MCALLEN, TEXAS—Everyone I met in this calm and quiet town was very polite, including the staff at the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center. The Border Patrol agents are helpful, and seem genuinely interested in offering some transparency about what goes on here. But when you see the inside of the facility, and combine it with what we know is happening here and elsewhere along the United States southern border, the lingering sense is that we are on the brink of a humanitarian disaster. And this is before we’ve built any tent city.

On Sunday, Father’s Day, I was part of a group of journalists invited to tour the facility shortly before a group of Democratic lawmakers. As we made our way through, Valesca Merida, a detainee, stopped us. She slipped her delicate fingers through the chain links between us, wrapped them around the metal, and pressed herself up against the wall of her metal cage. Her eyes welled up until the tears streamed down her face as Merida explained in Spanish how she and her one-year-old daughter had traveled more than a thousand miles from their home in Guatemala as part of a group—until her companions abandoned her in Mexico, leaving her alone with her baby.

Still, they made it to the United States border, where U.S. Customs and Border Patrol took her into custody. Now, she shared an enclosure with perhaps a dozen other young mothers and their children at the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center. And she didn’t know whether she’d be leaving with her daughter.

Merida was held towards the back of the center, nicknamed “Ursula” for the street on which it’s located, a sprawling converted warehouse with two main areas: a 22,000 square-foot area for intake, processing, and adult detention, and a 55,000 square-foot area where unaccompanied children and families are held after they’re processed. The two sides are separated by the only full wall in this part of the facility—the rest are loft-style barriers that do not reach the ceiling. The whole setup sits deep below a cavernous warehouse ceiling with tentacled networks of exposed silver piping. It is defined by the rows of cages lining both sides that have lent this place still another nickname: “the dog kennel.”

A look inside the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center, known as "the dog kennel." AP

The Rio Grande Valley, which spans the four counties at the southern tip of Texas, is now the number one destination, statistically, for migrants seeking asylum in the United States. So this facility is also ground zero for the Trump administration’s new “zero-tolerance” policy, where all adults who violate immigration law are referred for criminal prosecution. Because they must be jailed while they await trial, they’re separated from their travel companions, including spouses and children. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new policy in early May, and over the next six weeks, 2,000 children were separated from their parents. And at this moment, more families are separated at the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center than anywhere else in the country.

On the “55k side,” as the CPB agents referred to it, families and unaccompanied minors are split into four groups, each with their own large metal enclosures. Valesca Merida and her daughter were housed with other female heads-of-household and their children. There was another enclosure for male heads-of-household and their kids. Then there were two more still, for unaccompanied minors of each gender. In all of them, detainees sprawled out on moss-green mats or propped themselves up against the sides of the cages. (And yes, they are cages.) Some of the young ones smiled inquisitively at our group as we passed, but most people just looked back without much expression at all.

CPB agents were eager to tell us there were no rules about how much detainees could talk to one another (or, for that matter, eat or use the bathroom). “They get to talk all the time,” an agent said to me offhandedly. But no one seemed to be talking. The cages were not particularly crowded, and the quiet in the place had an eerie quality. Most parents just sat there, holding their children silently.

The capacity of the McAllen facility is 1,500 detainees. Assistant Chief Patrol Agent Carmen Qualia told us that at noon on Sunday, 1,129 people were housed here in total. Among them, 528 were family units, while 197 were unaccompanied minors. Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat from Oregon, who visited this same facility two weeks ago, said it felt “virtually empty” today. Two weeks ago it was “completely jammed with people,” he said.

Outside the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center. Jack Holmes

In a press conference prior to the tour, sector chief Manuel Padilla—who oversees the entire Rio Grande Valley—made it clear that the policy in this sector is not to separate children under five from their parents. (He could not confirm whether this policy applies in other sectors along the border.) That means Merida and her daughter will not be separated. But Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, another Democratic senator who toured the facility and others in the area with Merkley and his delegation, suggested to me that they had heard other stories on their trip.

