For José and his family, the moment still feels raw, all these years later.

Pried from his father’s arms by federal agents at the southern border, José was one of thousands of migrant children separated from their parents under a Trump-era crackdown that came to epitomize the former president’s harsh immigration agenda.

The Times told Jose’s story after he was taken from his father in May 2018, when he was 5, and placed with a foster family in Michigan.

Today, José is in sixth grade in Houston and living with his parents. He is excelling academically, playing guitar in a school band and cultivating his passion for soccer. “You possess all the qualities to take you very far in life,” his English teacher, Ms. Keller, said in a handwritten note to him dated Oct. 2.

For all the promise his teachers see in his future, José is still shaken by his past.

“I don’t trust anybody,” he said in an interview last week. “I just trust my mom and dad.”

Those months are never far from his mind. “I think about it,” he said. “I just don’t tell anyone about it.”

He and his parents are still undocumented and their future uncertain.

As former President Trump campaigns for another term, vowing a return to hard-line tactics on immigration, the specter of family separation preoccupies people who fought the policy — and immigrants who endured its consequences.