A small group of Catholic faithful, including five teenagers and one adult from Massachusetts, took their immigration pleas straight to the pope last week in an attempt to highlight the risk of family separation they live with every day.

“We’ve grown up as a Catholic family, and we’ve always known that the pope has a really strong voice,” said Lynn resident Kevin Palma, 17, speaking about the trip to Jim Braude on Greater Boston, along with his father Jose and fellow teen advocate, Lisbeth Landaverde.

Kevin hopes the Vatican can help solve the problem he worries about every day: his father getting deported.

“I just have to get through the day,” he said of his strategy for coping with the stress. “It’s like a thorn in me.”

As U.S. citizen, Kevin is old enough to stay in the country and chase his dream of becoming a cardiologist, even if his parents do get deported back to their native El Salvador. But for his younger sister, who is 13, the family still grapples with figuring out what would be the best choice for her: to stay in a land of opportunities with only her slightly older brother as a guardian, or to go with her parents to a struggling country she has never really known.

Lisbeth Landaverde, 16, has similar conversations playing out in her household, too.

“At dinner sometimes, we have conversations,” she said. “My little sister — she’s nine years old — she starts to cry thinking of our family having to separate.”

Lisbeth explained that the current plan is that she, her 17-year-old-sister, and her 14-year-old sister would stay in the United States — but that the nine-year-old gets anxious wondering about her fate. All the girls are U.S. citizens, but it may make more sense for the youngest one to go with her parents, even though that means separating from the rest of the siblings.

Kevin and Lisbeth are part of a new group of families facing deportation and separation fears. They are the children of people who have had legal protected status in the U.S. for almost two decades and have just recently had that taken away by the Trump administration.

These families are beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, created by Congress in 1990 to allow people from countries suffering civil conflict or natural disasters to live and work in the U.S. temporarily, without fear of deportation. Countries that have been granted TPS status over the years have often had it extended by the Department of Homeland Security, if it is determined that those countries still remain unsafe for return. There are more than 300,000 immigrants living in the U.S. with TPS status — not to mention their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.

Over the past year, however, the Trump administration has started revoking the TPS protections for people from six countries: Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Sudan and El Salvador. Earlier this month, a federal judge put the Trump administration's actions on hold for four of the six TPS countries. But if the federal government is allowed to resume, TPS recipients will face the risk of deportation.

Immigrants from El Salvador, like Kevin and Lisbeths’ parents, make up the vast majority of TPS recipients, accounting for some 200,000 people nationwide and 6,000 in Massachusetts. The country first received TPS status in 2001 following two devastating earthquakes.

Jose Palma said that his reasons for coming to the U.S. were multifold.

“The most important reason [I came] was that there was no opportunity,” he said. “I grew up during the civil war, the civil war in El Salvador started in 1980 and lasted for 12 years. My parents lost everything in the civil war, [as] farmers cultivating corn … We ended up with nothing.”

El Salvador has struggled to come out from under the shadows of that war ever since, with two earthquakes in 2001 causing even more mass destruction, and long-lasting violence that prompted the World Bank to designate it the “murder capital of the world” in 2016. This July, the Trump administration issued a warning to U.S. citizens to reconsider traveling there — just months after announcing it would end TPS protections for people from El Salvador, forcing them to return there.

“The U.S. government is telling U.S. citizens, ‘Don’t go to El Salvador’ — but yet, the government is saying to people that have been protected by TPS,' Get ready to go back to your country,’” said Jose. “And that’s kind of a double standard.”

The daunting nature of their parents’ deportation to such circumstances made Kevin and Lisbeth think that it was worth it to go with their advocacy group straight to Rome. In the end, they did manage to get a face-to-face with the Pope, who told them to “keep fighting” and that “migration is a human right.”

For Lisbeth, that moment gave her a sense of hope.

“It felt like a victory — knowing that somebody with such high power was saying that we had the right, and that no one can take it away from us, it was such a joy,” she said.