Can you describe, Jacob Soboroff, your first
visit inside one of these detention jails,
the children that you saw, 
and how this changed your life?
I’ll never forget it, Amy, for the rest
of my life.
June 13th, 2018, Brownsville, Texas.
I walked into a former Walmart, now called
Casa Padre, ostensibly a shelter, and it was
250,000 square feet.
There were approximately 1,500 migrant boys
detained inside for approximately 22 hours a day.
And hundreds of them, maybe as many as 400,
had been there only because they were systematically
separated from their parents 
by the Trump administration.
The facility was literally on the verge of
overflowing.
It had a variance from the state of Texas
to have five beds per room
instead of four beds per room.
I walked around this facility on a tour with
other journalists and officials from the government
and from the shelter system itself.
We saw children watching films, Moana, the
Disney movie, in the loading dock of the former
Walmart in line for chow.
You know, I’ve been inside a prison.
I’ve been inside several county jails.
And I said at the time, and I maintain today,
that the place was called a shelter, but,
effectively, they were incarcerated.
And one of the things that was startling to
me is that one of the officials — and I
write about this in the book, the portion
where we take the tour of this facility — said
to me, “You know, smile at the children.
They feel like they’re animals in cages
being looked at.”
And ironically, that wasn’t the facility
where I saw the cages.
It was just days later, on Father’s Day
2018, at the McAllen Border Patrol processing
station — Ursula, it’s known as — that
I saw what Katie Waldman, Katie Miller, at
the time told me was the epicenter of the
policy: children in cages, sitting on concrete
floors, under Mylar blankets, supervised by
security contractors in a watchtower.
And every time I recall this, 
it makes me sick, what I saw.
Border Patrol agents, who admitted to me they
were stressed and strained and struggling,
they were not licensed social workers.
They could not touch the children.
There were only four social workers in the
facility for all of the children that were
separated by the Trump administration.
It was a disaster.
It was a — you know, we said this at the
time; it’s still true today.
It was a man-made disaster by the Trump administration,
that was, according to one official from the
government, “the greatest human rights catastrophe
of my lifetime,” were the words that that
government official used.
They called Scott Lloyd — this same official
— “the most prolific child abuser in American
history” for allowing this to happen to
the thousands of children in his custody.
He was the custodian of all of these children,
the unaccompanied children
within the federal government.
