On this Fourth of July, its third with Donald Trump ensconced in the White House, the United States confronts both a political and moral crisis on its southern border.

Day after day, the revelations continue.

Migrant children, even toddlers, marinating for weeks in their own filth in an overcrowded border station. Hundreds of other migrants kept in squalid detention centres so crowded that cells are standing-room-only.

It goes on. As the details pile up, it becomes apparent that the gut-wrenching conditions are not limited to this or that over-burdened facility along the United States’ long border with Mexico.

The latest comes not from government critics or opposition politicians, but from an independent watchdog that is part of the Trump administration’s own Department of Homeland Security.

Officials from the department’s Office of Inspector General visited five detention centres, and this week reported conditions that should shame any country, especially on the day when it celebrates its own birth and its founding principles of human dignity.

They found migrants, including children, detained for days or weeks with only wet wipes available to clean themselves. They found overcrowding so severe that, in the words of a New York Times summary, “migrants banged on cells and pressed notes to windows begging for help.” They found adult migrants kept in standing-room-only conditions for a week.

The inspectors called conditions along the border a “ticking time bomb.”

Others have reported conditions equally as bad elsewhere. A Times reporter described a “chaotic scene of sickness and filth” at a detention facility in Clint, Texas. Doctors who care for underage migrants told of children having vital medication taken away and young mothers denied any way to keep their infants warm. Democratic representatives said they’d been told of migrant women being forced to drink water from toilets.

The crisis of overcrowding and neglect has been building for months, as record numbers of migrants came across the U.S.-Mexico border. And until recently it has been largely invisible since journalists and advocates for migrants have been mostly kept out of detention centres.

At this point, however, no one can claim ignorance of what is going on or how bad conditions were allowed to become.

This not just neglect or incompetence, but at least in part deliberate policy. U.S. federal courts have long required that migrant families detained after coming across the border must be kept in conditions that are “safe and sanitary.”

But astonishingly, the Trump administration has argued in court that “safe and sanitary” doesn’t necessarily include providing such basics as toothpaste or even soap. Here’s how one federal judge, William Fletcher, reacted to the arguments of a government lawyer on this point: “Cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket? I find it inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.”

Yet it does, and it looks as if the point is precisely to send an unmistakeable message that anyone who ventures across the border will find themselves imprisoned in truly wretched conditions. A deliberate deterrent, in other words.

This is a slow-moving political crisis, one that has been building for years. But it is also a moral crisis, one that more and more Americans are recognizing.

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The Salt Lake Tribune, the leading newspaper in one of the most solidly Republican states in the union, Utah, made clear what’s at stake by stating flatly in a recent editorial: “Our nation is operating concentration camps for refugee children. We need to stop denying that and decide if we are comfortable with that fact. And how we will explain it to our children.”

What better day for pondering that than July 4?

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