"Alot of girls cry. They have thoughts of cutting themselves," a 14-year old Guatemalan girl told a Reuters reporter in June. "I feel asphyxiated having so many people around me. There's no one here I can talk to about my case, or when I'm feeling sad. I just talk to God and cry," said another teenage girl from Honduras who was held in the Dallas convention center with 2,600 other kids.

It gets worse as you read more press reports written over the course of the summer. Kids in custody reported spoiled food, no clean clothes, sleeping on cots under glaring lights, drinking spoiled milk when there isn't water. According to a New York Times report, detained youth at a military base in El Paso said they'd gone days without showering, while at another facility in Erie, Pennsylvania, lice were rampant. In June roughly 4,000 unaccompanied children were being held by the Department of Health and Human Services. That's definitely a step up from the ICE detention of the Trump years, but still amounts to kids locked in facilities where press is not permitted.

No one denies that growing numbers of immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. present a difficult political, social and humanitarian problem. The Biden administration realizes that, and has worked to alleviate the suffering. Still, there is no excuse for the incarceration of children. As Leecia Welch, a lawyer at the National Center for Youth Law, told the New York Times in June, "Thousands of traumatized children are lingering in massive detention sites on military bases or convention centers, many relegated to unsafe, unsanitary conditions."