EL PASO — The young migrants often arrived at night. They were teenagers from Central and South America, brought by border agents to the Tornillo Detention Facility and led to rows of metal bunk beds in military tents ringed by barbed wire. Human touch, even a simple hug, was rare inside this secured temporary city, where nearly 3,000 unaccompanied minors at a time were confined between June 2018 and January 2019. In this harsh environment, the Chihuahuan Desert, imagination and faith helped them make it through.

The Rev. Rafael Garcia, a Jesuit priest from South El Paso, got his first inkling of the creativity within the camp when he noticed a cross with a red Sacred Heart entwined in yarn, handmade by incarcerated youngsters. Seeking asylum from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, they would go on to create ingenious tableaus inspired by their homelands: a miniature soccer field with pipe-cleaner players kicking a polka-dot cotton ball, for instance. Or an elegant church with a crepe paper dome resting on a painted sign that read “Female UAC” — unaccompanied alien children. Someone had borrowed it from the restroom.

The inventive artworks by children who wound up in Tornillo are the subject of a haunting exhibition, “Uncaged Art: Tornillo Children’s Detention Camp,” at the Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens at the University of Texas at El Paso, through Oct. 5. Crafted from memory, the scenes were fashioned from humble materials like bottle caps and Popsicle sticks as part of a social studies project in which a few creative teachers assigned to the camp asked the children to commemorate their native cultures. Birds — especially the emerald-tailed quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala and a symbol of freedom — were a recurring theme.