"We were able to speak to one of the moms who had been detained there,” Van Hollen said. “She had come from Guatemala, she was fleeing death threats, and came with her 13-year-old daughter. And they were detained after they crossed the river, and she was then separated from her daughter. She did not know where her daughter was anymore, but the mom was being criminally prosecuted.”

Children sleep on green mats inside the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center. AP

Shortly before we left the 55k side, a line of men holding sheets of paper in one hand and their children’s hands in the other made their way down a makeshift hallway towards one of the enclosures. A CBP agent explained they were holding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paperwork, and had been fully processed. They were ready to be transferred from this facility. Many held the hands of children clearly young enough that, like Merida and her daughter, they likely will not be separated here. Other children, however, may have been more than five. That meant that, as this line of fathers and sons and daughters made their way back to the central cage on the 55k side, this may be the last time they see their children for some time. No one, including those who run this facility or the ICE personnel who will soon pick them up, can guarantee when they will see them again—or even speak to them by phone. We left while they still held their children’s hands, around 1:30 p.m. on Father’s Day.

This processing facility is just one step of a long and arduous legal process for those who come to our southern border seeking asylum. This follows, of course, the long and arduous physical journey from their homelands. When people are captured at the border, they’re initially taken to a Border Patrol “intake station.” There is a separate facility for this in McAllen, which is one of many such setups in the Valley and beyond.

Families are kept together when they encounter Border Patrol—whether they present themselves as asylum-seekers or are captured—and remain together while in CPB custody as they make their way to the processing facility. It’s not until they’re fully processed and ready to depart the facility that the vital decisions are made. At this point, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers pick them up. Parents who will be prosecuted are taken to a federal detention center. Their children are brought to a facility like the former Walmart-turned-shelter in Brownsville.

These migrants are primarily from Central American countries like Honduras and Guatemala, though some are from farther afield. The U.S. has existing treaties with Canada and Mexico that allow for undocumented immigrants from those countries to be swiftly deported, but migrants from non-contiguous nations are not so easily dealt with under the law.

In 2014, the first surge of Central American migration became a harrowing issue for the Obama administration, particularly as more unaccompanied minors made the long journey by themselves. It was approaching chaos, and Border Patrol agents were thrust into extraordinary roles. John Lopez, Acting Deputy Patrol Agent for the McAllen facility, was at this facility then and described how he suddenly found himself changing diapers. The McAllen facility was one piece of an entirely new infrastructure the Department of Homeland Security built to respond to the surge. The facility for unaccompanied minors in Brownsville was part of the response, too.

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“The administration was overwhelmed,” Julian Castro, who served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Obama and attended a protest outside the McAllen facility Sunday, told me. “I remember saying in the spring of 2014 that I thought the administration could handle things better. And the Obama administration did get better from the beginning to the end of it. What we see with Trump is the opposite: not only is he not getting better on these issues, he's getting worse.”

The difference now is that, under zero-tolerance, families can be torn apart while their asylum case is being adjudicated. The Obama administration avoided separating families when the parent had no prior criminal offenses, and sought to establish facilities where they could live together while their asylum cases were handled.

"We have an asylum court system,” Merkley said. “It's controlled by Jeff Sessions. It normally on average only lets in one out of five people who seek asylum. So treat people decently, and either they're allowed in because they can present credible evidence to meet the test, or they can't, in which case they are deported.

"But do not deliberately hurt people who are fleeing persecution. That is completely contrary to the very fabric of America as a nation, where the vast majority of us come from immigrant traditions."

Inside the Brownsville shelter for unaccompanied minors and children separated from their parents. Twitter

The Trump administration has, in recent weeks, gone in the complete opposite direction. Many of the parents detained by Border Patrol are charged with illegally entering the country, a misdemeanor. To make things worse, Jeff Sessions narrowed the criteria for granting asylum, excluding the threats of domestic and gang violence that drive many Central American migrants to make the journey here.

