For our “Sexuality & Gender Studies Now” series, Catherine Lee, a 2000 fellow of the SSRC’s Sexuality Research Fellowship Program, describes how conceptualizations of kinship in the United States fail to account for the realities of people’s lived experience. Lee builds on her original research on race, gender, and sexuality in the context of Asian immigration and demonstrates concretely how notions of family underpin one of the most pressing moral and policy issues of our time: the separation of family members crossing US borders.