Video: Separated From Her Mother at the Border, a 6-Year-Old Has to Find Her Own Way

by Nadia Sussman and Ginger Thompson, Propublica.org | Earlier this week, millions of people were captivated by audiotape of an insistent 6-year-old girl from El Salvador demanding that workers at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Facility call her aunt. While other children wept inconsolably, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid recited the phone number her mother made her memorize on the raft ride across the Rio Grande.

Propublica captured the moments when Jimena, now in an Arizona shelter, and then her mom, who is in a detention facility in Texas, called the aunt who’d become their lifeline.