LOS ANGELES - Five-year-old Valentina stands by her mother as she feeds her beans, one of her favorite foods. For her and her mother Gabriela, every meal is a godsend, because when they migrated from El Salvador to the U.S. in January of this year, they ate once a day.

In Spanish, Gabriela tells us that months later she is still struggling with it all.

“It’s horrible to remember it. I sometimes wake up with fear thinking, 'how many people are going through what we went through?'”

The answer, more than 130,000 immigrants apprehended along the southwest border by Customs and Border Protection just in the month of May. The details were released in a report the same week that tariff negotiations with Mexico were taking place, and they paint a dire picture with officials using words like ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency.’

“There were a lot of people, a lot of people waiting to cross the border,” recalled Gabriela.

So many in fact that in their two-bedroom hideout in Reynosa, Mexico, her and her daughter were forced to sleep standing up for three days due to the lack of space.

“There were approximately 160 people in the house they had us in. People slept on top of each other, there are no beds, they sleep on the floor, standing, sitting, some take turns sleeping,” said Gabriela.

A few days later when it was their time to cross the border from Reynosa into McAllen, Texas and ask for asylum; she remembers the coyotes would gather hundreds of people and bring them across the Rio Grande every few hours in order to give immigration officials enough time to apprehend them all.

“There were about 150 people in my group, there was another group that had to wait until midnight to cross so they could catch us first,” recalled Gabriela.

She estimates more than 500 people were apprehended in that area on that day. That was back in January. This May there were almost three times as many immigrants apprehended along the southwest border as when Gabriela crossed.

CBP says enforcement actions on the southwest border are up 99 percent over last year at this time.

The immigration surge has put a strain on every part of the system, from CBP to the courts, and even immigration lawyers like the one representing Gabriela, Edward Pilot.

“Since the commencement of 2019, the number of recent arrival clients that I had have either tripled or quadrupled from the previous three years,” said Pilot.

Almost six months after their journey, Valentina is adjusting well to her new home; but while the physical journey is over, the legal one is just beginning. Gabriela and her daughter have been given a notice to appear in immigration court, a court also overwhelmed with a backlog of almost a million cases.