
The girl's mom came to the United States from El Salvador as a teen, the stepdad told me. She was educated and married here, in California. She lived with her daughter and husband in Long Beach until two months ago, when she was pulled over while driving, discovered to be undocumented and carted away.
