Giving Compass' Take:

• The Marshall Project shares the harrowing story of a father from Honduras who was separated from his 7-year-old son after they crossed the border from Mexico to Texas, with no knowledge if they'll ever be reunited.

• Unfortunately, stories like this one have been all too common of late, and though the family separation policy at the US border has been debated, there doesn't seem to be any more certainty on how it will all be resolved.

• Donors can do something to address the issue and help these families. Start by reading this article.

The first day after they were caught hiding in tall grass near the Rio Grande river, before they were separated, the Honduran father and his 7-year-old son were detained in an air-conditioned Border Patrol station. After a night in the thick heat of borderlands summer, the boy was shivering, and he asked his father insistently to hold him to keep him warm.

That was what the father, Mauricio Posadas Andrade, recalled in the days after border officers pried his son away from him on June 12, and after he was confined with dozens of other migrant parents in a detention center near Brownsville, Texas. For 10 days he had no communication with his namesake son, Mauricio, and no idea where he was. Seized with insomnia, Posadas imagined that the boy had been taken back to the Border Patrol “icebox” and was freezing there without him.

The relief was powerful 10 days later when he was summoned by a guard to a phone and heard his son’s small voice. Now at least he knows the boy is safe, in a climate-controlled federal children’s shelter in Phoenix.

What Posadas doesn’t know is when he will see his son again. The detention center, benignly named the Port Isabel Service Processing Center, has been designated by the Department of Homeland Security as a hub for migrant parents in the whipsawing crisis created by the Trump Administration’s zero tolerance policy for illegal border crossers. According to a fact sheet DHS issued on June 23, the center is “intended to serve the unique needs” of detained parents whose children were taken from them.

But if the authorities here have a plan for reuniting parents and children, they have not shared it with Posadas or at least 150 other recently separated, very agitated parents detained here.

Read the full article about how a father faced "zero tolerance" by Julia Preston at The Marshall Project.