Arturo Rubio and Caitlin Dickerson

<h1>CLINT, Tex. — At the squat, sand-colored concrete border station in Texas that has become the center of debate over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, a chaotic shuffle of migrant children continued Tuesday as more than 100 were moved back into a facility that days earlier had been emptied in the midst of criticism that young detainees there were hungry, crying and unwashed.</h1>

The transfer came just days after 249 children originally housed at the station in Clint, Texas, had been moved to other facilities to relieve overcrowding. The continuing movement of children and confusion over housing of the Border Patrol’s youngest detainees pointed to an increasingly disorganized situation along the southern border and an agency struggling to maintain minimal humanitarian standards amid an unprecedented influx of migrant families.

“We’ve dipped far below the standard of care into the realms of just utter darkness,” said state Rep. Terry Canales of Texas, a Democrat who contacted Border Patrol officials to ask what he and his staff could do to help. “We’re in a dark place as a nation, and it just breaks my heart.”

In Clint, a farm town about 20 miles southeast of El Paso with fewer than 1,000 residents, there was consternation and dismay among residents at reports from lawyers who visited the border station recently, who said they found that children as young as 5 months old had been housed with filthy clothes, dirty diapers and inadequate food.

“Almost like a concentration camp,” said Juan Martinez, who works at the Pride Fitness gym in Clint and heard about what was happening at the nearby station from news reports. “I mean, they’re not killing them, but they’re treating them like animals. They need basic hygiene.”

From across the country, donations of diapers and other supplies began flowing in — though Customs and Border Protection agents said they could not accept outside supplies and initially refused the growing stockpile. More than a dozen people drove into South Texas from as far away as the West Coast to deliver aid and launch protests.

“It’s about getting people aware and creating a space for people to be outraged,” said Kris Brockmann, who traveled 17 hours from Palo Alto, Californa, to protest outside a Border Patrol facility near Clint on Tuesday night.

The Clint facility houses only a fraction of the tens of thousands of migrants who have been crossing the border each month, mostly Central American families fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands. But the lawyers’ observations of the conditions there, shared with journalists last week, offered a rare view into a system that has been deteriorating for the most part out of sight of the public.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has recently reported on facilities that it found to be dangerously overcrowded, where there was standing room only, and where lights had been kept on 24 hours a day in rooms where people had been left to sleep on concrete floors. But reporters have rarely been allowed into the facilities to document the conditions firsthand.

Trump refused to take responsibility for the conditions facing migrant children and families at border facilities. “You know, they were built by President Obama; they are really not designed so much for children,” Trump said in an interview in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “But you know, children can be there because we have no choice because of the laws, the laws are so bad.”

Asked if his administration’s policies were to blame, Trump said the conditions existed because Democrats in Congress would not agree to policy changes that would stanch the flow of migrants across the border.

“All I can say is that if they change the law, you wouldn’t have it,” Trump said. “The cartels are making the money, are they using children’s — it’s virtual slavery. And if we could get a change, a very simple change it would go so quickly, so easily with the Democrats, we would be able to solve that problem very easily.”

The station in Clint was built in 2012. It was meant to temporarily house adults, not children, and not for a month at a time, as has happened under the Trump administration.

Local Democratic lawmakers Tuesday were demanding an immediate improvement to conditions for detainees along the border, with Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas who is chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, announcing that the caucus would lead an inspection of the facility at Clint next week.

Amid the outrage over the conditions at Clint, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, John Sanders, announced he would step down in early July as the government’s primary border enforcement executive, the latest in a series of personnel changes within the federal border enforcement agencies that have come down since April, when Trump asked Kirstjen Nielsen to resign from her position as homeland security secretary.

A CBP spokesman said that the agency was able to return 100 children to Clint because the previous overcrowding had been alleviated, but he also said that no additional resources were being provided to them. He disputed the accounts of the lawyers, including some from the nation’s top law schools, who after a court-ordered visit to the facility earlier this month said they had observed children who had not been allowed to shower in nearly a month and were so hungry that it had been hard for them to sleep through the night.

They found children as young as 8 caring for infants they didn’t know and toddlers who had relieved themselves in their clothes because they had not been put in diapers.

“I personally don’t believe these allegations,” the Customs and Border Protection official, who spoke on the condition he not be identified, told reporters.

Volunteers who began trying to deliver donated supplies to the facility in Clint starting over the weekend were originally turned away and told that outside donations would not be accepted. A CBP spokesman Tuesday followed up, telling reporters that the agency was reviewing its donations policy to see if it could legally accept any supplies from the outside — though he also disputed the idea that any needed supplies were running low.

Canales, the Democratic state representative, said his office had been contacted by more than 1,000 people in the last week who were looking for ways to help the children in Clint.

As evening approached Tuesday, activists from places including California, New York and Washington, D.C., began their demonstration.

“I’ve become increasingly aware of the enormous pipeline from Central America and all of the things that make it unlivable there,” said Heather Hadlock, a professor of musicology at Stanford University in California. ”Those things are not trivial or optional.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/us/migrant-children-border.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Children Returned to Texas Shelter That Set Off an Outcry

The transfer came just days after 249 children originally housed at the station in Clint, Texas, had been moved to other facilities to relieve overcrowding.

Children returned to Texas shelter that set off an outcry

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Arturo Rubio and Caitlin Dickerson

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Children returned to Texas shelter that set off an outcry