It is also increasingly difficult to present yourself for asylum recognition at official border crossings—the standard in international law—and migrants have been forced to wait for days outside those checkpoints, living and sleeping in exposed conditions. This has driven still more people to avoid the legitimate crossings and try their luck crossing the Rio Grande, a dangerous path that often leads to quick detention by Border Patrol anyway.

"Do not deliberately hurt people who are fleeing persecution. That is completely contrary to the very fabric of America as a nation."

In this sense, the situation at the southern border is a Catch-22: it’s increasingly difficult to present yourself for asylum in the proper way, and the only other way into the country—and out of the extreme conditions immediately outside—is to break the law. Once you’ve broken it, you risk prosecution and separation from your children.

If you ask sector chief Padilla, however, this is all necessary. In his press conference, Padilla painted a picture very much reminiscent of President Trump’s visions of American Carnage. A video played featuring all the worst cases encountered by Border Patrol agents: smugglers leading high-speed, and often deadly, chases; images of gangs, including extensive tattoos. He listed the statistics on drug trafficking through the Rio Grande Valley. There has been a 315% increase in MS-13 apprehensions, he said, adding that Border Patrol rescues are also up significantly year to date compared to last year. He cited a case of an MS-13 member who was apprehended while traveling with a child, suggesting there are “threats in the mix.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley speaks to reporters outside the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center. Jack Holmes

“You can’t understand the situation at the border by carving out one small piece of what’s happening and building a narrative out of that,” he said.

According to Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants who entered the country legally, zero-tolerance was a necessary deterrent because of the spike in illegal crossings in the Valley, a situation that helps the cartels and smugglers. Yet he also seemed to suggest his office was just following orders: The attorney general gives guidance, he said, and “we implement that guidance.” Padilla told The Washington Post last week that as the new system ramps up, the number of families separated could double.

There’s no doubt that Padilla and his staff work in dangerous conditions. They battle individuals and organizations that operate beyond the law, in the wild country near our border where both Mexican and American governments struggle to exert control. Valesca Merida was just one of thousands who have experienced the terror of this area first-hand. Migrants commonly experience robbery, extortion, and sexual violence on their journeys, and Padilla sees his office as helping to prevent that however they can. The situation crossing the Rio Grande is also incredibly dangerous, and agents have seen some shocking things.

“We do encounter two- and four-year-olds who are crossing the river by themselves,” Agent Lopez said.

But it’s still hard to see how family separation contributes to this mission. These migrants, after all, are already across the border. And it’s still unclear whether this will actually deter others from coming. Merida told our group she had heard of the separation policy, thanks to video making the rounds on social media and elsewhere. But another mother sitting with her child against the fence in the McAllen facility said she was still unaware of any such policy. Even if people in Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador do become aware of it, some advocates doubt it will significantly cut down on migration. The situation in these countries is truly desperate—that’s why people are willing to risk their lives and travel thousands of miles to escape.

Padilla likened the separation process to what happens to U.S. citizens when they violate the law. A citizen who tries to carry drugs across the border, for instance, would be jailed and separated for his or her children, according to Padilla. Except drug trafficking, and most other offenses for which bail would not be granted, is a felony. Illegal border crossing is a misdemeanor. The punishment for the parent does not match the crime. It is an injustice.

The trauma inflicted on their children is something else entirely. After all, they have already endured a journey of incredible stress and trauma to reach our border. They are in a strange land where people do not speak their language. The one constant in their lives—the one thing these young children can latch onto—is a parent. Severing that bond, psychologists warn, could have drastic consequences down the line.

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Padilla’s rhetoric also mirrored Trump and his administration’s in another respect: He repeatedly suggested that “there is no policy to separate families,” which is true only if you divorce the expressed policy from its inevitable consequences.



In the meantime, though, the new policy is putting a renewed strain on the system set up by the Obama administration to deal with this issue. There are not enough immigration and other judges down here to deal with the volume of cases now crossing their desks. There aren’t enough public defenders to represent everyone being charged, or immigration lawyers to represent those seeking asylum.

