The New Yorker:

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.

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.

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