Inside the Heartland International Children’s Rescue Center in Chicago, Illinois, two young boys sit and wait. One is 15 years old. The other is 9. Their fathers are more than a thousand miles away, at two for-profit detention centers on the border. The two families came from Brazil, seeking asylum in the U.S. Instead, they were locked up. It’s been nearly a month since the four were separated. Only one of the boys has been able to speak to his father and even then, the conversation was brief. On Wednesday, as President Donald Trump prepared to sign an executive order with potentially sweeping implications for immigrant detention, the boys became the latest plaintiffs to challenge the administration’s family separation practices. Their complaints, filed in Chicago, appeal to the same critical federal consent decree, known as the Flores settlement, that the president is now seeking to circumvent. But unlike the order Trump ultimately signed, which was framed around a false premise that the Flores settlement requires families to be separated at the border, the boys’ complaint points to what the agreement actually says: that the U.S. government not engage in the prolonged and unnecessary detention of children.

The lawsuit, filed by the Aldea — People’s Justice Center and the Law Office of Amy Maldonado, reflects a narrative that has become common in recent weeks, as the implications of Trump’s “zero tolerance doctrine” evolved into a national scandal. The families came from a Latin American nation where the security situation is dire and sought refuge in the U.S., only to find themselves in a newly terrifying situation: separated by a government with no system in place to reunite the parents and kids that it is systematically tearing apart. The boys, whose ordeal was first reported today by the Associated Press, are identified in their complaints by their initials. The 15-year-old is identified as W.S.R. and the 9-year-old is identified as C.D.A. According to their complaints, the boys, along with their fathers, came to the U.S. to seek asylum. Their individual experiences were distinct, though both families claim to have been targeted by organized crime. They crossed into the U.S. in late May, in New Mexico, more than a month after “zero tolerance” order went into effect. In the case of 9-year-old C.D.A., the complaint claims that the father and the son attempted to enter the U.S. at a port of entry, as the administration has advised asylum-seekers to do, but were told it was “closed.” And so the pair crossed the border between ports. W.S.R. and his father did the same. They were promptly arrested by U.S. Border Patrol agents and, lawyers for the families say, expressed their desire to seek asylum.

It’s been nearly a month since the families were separated. Only one of the boys has been able to speak to his father.

It’s a pattern that Bridget Cambria, one of the attorneys for the two families, says is occurring with increasing regularity on the border. “Most of the people that we’ve heard from, they’ve all tried to present at a port of entry and they’re denied entry,” Cambria told The Intercept. “So that’s why they’re apprehended, primarily, because they’re seeking out a border officer to ask for protection.” While the prevalence of that particular pattern could not be confirmed, The Intercept and several other news and legal advocacy organizations have documented numerous instances of border agents turning away asylum-seekers at ports of entry across the border, making it all but impossible for them to assert their right in the one manner deemed appropriate by the Trump administration. The fathers were arrested, charged, and ultimately prosecuted for entering the country without inspection, a federal misdemeanor. The families spent two sleepless nights in a Border Patrol holding facility. One night, a U.S. official approached C.D.A., the 9-year-old, and his father. According to the boy’s complaint, the official told the father that the pair needed to be separated for a “process,” assuring him that it would only last three to five days, and then they would be reunited after. The reunification never happened. Karen Hoffmann, also an attorney working on the families’ case, says W.S.R. and his father were similarly separated. Hoffman said the boys were in tears and their fathers assured them, “I’ll see you soon. I promise I won’t let you be alone.” “Basically, the U.S. government made liars out of them because it’s been almost a month,” Hoffmann told The Intercept. “They haven’t seen them. In one case, they still haven’t spoken.”

As sources working on family separation cases recently told The Intercept, and as U.S. officials confirmed Wednesday, the U.S. government has no dedicated system in place to reunite the thousands of families it has separated across the border. In both C.D.A.’s and W.S.R.’s cases, their complaints state that their fathers were given no information about their sons’ whereabouts following their separation. The boys were both shipped to Chicago, while the fathers entered U.S. Marshal custody. As of Wednesday’s filings, C.D.A.’s father still did not know the name of the facility where his elementary school-age son was being kept. According to W.S.R.’s complaint, it took his father three weeks to obtain the hotline number the government is providing to parents whose children it has taken. In their one and only conversation since being separated, W.S.R.’s father expressed that his son is “extremely unhappy and upset and is desperate to be reunited with his father.” According to C.D.A.’s complaint, his father obtained the government’s hotline number as well, which is managed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Health and Human Services department responsible for the custody of minors in the immigration system. The father tried calling the number “repeatedly,” the complaint states. “He says they took his information and told him they would call him back,” it goes on to say. “He has not managed to find out if he can receive calls at the detention center where he is.” The fathers of the two boys are currently being held in detention centers in New Mexico and Texas, where they are awaiting interviews with asylum officers to make their claims. Lawyers for the families argue that the ongoing detention of the two boys is a clear-cut violation of the Flores settlement, a 1997 federal consent decree that limits the amount of time the government can keep a child in detention and stipulates a series of protections for kids in U.S. custody. In 2014, the Obama administration responded to an increase in Central American women and children showing up to the border by dramatically expanding the use of family detention. The courts ultimately intervened, ruling that the government, in general, could not hold unaccompanied children or children apprehended with a family member in detention for more than 20 days. Instead, families were to be released on parole as their immigration cases proceeded through the courts. Far right, anti-immigrant hawks in and around the Trump administration, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House adviser Steven Miller, have long hated the settlement, casting it as a “loophole” routinely exploited by women and kids. The administration has insisted that the only way forward is through detention, arguing that if families are released into the community, they will simply disappear.

The Flores settlement requires that children not be held for more than 20 days. It also requires “contact with family members who were arrested with the minor.”