In good moments, Caroline is convinced that there is still hope. Let them do all they can about the children, she writes, I will undo in two hours what they have laboured to do for ten years – I have a power beyond brute force to swing them round again, back to their old moorings. But mostly she feels the lethargy of despair. No future can ever wipe out the past, nor renew it. The children won’t recognise her if she passes them in the street, nor she them. The youngest is no longer the fair, fat baby he used to be: those months, those years, those precious days, are lost forever.

It is unbearable, the thought that a child will not remember its mother.

There is a psychoanalyst who says that at a certain moment in pregnancy, if the mother-to-be is pregnant with a baby girl, five generations fuse together. It comes at around twenty weeks’ gestation, when the unborn child, in her tiny, seedling ovaries, makes the hundreds of tiny eggs which will be her future children, or the possibility of them. In that moment, the not-yet-child is already mother, the not-yet-mother already grandmother, just as the 98mother-to-be was once a possibility inside her own in-utero mother, carried by her one-day grandmother. I like the Escher’s staircase of it, the sense of nestled Russian dolls. The potential grandchildren that I might never even see, joined in a vertiginous rush with the grandmother who only barely met me, the centuries collapsing.

But the psychoanalyst uses the image to explain how suffering is passed down the generations; how we become trapped in the behaviours of our parents and theirs, doomed to repeat destructive patterns, unless we find ways of breaking free. The iniquities, as the Bible solemnly tolls, visited unto the third and fourth generations. The loss of a mother may be played out in the souls of your children’s grandchildren.

The lawyers at RAICES, Texas’s largest immigration legal service non-profit, estimate that at least a quarter of the children, a number in the hundreds, will never, ever be reunited with their parents again.

I bought the psychoanalyst’s book because someone quoted him on Twitter, saying that the US president was doing exactly the job he needed to, forcing into consciousness some of our collective unconscious issues. He told us not to look at him, but to look to ourselves. I didn’t know quite what I made of this. The notion that we get the people we deserve, or require, seemed to let an individual off the hook; or, conversely, to imply that their achievement wasn’t that great. I think of Caroline, and Abogada Laura. At night, the children tumble through my dreams. I wake in a tangled sweat. I can’t even go to a fucking march. 99In her cot beside me, the baby whimpers. I sit for hours, years, until my breathing calms.