Annunciation House took her in. Ruben Garcia, the director of the organization, says he is finding beds these days for more than 2,000 people a week. If nothing else, Trump’s rhetoric and policy swerves have helped feed chaos.

“For Trump, to be a refugee is to be a murderer and a rapist,” Garcia told me. “This is what he ran on. He has a can of paint filled with a certain ideology and paints everything with it. To supporters of the wall, I ask: Is it time to take down the Statue of Liberty?”

Representative Veronica Escobar, the successor to Beto O’Rourke, now a possible Democratic presidential candidate, took me down to the spot, near a stretch of existing wall, where border agents detained an 8-year-old Guatemalan boy, Felipe Gómez Alonzo, in December. He later died in United States custody.

The spot is over the Rio Grande, in the United States, but just short of the wall, raising the question of the barrier’s usefulness. That is a question the president has refused to address with any seriousness. His wall is much less about security than macho symbolism — “a monument to bigotry,” in Escobar’s words.

I got talking to an agent who stopped us as we stepped south of the wall. He said agents in that area detained “300 bodies a day.” He said the “bodies” were jumping the line. He said by the time their cases came before an immigration judge, “the bodies are somewhere else so they get to stay.” So, he concluded, “we really have no authority to enforce the law.”

Bodies, I noted, is a term generally used for dead people. Would it not be better to call them people or human beings, as this is what they are? The agent said he didn’t mean that they are dead, but that “bodies” was the favored term.

I was subsequently advised not to read too much into this “law enforcement vernacular.” Border agents are under a lot of pressure. Their gestures of humanity — a birthday cake, a soccer ball — tend to go unrecorded. Still, if you talk about bodies you are liable to see bodies: that is to say, people stripped of their humanity, their agonizing choices, their humble ambitions and their hopes. It is then easier to treat them with callous harshness, to forget what we Americans are and where we came from.