When Mom Can't Come Home

On a chilly Saturday in downtown Dallas, a curly-haired woman dashes between rows of wrapped gifts arranged in the back room of an Italian restaurant. Her name is Angelica Zaragoza, and today, she refuses to forget anyone.

Dozens of children watch as she and a few volunteers call out the names scrawled on multi-colored boxes. The kids sit cross-legged in front of a 7-foot-tall paper gingerbread house decorated with coffee-brown, white, and red balloons. Zaragoza turns to them, drawing their attention as if she is conducting a choir. “Who else needs somethin’?” she yells over Christmas tunes.

She won’t let anyone leave without a present. Many of these kids are here because their mothers can’t be. 

This is the second Christmas event since Zaragoza, 47, took the reins of Janie’s Angels, an organization that supports incarcerated mothers and their children. The nonprofit, once called Girls Embracing Mothers, transports sons and daughters from North Texas to Gatesville to visit their imprisoned moms for four hours every month and do an activity—crafts, painting, even dodgeball. It also offers monthly parenting classes, a yearly summer camp and mentorship for the kids, and support for families throughout the woman’s re-entry into society. 

Since 2013, the program has served around 300 women in North Texas, and to Zaragoza’s knowledge, only five have returned to jail. As the group’s only full-time staffer, Zaragoza spends her days like she did this past Saturday, rushing around to ensure no child is forgotten. It previously allowed only daughters, but this fall, the group admitted sons, increasing enrollment to 23 mothers and 45 kids. (The state prison system caps the visits at 45, she says.)

The number of incarcerated women has exploded in the U.S. since the 1980s, growing at twice the pace of men. More than half are mothers to children younger than 18, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Mothers are more likely to have been the sole or primary caregiver for the child before incarceration, the bureau found. While men typically rely on the mother to care for the children while they’re away, women turned to other relatives—and their kids were five times more likely to end up in foster care.

Most women in the criminal justice system report childhood abuse or trauma. They are more likely than men to be arrested for low-level offenses, and while locked up, have more significant behavioral health needs that often go untreated. When they return home, their stress is exacerbated by navigating childcare while finding housing and a job.

Zaragoza faced these same hardships. Raised by her grandparents in Pleasant Grove, she never knew her father, she says, and her mother struggled with substance abuse. Growing up, she was a caretaker for two younger sisters and multiple cousins; she’d get them ready for school each morning, come home after her own classes and job at a food store, then cook dinner, clean up, and put them to bed. “I was a little mommy,” she says.

After graduation, she kept that responsibility but added several jobs, including a night shift at a pool hall. It introduced her to “the fast life,” she says. She used cocaine and methamphetamine to stay awake, then heroin to come down. “I went zero to 60 in no time,” she says. “It was just a vicious spiral all the way down.”

She became homeless and turned to sex work to make ends meet. She was jailed repeatedly, typically on drug and theft charges. Authorities sent her to rehab, but once she’d get out, she’d find trouble. From about the ages of 19 to 34, she served three prison sentences. 

In 2003, while shackled by one foot and one arm, she gave birth to her second child—her only daughter, Jalyssa. She calls it one of the hardest things she’s experienced. She held Jalyssa for about 15 minutes before she was taken; for the following weeks, Zaragoza continued to wake in the early hours thinking she heard a baby crying.

She had three sons, as well, who her Aunt Janie cared for while Zaragoza was away. Zaragoza felt she’d ruin her family if she got close. “It was definitely sad,” she says. “I was like a soulless body walking this earth, just destroying things. I didn't care. I had lost my children. I had lost me and I didn't know how to find me.” Before her last time in prison, she was in rehab and had found an apartment for her and the kids. But she struggled to find a job, despite help from counselors and a life coach. She wound up back behind bars in 2014 for not paying her probation fees.

Later that year, she saw a fellow inmate pulling on a nice outfit. “Where are you getting dressed up to go to?” Zaragoza asked. “I get to see my daughter,” the woman replied. Zaragoza began to notice flyers advertising a program that would allow school-aged daughters to visit. She wrote a letter asking to join. She was put on a waiting list, but soon, she and Jalyssa were accepted.

Instead of kids peering at parents through glass while multiple guards keep watch, this program allowed the moms to hold and touch their children. They were free to move around and participate in monthly activities with lunch provided. The visits often involve crafts, from painting to creating snow globes to weaving fabric into tie-knot blankets. “It's being a family for those four hours,” Zaragoza says. “You're not in a prison, you're reuniting.” 

It was a privilege, and she’d need to show good behavior to keep it.

But that was only half the battle. On her first two visits, her 11-year-old was chatty with everyone but her. Jalyssa was closed off, Zaragoza says, hurt after years of broken trust. Their third visit began to bridge that gap. While stuffing rice into socks to craft snowmen and bunnies, Jalyssa turned to her. “Mom, I can’t do this,” she said. “Can you help me?” 

“My heart melted,” Zaragoza says. “I knew if I could just get this right, I could have her back.” 

