Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, a critic from the outset of the Trump administration’s decision to separate children from their families at the border, distilled the situation down to a single sentence Wednesday morning: “This gets even worse as the layers are peeled back.” He was referring to a new report from the Associated Press describing so-called “tender-age” shelters in South Texas, where Trump administration officials have reportedly sent hundreds of infants and toddlers taken from their parents. No photos have yet surfaced of the shelters, which opponents of the family-separation policy were quick to brand as “baby jails,” but they have been roundly condemned by lawyers and and medical providers. “The thought that they are going to be putting such little kids in an institutional setting? I mean it is hard for me to even wrap my mind around it,” Kay Bellor, vice president for programs at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, told the A.P. “Toddlers are being detained.”

Reports of the “tender-age” facilities—a phrase that, per the A.P, typically refers to children under the age of 13—follow the mass circulation of images of children held in chain-link cages, curled up in mylar blankets. The pictures have fueled outrage among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, many of whom are pushing the White House to end the disastrous implementation of its “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April. But as the news cycle remains fixated on the children’s plight, it’s increasingly clear that those images depict just a sliver of the burgeoning humanitarian crisis, the optics of which are—somehow—only getting worse.

Along with the three Texas detention centers in Combes, Raymondville, and Brownsville, there are reportedly plans to build a fourth “tender-age” facility in Houston that would hold up to 240 children, despite the objection of city officials. Steven Wagner, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services, dismissed the notion that the children are being treated inhumanely: “We have specialized facilities that are devoted to providing care to children with special needs and tender-age children as we define as under 13 would fall into that category,” he told the A.P. “They have very well-trained clinicians, and those facilities meet state licensing standards for child welfare agencies, and they’re staffed by people who know how to deal with the needs—particularly of the younger children.” But doctors and lawyers who’ve visited the shelters described the children there as “hysterical, crying and acting out.” “The shelters aren’t the problem,” South Texas pediatrician Marsha Griffin reiterated to the A.P. “It’s taking kids from their parents that’s the problem.”

On Tuesday, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights also reported an influx of young children in need of temporary foster-care placement. “We have received reports and are very concerned that the children arriving here are much younger than those who have been transported here in the past. Some of the children are infants as young as three months of age and are completely unable to advocate for themselves,” the agency said in a statement. “While we commend the work of resettlement agencies in Michigan attempting to serve these children with dignity and compassion, nothing can replace the love, sense of security and care of a parent.” Not only is holding children apart from their parents psychologically traumatic, it’s also expensive—a fact that could drum up further conservative opposition to the policy. NBC News reported Wednesday that it costs millions more to detain children separated from their parents in new “tent cities” than it does to keep families together at detention centers or permanent facilities. According to an official at the Health and Human Services department, it costs $775 per night to detain an individual child in a tent city, compared to $256 per person per night to detain a child in more permanent H.H.S. housing facilities, and $298 per person per night to keep kids with their parents at centers such as the one in Dilley, Texas.