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Editor's note: This is Part II of a three-day series. See Part I here . It was 3 a.m. on a December night when Estéban Gonzalez was awakened, removed from a cell that had housed him for four days and bundled into one of a line of white cars. He caught sight of his 11-year-old sister, Lizet, for the first time since they’d arrived at the Santa Cruz County Detention Center not quite three miles north of the Arizona border town of Nogales. Estéban felt the worry that had filled his mind during all the days they had been separated ease slightly. The moment they reunited was “very happy,” he says. There were five other children in their car on the ride to the nearby international airport, but none of them knew where they were going. The name of the location they were traveling to, the Cayuga Centers, meant nothing to them. All the children could think of was the cold and painful fact that they were leaving the detention center without their parents, their futures now held in limbo by the U.S. immigration system. Estéban says he had trusted both his stepfather, Jonathan, who was to receive them in Southern Oregon, and his mother, Gabriela, who had fled El Salvador with her children from gang members who threatened to kill them, that things would turn out all right. “I didn’t know all of this was going to happen,” he says. The journey The Gonzalezes’ journey from their hometown of Lourdes had already spanned over 2,300 miles. They took buses first, up through Guatemala and Mexico. Too anxious to become acquainted with the other passengers or even get off their bus for fear of being left behind, Estéban, Lizet and their mother mostly watched the world passing by their windows, turning their attention occasionally to the ‘80s movies playing on TV screens. That detail makes Estéban laugh now when he tells it. The journey wasn’t all bad, he says. “Sometimes, we felt good,” he says. “We saw beautiful landscapes that looked like our country, and we remembered our happy times.” But he and Lizet hadn’t thought much about what might happen when the last bus came to its final stop at the border between them and the new country where their hopes for survival lay. Mother and children changed their clothes from the single bag holding their belongings. They spent their final hours in Mexico stopping to buy food and use the bathroom. The next part of their journey came on foot. But on Dec. 13, 2017, the Gonzalez family was taken into custody by border officials. Four months later, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions would announce changes as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy for unlawful border crossings. Officials would take children from parents who were caught attempting to cross the border, and those parents would now be criminally prosecuted, in a departure from previous enforcement. “If you come to the country, you should come through, first, through the port of entry and make a claim of asylum if you think you have a legitimate asylum claim,” Sessions would say June 5 in an interview with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt. But Jonathan Gonzalez, who has been living in the U.S. illegally for years, says that his family didn’t know about those processes. They came how they knew they could. The detention center Estéban, Lizet and Gabriela were put into a government vehicle together and driven a short distance to the Santa Cruz County Detention Center in Arizona. When they arrived, Estéban was separated first. Immigration officials instructed him to remove his belt and the laces from his shoes. They led him to an empty room, told him to sit inside and closed the door. Through a window, Estéban could see Lizet taken next, to a different cell. Their mother was left with the border officials. Both children say they watched from the windows in their cells as officials placed handcuffs around Gabriela’s wrists and shackles around her ankles before leading her out the door they had entered by. It was the last time they saw her. Unaware that they would be separated, the children had not been given a chance to hug Gabriela or say goodbye. “They treated us like prisoners,” Estéban says. “Everyone was calm. Just —” he mimes handcuffs being fastened to his own wrists. Estéban says he and his sister were told nothing about how long they would be in their respective cells, where they would go if they were moved, when or if they would see each other or their mother again. The siblings were separated for all three or four days they were held in the detention facility, which they say was always cold. Lizet shared her cell with five other girls, all teenagers. She is 11. The children slept on mats on the floor under shiny silver emergency blankets. The facility had TV screens, Estéban says, but they were always off. Except for during meals, everyone sat and just waited — but for what was unknown to them. Estéban was alone in his cell for hours before a few other boys were brought in, he says. Some were from Mexico, others from Guatemala. He was the only Salvadoran. But, he says, “they had almost the same story as I did.” Each one had left his country accompanied by at least one parent. None knew by then where those parents were. Now, jolting in the seat of another government vehicle in the dark of the early morning, Estéban and Lizet knew only that they were being taken to the Cayuga Centers — which turned out to be a privately run group home in New York. The children were put on a plane, a first for Estéban and Lizet. This was their favorite part of their journey. In Southern Oregon, Jonathan was waiting for some word from his family. A relative had told him when the children had left home with Gabriela, but it wasn’t until a social worker with Cayuga Centers called him that he learned what had become of his daughter and stepson. The group homes where separated children are placed came under increased scrutiny as news coverage about family separations ticked up following Sessions’ April and June announcements. Many of the care facilities are for-profit companies operating under multimillion-dollar contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services and Immigrations and Custom Enforcement. Cayuga Centers, for example, receives $15 million from DHS for every two-year contract renewal as a short-term foster care facility. It began housing immigrant children in 2014. The contractors vary in not only their size but also their oversight and safety. Online news site Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting published articles in recent months about an Arizona contractor keeping children overnight in an empty office building and a Texas shelter called Shiloh facing a lawsuit brought on behalf of migrant children who say they were drugged and physically abused there. Sexual abuse also has been reported. The Department of Health and Human Services told Reveal in a statement: “Congress gave HHS the responsibility to care for these children and teenagers, and we take this legal mandate very seriously.” Before arriving in New York, Estéban recalls officials giving him four vaccinations in each arm while in custody, but he and Lizet say their days at the Cayuga Centers were mostly quiet. They spent time learning English, eating and occasionally speaking with a social worker in charge of figuring out where to place them. But the siblings didn’t feel at ease, they say, because they were placed in different foster homes and, again, didn’t know for how long they would be separated. Southern Oregon at last Before they left New York to join their father, over a month after they had been detained at the border, Estéban says, a lawyer met with him to explain what was next for him and Lizet when they went to Oregon. The man, he says, told him they would go to court, so the government could decide whether the law allowed them to stay. When it comes to how those laws work, months later, Esteban says, “I don’t understand anything.” The children’s mother and what few belongings they had brought from El Salvador were gone — Cayuga Centers workers sent them off with two suitcases each filled with unfamiliar clothes. And in January, Estéban and Lizet were reunited with Jonathan for the first time in 11 years in the Sacramento airport. Jonathan says he had imagined the moment he saw the children like a movie scene, a sentimental moment. But he had to sign a lot of papers as the children’s sponsor and guardian before he could see them. The luggage got in the way, too. It was not like a movie, he says. But between the unfamiliar family dynamic — Lizet and Estéban now far from Gabriela and living with Jonathan for the first time — and the ongoing upheaval of children’s sense of normalcy, the drama was far from over. Jonathan drove them all back to Southern Oregon for the next phase in their uncertain journey forward. Reach Mail Tribune reporter Kaylee Tornay at 541-776-4497 or by email at [email protected] .