Zaragoza credits these visits with helping her turn her life around. She stopped bucking the guards’ orders and kept her head down. When she was released in 2016, Zaragoza stayed in touch with the program. She began to volunteer and work with founder Brittany Barnett, a Dallas attorney whose own mother had been incarcerated. Barnett offered Zaragoza a job, and the two worked together for nine years.

The mothers are housed across several units in Gatesville, a city about 130 miles south of Dallas. One Saturday a month is dedicated to the visits, and on a different weekend, the mothers spend three hours discussing everything from parenting to trauma healing. They get help putting together resumes and navigating parole packets. The nonprofit brings therapists and provides free to low-cost therapy for the families, including the kids. (Mothers who were in trouble in the previous nine months, or those who committed crimes against children or the elderly, are not eligible for the program.)

Then, in 2023, Barnett told Zaragoza she’d decided to sunset Girls Embracing Mothers so she could spend more time on her two other criminal justice organizations. The nonprofit had grown substantially over the previous decade, blossoming from Barnett’s first van ride to Gatesville with her mother, six girls, and handmade sandwiches to supporting thousands of women and children across multiple states.

The group attracted national attention for its advocacy in 2019, when Texas faced scrutiny for its growing population of incarcerated women. Three years later, Girls Embracing Mothers again made headlines when it revealed only 11 states in the U.S. collected reliable data on incarcerated mothers. “ Sadly there were not many programs like GEM,” Barnett says. “GEM was really created to fill that gap.”  

Zaragoza protested its impending closure. She struggled to find another job, until, eventually, Barnett asked whether she’d take the baton herself. “Yes!” she cried, then began to map out how to bring her vision to life. She’d long hoped to include sons. One of her boys, now 18, had been straying off course; she believes his outcome could’ve been different if he’d had the same attention as her daughter. She says he once told her he was jealous of Jalyssa. “She got all of your time,” he said. “It was like we were nothing.”

“How can you think that?” Zaragoza replied. 

In a way, it was true. The programming was for girls. Other mothers had chosen not to apply, believing it wasn’t fair that their sons could not join. Barnett helped Zaragoza rebrand the organization, and Janie’s Angels, named after Zaragoza’s aunt, was born.

Even Barnett knew the organization needed to add sons. “They're navigating the same trauma, the same separation, and they deserve the same love, support and healing,” Barnett says. “Angelica is just brilliant. She recognized the gap and she had the heart to widen that circle.” They started with the boys in September, and grouped the sons and daughters over the following months.

The program aims to heal both the mother and child. Jalyssa, now 22, remembers she didn’t talk to classmates about her mother when she was a kid. She didn’t want to suffer the odd looks, the lack of understanding. The program introduced her to girls like her. “You actually feel safe and known and heard and seen,” she says. “It's actually pretty damn beautiful.”

She’s “100 percent sure” she wouldn’t have a relationship with her mother if not for the nonprofit. She had built-up anger, she says, and likely would’ve walked a rougher path in life. “I can't tell you exactly what the other version of me would be, but I'm sure it wouldn't be good,” she says.

Each person at the Christmas event in December had their own story. There’s Nellow Santos, an 8-year-old boy whose participation in the program this fall allowed him to see his mother for the first time since he was nine months old. He also met his 15-year-old brother through it. 

There’s Nadia Kerr, a 40-year-old who met Zaragoza while both women were behind bars. Each time her daughters visited, she noticed how much older they appeared. The program kept her out of trouble so she wouldn’t miss any more moments. “I have to hold on,” she says about the organization, a hot chocolate in hand, “‘cause they got me through all of that.”

There’s the Cisneros family, a woman and man who traveled from Abilene with their three grandkids: Eris, Julian, and David. They’re praying the kids’ mother is released on parole next week. If not, they at least have the monthly visits. “It’s fun,” says 14-year-old Eris, a dimple appearing on each cheek as she peers down shyly.

One woman, Zaragoza recalls, stopped getting calls from school about her young grandson after he joined the program. The boy began to show his best behavior because he knew he’d get to see his mother again next month. It’s the same mentality that once kept Zaragoza from returning to the system when all hope seemed lost—just on the other side of the bars. 

“If it can change me,” Zaragoza says, “oh, it can change anyone.” 

Their adversity was drowned out that Saturday by Christmas cheer. Each child unwrapped a new pair of shoes, from sparkly gray Nikes to highlighter-yellow LaMelo Ball Pumas to red New Balances. The guardians took home gifts of their own: three-wick candles and a Bath and Body Works gift card. 

The growth of the women sticks with Zaragoza. She’s seen them go from not knowing how to talk to their children to becoming mothers. She’s now starting a reunification curriculum to help them write, make calls, and explain to their kids why they’re incarcerated, to relay that they made a mistake but aren’t bad people. She knows her power. Which is why Zaragoza couldn’t forget anyone that Saturday, just as she wouldn’t let the program go. 

Kelli Smith is a staff writer for The Lab Report. [email protected].

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