There’s something spectacular about seeing the face of a newborn. Maybe this is partly because of some personal nostalgia, a reminder of when I first held my own kids in my arms. But there’s more. Perhaps in the case of Valentina, the baby I was about to meet, it was because she was born in a shelter for migrants, far away from her parents’ home in Guerrero. Or perhaps it was because she represented hope; at least that’s what her father, José, told me a week ago during my interview with him at the Casa de la Misericordia y de Todas las Naciones, located in Nogales, Sonora. Since 2020, the Casa has housed asylum seekers, who can stay for months as they go through the long bureaucratic process to get a hearing with the U.S. government. When I finished the interview with José in one of the shelter’s dormitories, where he and his family had been staying for almost a year, he asked me if I wanted to see Valentina, who was born February 4. She was the first newborn at the shelter since Donald Trump’s inauguration. More
