Photos by Karla Gachet kchete77 / “It was tough being without my mom, being so little... eventually when she crossed I remember crying because I never saw my mom like that, so drained, her body looked really tired, she had scratches in her face and her arms from crossing through the desert the couple of times that she tried and couldn’t,” says Cristian Valentin. Cristian Valentín, 26, came to the U.S. when he was eight years old from Michoacán, Mexico. When he was in middle school, a USC representative told him if he kept up his good grades he would be awarded a full scholarship. He worked very hard to get straight A's, only to learn in his senior year that he didn’t have a social security card. Around that time, his father got injured at work, so Cristian started working at an Asian market to help support his family. He worked there for six years, until one of his coworkers tested positive for COVID-19  in late June. Cristian’s two-year-old daughter is high risk because she had Kawa...