Tens of thousands of Central Americans fleeing violence in their home countries overwhelmed U.S. immigration facilities like this one in Nogales, Arizona, in 2014. Central Americans are among the least successful at gaining asylum from U.S. immigration court judges.
Thousands of immigrants face deportation due to US President Donald Trump's zero-tolerance stance on illegal immigration.
But when the US deports immigrants, their US-born children get unaccompanied and they mostly placed into the foster care system and adopted.
But one woman in Miami, Nora Sandigo is offering families another option.
She is the legal guardian to more than 1,000 children of immigrant parents who have signed a document known as a power of attorney that enables Sandigo to care for their children if they are detained, at which point it might be too late to make such an arrangement.
TRT World's Sally Ayhan reports;
Sandigo, a deeply-religious 52-year-old mother of two daughters, can relate to the immigrants she helps.
She fled Nicaragua as a teen, leaving her own parents behind, after the socialist Sandinista government confiscated her family's farm.
During the 1980s, she provided the US-backed Contra insurgents with clothes and other supplies and later spirited her brother out of the country at age 16 before he could be drafted into the military.
She became a US citizen in 1996 and became active in immigration issues, helping fellow refugees from Nicaragua.
Sandigo has since become well known for broader efforts, which include filing a lawsuit last week against the Trump administration on behalf of children with citizenship whose parents have been deported.
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