At the airport, parents walked slightly behind their children, protective hands hovering at their backs as they made their way through the bustling crowds. They guided them toward the ticketing lines and through security, dodging the wheels of small rolling bags.

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is in the height of its busiest season. Roughly 14.7 million people will flood through the airport this summer.

Today, one of those millions of passengers was Jelsin, a 6-year-old from Honduras who was separated from his mother two months ago when they crossed the U.S. southern border.

In front of the security line, a father crouched down in front of his son’s stroller.

“You know you’re my guy?” he asked. His son nodded. “You know daddy loves you?” Another nod. He got up, said a goodbye to both the child and the child’s mother, and watched as they blended into the crowd.

Yolany Padilla, 24, did not get to say goodbye to her son, Jelsin.

Padilla was detained at the southern border in mid-May. Jelsin was taken from her. Padilla was held at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility in Hidalgo, Texas. She was then transferred to a SeaTac facility. Now, after months of detainment, Padilla is free on an $8,000 bond. She hadn’t seen Jelsin in months.

Today, she was reunited with Jelsin.

Padilla was detained for a month before she was clued in to where Jaslin was. Even then, she could only speak to him by phone and much of his day-to-day life remained uncertain—just like when, or if, she would see him again.

At the end of June, President Trump signed an executive order to stop family separation. Since then, the federal government has begun reuniting separated families. A federal judge ordered the government to reunite all children older than 5 with their families by a July 26 deadline.

“One of the things I want to note,” Jorge L. Barón with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project said, “is that this is not happening because the government all of a sudden decided to do the right thing.”

Padilla’s reunification with her son is a result of people advocating for detainees and fighting against the government, Barón said.

“The government didn’t decide to release Yolany,” Báron said. “We had to go to court for the judge to give her a bond, we had to pay that bond. She was released a week ago yesterday and still it took a week for her attorney to get her reunified.”

Unlike the kids being shepherded through SeaTac, Jaslin was alone on his journey from New York where he was in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

“He’s unaccompanied,” Báron said. “That means the airline—Delta—is responsible for him.”

Padilla met him at the gate. Reporters were not allowed back there to witness the initial reunion.

Instead, The Stranger and other media outlets waited outside the A gates. Padilla and Jelsin walked out hand-in-hand.

When they stopped to talk to the reporters, Padilla draped her arms around Jelsin's shoulders. He held onto her with both hands.

“It’s been so, so long since I’ve seen him you can imagine how I’m feeling inside,” Padilla said in Spanish. “I felt like my heart was going to come out of my body.”

Padilla was the first parent to be reunited here in Washington state but Barón and NWIRP emphasized that there are still over 2,500 kids around the country who need to be reunified.

Those families shouldn’t worry, Padilla said.

“The moment will come,” she said.