In Phoenix, Arizona there’s a place called Butterfly Wonderland. Its main attraction is a high-ceilinged greenhouse filled with plants, where more than 3,000 butterflies flutter around and, to the delight of small children and adults alike, will sometimes alight on a human shoulder or head or arm.

Before you get to go into the greenhouse, you watch a short film about the monarch butterfly’s yearlong migration from the central Mexico all the way to Canada. Not long ago, my two little daughters and I sat in the theatre. As I looked at their faces, aglow in the light of the screen, I thought to myself that we are butterflies, too. Every so often, we make the trip back to the small town in Northern Mexico where I was raised. It’s a long drive, but (thanks to the American passports we all have) we cross the border nearly as easily as the monarchs do. I know we’re lucky, lucky Mexicans. I never forget this.

This summer, I’ve thought about it often as I read account after account of kids separated from their parents and held in uncertainty in detention centers all across the U.S. I think about the price they’ve paid, just for crossing an imaginary line in the desert dirt: children forced to appear alone in court, babies returned to their parents sick and covered in rashes, toddlers unable to recognize their mothers after so much time spent apart.

***

The place where I’m from is a town filled with peach orchards and chili fields, run by cattle ranchers and schoolteachers from the local schools. As soon as we get close, my three-year-old starts repeating “Ya llegamos! Ya llegamos!” in increasingly higher decibels.

We unload from the car— in a frenzy of missing shoes, too many bags, and half-eaten snacks— and run inside my parents’ house to love our people. And you know what’s amazing? Kids know their people. Even if we haven’t seen each other for months and months, even if they’re a little shy at first, they can instinctively recognize family, instantly feel comfortable, secure, loved. The distance is the hard part of families split by borders, but the reunion? That’s the great part.

But this summer our arrival was bittersweet for me, because it happened at the same time as family separation at the border reached crisis level. As I watched my kids hug my mom, I thought about all of the mothers that had sent their kids off “for a bath,” only to find out a few minutes later that they had been taken away. When my extended family enveloped us in love, I thought about all of the families who had sought asylum in the U.S. (fleeing rape, violence and murder in their home countries) but had been met with hatred instead.

***

My little Mexican hometown is not strictly a border town—it’s technically about 3 hours away from the border—but it’s close enough that it kind of feels like one. Lots of people who live there have American citizenship, and often people will migrate from the U.S. to live there for a season or forever. Sometimes this migration is legal. Sometimes it isn’t.

When I lived there, the high school sports teams would sometimes play against American schools. We would load up the school buses and drive across the desert to play some small-town school in Arizona or New Mexico. Mostly this was not a big deal; sometimes friends didn’t have passports or realized their visa had expired, and then it was. Talented players trying to pretend that it didn’t matter that they had to miss the big game, a brave wave, some of us gone and some left behind.

Now that I live on the other side of the border, I keep having variations of this same experience. My brother’s family couldn’t make it to my daughter’s first birthday party because my nephew didn’t yet have the necessary paperwork to cross the border. My cousin very narrowly made it to my other cousin’s wedding after she wasn’t allowed to cross the border in time to make her flight.

In the grand scheme of things, these are minor injustices. I understand this more than ever, after a summer of thinking about the border and the families that cross it. I know that so many migrants hug their families goodbye and never get to hug them again.

***

In the end, Trump finally signed an executive order to end his family separation policy, but (weeks later) thousands of children are still in government custody after being separated from their parents. All summer long I’ve thought about how to write about this, how to best help the people experiencing it, how to talk about it to people who feel very differently than I do about the border.

It turns out the best I can do is repeat the words of Brené Brown:

“If your response is, ‘The parents should not have brought their children here illegally,’ know this: I pray to God that you never have to flee violence or poverty or persecution with your children. And, if the day comes that you must and your babies are forcibly removed from your arms, I will fight for you too.”

Human beings—especially the tiny ones—are infinitely more precious than butterflies. I hope to someday live in a world where their stories of migration across the U.S.-Mexico border are just as beautiful.

(Illustration by Juan Palomino from the book “María la monarca“)