I feel like like this whole notion of crossing borders appeals to me because curiosity is basically, no one is curious unless they admit that they do… - Jean Guerrero

One thing that hasn't really been discussed in this whole debate on family separations, which I've been following, is there's a family separation practice that predates the Trump administration. It's been going on for years, and it continues to go on. And it's basically this tendency for Homeland Security to prioritize women and children for release on parole while locking up the fathers in detention.

I’ve been following one family that, a father had his one year-old baby taken away from him months ago and just [a week ago] he was reunited finally, after eight months in detention. So I followed that story. We put out the story of their reunification but it’s like the struggle for the family is nowhere near over. The little boy is severely traumatized because he was kept in a tender age facility that has since closed for more than a thousand abuses ranging from inappropriate sexual contact between staff and the children to harsh punishment. It’s incredible, so I’ve been following the reunification of families, in particular this one family that has been so traumatized. I don’t know if you saw the question about “where are the girls,” because the government was conducting tours of child migrant shelters but nowhere were the girls visible. So I found one the girls’ shelter in San Diego and I put out a story on that and now I’m finding another one and it’s just never ending. It’s just crazy.

I always knew that I wanted to be a writer but to me when I was a child and as a teenager as well, the idea of aspiring to be an author of books, always seemed kind of unobtainable. And I thought that a more practical and realistic way of going about eventually writing books was to start out in journalism, in large part because I knew it was going to give me real-world experience and so I was able to see what was happening in the world in our current age. It would give me valuable perspective to inform my writing of books in the future.