Months ago, a team of volunteer lawyers were granted access for a few days to speak with the children inside the green-tarped fences of Homestead prison for migrant children. These attorneys were allowed in under the authority of a ruling that took place more than 20 years ago, a ruling that set some guidelines for how such children in the custody of our country need to be treated to minimize the damage that can be done in an institutional setting to vulnerable charges.

And this team went inside, driven on golf carts each day for nearly a week, from the old Job Corp building marked Career Center into both sides of the prison camp, one side where children aged 11-16 (although we now learn that there was one at least as young as 8 years) and also the other side of the prison camp, the where nearly half the children were held, and still are, the 17-year olds, the children on the edge of an adulthood that threatened them with solitary confinement while waiting for shackled transport to adult facilities in Broward or Krome.

Witnesses were there, and we watched as leader Hope Frye and her team of volunteers began each day with some sort of consultation with the prison camp’s assistant director, a man we see scooting about all day in his cart, his face impassive, and then set off to ask the questions and hear the answers that we finally heard about yesterday. The answers that have stunned us, even those of us who knew a sense of horror and had committed so much of our lives to witness and protest.

From confinement in spaces known as Hielera and Perrera (refrigerator and dog kennel), in the Texas borderlands, these children tell a story of a place where isolation, brutal regulation, and overlong stays, where tears and self-harm are regular features. The details are harrowing.

This place, that has been characterized to us by either deluded or deceptive people as a 5-star hotel or a summer camp, enforces its brutally regimented routine with threats of extensions of confinement and deportation. Children isolated by their language sit quiet and sunk in depression, alone. Girls have their pens and pencils taken so that they cannot cut themselves in the dark of their teeming dormitories. Children force feed themselves to follow the rule that requires the plate to be empty, under those threats.

Read it for yourselves. The details are published here on this page. I can’t begin to list all the horror we learned.

I am grateful for the work of the inspectors, of the suit they bring to end this brutal regime, the one that earns the very makers of the policy that led to this atrocity big money, very big money, in this concentration camp for children set up near the steamy Everglades of South Florida. But the wheels of justice turn slowly, and meantime the forces of cruelty and greed are grinding, and children, in the dark of night, and in the many nooks and crannies of this house of horrors, weep and despair, and die a little.