For more than nine months, Mara, 23, has been waiting in an immigration detention center in Arizona hoping to reunite with the six-year-old niece she raised as a daughter. When the two asked for asylum at the border last March because they feared for their lives in Guatemala, border officials detained Mara in the Eloy detention center and sent the girl to foster care in New York, 2,400 miles away. Lawmakers and more than 200 clergy asked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to grant Mara parole so she can leave detention and reunite with the girl. A woman in New York volunteered to house them both while Mara awaits a decision on her appeal for asylum. But despite that public support, Ice denied Mara's application for parole in mid-December. Parole was once the norm for arriving asylum seekers, but in recent years approvals have become increasingly rare. On a standardized form, Ice officers indicated Mara failed to prove she was not a flight risk" or that her "continued detention was not in the public interest". After a federal judge in 2018 ordered most family separations to end, attorneys have been scrambling to reunite families. There are currently about 5,500 known cases of children separated from parents during the Trump administration. But no one has tracked how many children have been split from non-parent relatives. The logistics of how and when Mara will see her niece again if she is not paroled are unclear. Mara's asylum appeal could take up to two years.