Hundreds of pages of sworn affidavits and court documents from forcibly separated migrant parents, immigration attorneys, immigrant rights groups and others reveal intentional cruelty, neglect and chaos behind the Trump administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy that has torn thousands of children from families at the U.S./Mexico border.

Over the past several weeks, officials have made it increasingly difficult for elected leaders and media to access both detention facilities and detained families. U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, among the first to attempt to access a children’s detention facility in Texas, was asked to leave the property. Scanning the pages of court documents, some tweeted by reporter Adam Klasfeld, gives an insight into why.

Angelica Rebeca Gonzalez-Garcia came to the U.S. on May 9 with her nine-year-old daughter, fleeing domestic violence in Guatemala. While Angelica was released on June 19, her daughter continues to be detained at a facility in Texas. In her declaration, the mother described being pressured into signing documents at the threat of having her daughter taken away, which they did anyway. But then, there was also the humiliation by border officials.

"In Guatemala do they celebrate Mother's Day?" she says they asked her. “When I answered yes he said, ‘then Happy Mother's Day’ because the next Sunday was Mother's Day. I lowered my head so that my daughter would not see the tears forming in my eyes.”

“That particular act of cruelty astonished me then as it does now,” she continued. “I could not understand why they hated me so much, or wanted to hurt me so much.” Angelica said her daughter was taken from her the next day. She and other mothers separated from their children “sat next to each other in the cell and cried together and asked God to give us strength.”

“I entered the United States on May 14, in Reynoso,” said Nery Flores-Oliva, who fled her home country with her six year old after her husband’s two brothers were murdered. “I was picked up and taken to the ‘icebox,’ a cold room. They treated us badly. My son was with me. The following day the officer told me that they were going to take my son to shower and and they sent me somewhere else and they never returned with my son. I felt deceived. I never saw him again. I only ask that I be reunited with my son. He is young. He needs me.”

More than 2,300 children have been forcibly separated from parents in recent weeks. Under the judge’s order, the Trump administration must reunite children under five years old by July 10, all children by July 26, and connect all children with their parents via telephone in just hours, by July 6. But some ORR officials, “the division within [Health and Human Services] HHS that oversees the care of unaccompanied children, have received no instructions on how to proceed.”