There aren’t enough people to work in the facilities for unaccompanied minors, like Brownsville, where the number of children is growing rapidly as more become “unaccompanied” because they’ve been taken away from their parents. There aren’t enough caregivers, like the four on-site at McAllen for hundreds of kids. There are no mental-health professionals on-site at McAllen. And there aren’t enough Border Patrol agents, now that everyone captured must go through the full processing procedure.

“It is a challenge to handle both enforcement on the front lines and processing here,” said Agent Lopez in response to a question of whether they simply had enough people. He explained that the CPB has had to reallocate resources, sometimes removing agents from patrolling the border, to staff these facilities. There is much more paperwork now that everyone is being processed. The situation is sliding towards the same level of chaos that prevailed in 2014. There’s also an understandable emotional toll.

“Does it affect me?” said Carmen Qualia, the Assistant Chief Patrol Agent. “You wouldn’t be human if it didn’t.”

Adults without children are held on the “22k side,” which we toured upon first entering the detention area. It functions and feels like a jail. It was noticeably cold in the 22k area, though an agent told me the temperature throughout the facility is a mandated 68-to-77 degrees. (It is significantly warmer in 55k.) Detainees were sprawled out with the silver mylar blankets wrapped around them, not unlike the ones given to marathon runners at the finish line. They were separated into rows of chain-link cages, each of which held between a dozen and 20 young men, sometimes nearly on top of each other, who we passed by from a few feet away. Across the facility, there were more sparsely populated cages with adult women.

The men greeted our group with jeers. “I thought I was going to Miami,” grinned a man near the front of a cage in Spanish, translated in part for me by a nearby CPB agent. “Now it looks like I’m going to Honduras.” His cellmates hooted with laughter.

Nearby, a boy no older than four sat on his father’s lap across a counter from an agent processing them. This was, after all, the processing area for everyone—not just young men. The boy was silent and calm, but he did not look at the rattling cages or our group as we passed. This was merely the latest strange and frightening moment in his long journey.

A little farther into the 22k side, we turned left down a shallow corridor—still under the same cavernous ceiling—and stopped in front of two detention rooms that could not have been more than eight or ten feet in any direction. Agent Lopez explained these were mini-quarantines for detainees who arrive with suspected contagious diseases or other issues. (They are put through a medical exam when they arrive to check for rashes and the like.) The near cell’s door window was covered with some black material. The farther cell was marked, “Do not use,” but a couple of reporters in our group quickly realized it was indeed in use. I looked through the window and failed to see anyone, until I craned my neck and saw a young woman slumped in the near right corner, head on her knees. Agents tried to move us away as Lopez said he would find out why someone was being housed there.

As we reentered the main area of 22k, some detainees sat at two rows of computer monitors, speaking with someone via video chat. At first I thought it might be a system for them to get in touch with relatives. The agents guiding our tour soon explained they were being processed remotely by CPB personnel at other stations. That is to say, it appeared some people’s fate—whether they could demonstrate they had “credible fear” and warranted an asylum hearing, or whether they’d simply be prosecuted—was determined via a video chat where they represented themselves. It was the latest sign of a system stretched to the brink, and the sacrifice of due process and human rights that can easily result. Then again, the U.S. is poised to leave the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Outside the McAllen facility, a group of around 50 or 60 people chanted and held signs in protest. There were indications that local communities here were not fully aware of what is happening in their backyard. “I saw it on the news that a man killed himself when he was in jail after they took him away from his son,” Maria, a local bartender, told me, suggesting she had learned of the new policies via the emerging national media coverage. She was referring to the horror story of a Honduran man who was separated from his three-year-old, one of many beginning to emerge out of this valley. Those assembled across the street were fully informed.

Protesters outside the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center. AP

"The comfort issue is secondary,” said Silvia Medina, who was born in Mexico but has lived on this side of the border for 55 years. “It's the psychological damage, the trauma. We Hispanics, we love to be touched—we love to cuddle. And these children are not receiving any human touch, because it's prohibited. That goes against all the natural laws of humanity.”

