Here is a bird fact from Around the World in Birds: An Encyclopedia. You can find it under the entry “Bird Suicide.” In Jatinga, India, after the long monsoon months, come dark, foggy nights. On the darkest, the foggiest of these nights, hundreds of birds begin to descend the night sky, attracted to the lights below. The villagers capture them on bamboo poles. They are diving to their deaths, these mostly juvenile birds. Wildlife experts have studied the bird suicides of Jatinga, India, and they can’t find a scientific explanation. I imagine myself standing in the middle of a field, a field like the one behind my childhood home in Sonsonate, in El Salvador, and I look up and there are hundreds of baby birds raining down on me: hill partridge, green pigeon, emerald dove, necklaced laughing thrush, black drongo, burrowing parrot, burrowing parrot, I am covered in birds.

I tell you this because I threw a sheet over the chicken wire fence that contains us. I didn’t care if I got in trouble, but none of the guards saw. I wanted the sheet to land on the spikes, to make a softer place, a nest. I did not want a bird to kill itself. The sheet did not land over the chicken wire; it soared over the fence. For a moment, the sheet flew, and I said go. I said fly, fly, fly. Birds fly even if it kills them.

Do you have a daughter named Ana, the officer says to me in his office after I leave the playground. It is a question but he does not phrase it like a question.

Why? I say. His office has a bulletin board covered with crayon drawings made by children.

Just answer the question, he says. One of the crayon drawings is a bird. This must be a sign.

She was turned in to the authorities, the guard says. She was left behind in a house by herself after you were apprehended.

No, I say. I left her with a babysitter.

She is with the Department of Health and Human Services, the guard says. But she is an alien minor. And she is on her way here. That’s why you are here.

The bird in the drawing is outlined in green crayon. The inside of the bird outline is orange. The sky is big smears of blue crayon, fat strokes. There is no sun.

No, no, no, I say. No.