On Monday afternoon, around the time that reporters were asking Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, whether the Trump Administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents was child abuse, immigrant children being held by our government in the West Texas desert were playing soccer. Their field was located in the center of a new tent camp, next to a Customs and Border Protection station in Tornillo, Texas, a border town thirty miles southeast of El Paso. Not far from the dusty sidelines stood a chain-link fence, topped by barbed wire, which marked the boundary of the facility. A few hundred yards south of the fence stood a taller barrier: the latticed metal border wall that separates the United States from Mexico. Philip Montgomery and I stood beside the border wall to capture the photographs that accompany this article. We could hear the whooping and shouting of the kids and see the ball bounce back and forth across the field. There were a number of adults on the grounds, wearing lime-green T-shirts with “STAFF” printed on the back. It was ninety-five degrees, hot even in the shade of the border wall, and beyond the edge of the camp the landscape was farmland and scrubland out to the horizon.

Children play soccer on a dusty field in the middle of the tent camp. Photographs by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker

The Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for immigrant children in government custody, has said that the Tornillo camp can hold three hundred and sixty kids, and that it may expand. So far, officials have mostly succeeded in keeping the world out. Members of the press have not been allowed to tour the camp—when I tried to visit the adjacent Border Patrol station on Monday, I was told that no one there was available to speak to me, and was handed a card with contact information for press people at H.H.S. The government has made a few photographs of the interiors of the tents public: they show one tent crammed with empty bunk beds and another, larger tent filled with long plastic tables and dozens of metal chairs. On Friday, Representative Will Hurd, a Republican whose border district includes Tornillo, toured the camp and told Texas Monthly that he had found it safe and well run, even if he disagreed with the policies and policy changes that brought it about. It is not even clear how many kids are being held at Tornillo. An H.H.S. spokesperson did not respond to a request for the most up-to-date numbers from the camp. Hurd, on Friday, put the number at around four hundred, and said that the children being held there were sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys who didn’t appear to have been separated from their families. On Sunday, Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat from El Paso, said that the number of kids at Tornillo was two hundred, twenty per cent of whom had been separated from their parents.

Video by Philip Montgomery.

A Crisis at the Border More coverage of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy from The New Yorker.

Both Trump supporters and immigrant-rights activists have noted that the Obama Administration also used tent camps to hold immigrant kids. (The distinction raised by defenders of Obama’s policies is that his tent camps were set up at a time when thousands of unaccompanied minors were crossing the border—a genuine crisis.) As much as many activists deplore the tent cities, they don’t want to see kids put into the same detention centers as adults. Hurd favors bringing back the Family Case Management Program, which was in place from January, 2016, to the summer of 2017; it simply kept tabs on people with pending immigration cases until their court cases began. It’s a long way from that to playing soccer behind barbed wire.