Another attendee, Allen Pitman, said he was hoping more people would be here. I asked him why he came. “Because I’m a grandfather,” he said. Pitman is a lifelong Minnesotan who moved down here for retirement. He was fixated on the role he believes Evangelicals should play in this debate. "I've got a daughter who's very active in the Evangelical church,” he told me. “We just had a big discussion about it. If they are truly for the family values, it's time to step up."

Attorney General Sessions cited Romans 13 recently as justification for the new policy. He was rebuked in many quarters, including in a stirring monologue from Stephen Colbert, for a grotesque interpretation of the Bible that is apparently rooted in an ultra-authoritarian strain of Evangelical Christianity. But Sessions at least has the courage to own up to a policy he enacted. His boss, the president, refuses to take responsibility, blaming “Democratic laws” that he never specifies for the family separations.

In reality, his administration began examining the “zero-tolerance” policy almost as soon as they took office, and he was convinced to sign off on it by his ghoul of a senior adviser, Stephen Miller, the anti-immigration zealot from Santa Monica, California. Somehow, the president’s administration has simultaneously claimed there is no family-separation policy, that the policy will be a deterrent, and most recently, that it will force Democrats to come to the table on an immigration bill.

"Injuring children and injuring parents in order to send a political message? That's not acceptable under any moral code or religious tradition,” Sen. Merkley said. "You can't injure children to give yourself legislative leverage. That is evil."

He continued: "You saw the arc in which the president has dehumanized immigrants, using MS-13 as a way to describe immigrants broadly and then calling immigrants animals. If you dehumanize people, it becomes more and more comfortable to inflict pain on them, and so they finally decided, well, we're OK doing this. And it seems like John Kelly was in that conversation, certainly Jeff Sessions was in those conversations. And they decided to do it and cover it up by calling it 'zero-tolerance.' This isn't zero-tolerance, this is zero humanity with zero logic."

Children inside the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center. Shutterstock

But regardless of the protestations of Democratic senators and protesters outside the McAllen facility and whoever else, the administration does not appear to be taking a single step back. And Trump could instantly reverse the policy at any time. But the defining characteristic of Trumpism is hostility to immigration and to outsiders. His White House suggested cutting legal immigration in half. The move to separate families is the latest in a long line of initiatives that amount to little more than performative cruelty, regardless of whatever Bible passage Sessions might produce to back it up.

An administration that knows only the value of force, power, and authority believes anything is justified in stopping people it doesn’t want from coming to this country. El Salvador, after all, was one of the president’s infamous alleged “shitholes.” That range of acceptable deterrence includes blatant lying, and, according to the Convention Against Torture—to which the U.S. is a signatory—torturing children.

The environments in many of these facilities have long been tough, bordering on brutal, despite the often best efforts of people on the ground. That includes under the Obama administration. But Trump administration policies that radically increase the number of kids left alone, leading to overcrowding and severe psychological trauma, have made things immeasurably worse.

So, too, will Trump’s next move. A senior administration official told The Washington Examiner that the Department of Health and Human Services is taking in 250 children a day now, and that the number in government care could reach 30,000 by August. The overcrowding has already reached the point that the administration has now approved a plan to build a so-called “tent city” outside El Paso to hold the children. The average temperature there in July is 97 degrees.

Down a bit farther south and east, in the Valley, the heat was absolutely oppressive, a blanket of beating sun and stagnant air outside the processing facility. It seemed unconscionable that someone would propose putting small children out to live in these conditions, particularly if, like the residents of the Brownsville facility, they’re set to be there for an average of almost 50 days. Already, the decision to house human beings this way evoked Japanese internment—a point made by Laura Bush, the First Lady during our most recent Republican presidency, in an op-ed.

Combined with the extreme conditions of South Texas summer, what lies on the horizon is nothing less than a human rights calamity. We are poised on a cliff’s edge, or possibly an inflection point. We are called to action, to call out to the world what kind of nation this is. God help us if we’re one that tears little kids from their fathers and puts them in internment camps—on Father’s Day, or any other.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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