It has been a challenging week.

The administration has intensified its punishing behavior toward migrant children. The suspension of funds for recreation, education and legal services—services that were already only tokens and laughably thin but for the short time outside in the soccer field—is a painful escalation of the proxy war on migrants being waged against the hapless children who languish, in prison. And we watch, over the green-tarped fences of Homestead prison camp.

And so we watch for signs of change for the worse. We watch, trying to see whether this new blow will fall. Whether soccer balls will no longer fly, kicked and headed toward the nets set up on the heat-scorched and dusty fields. Whether the children will be led single file to have their IDs scanned as they go to their cavernous tent classrooms for the sessions of din-filled, barely heard “education.”

And how can it be a mere coincidence that the government announced new camps to open, on military bases and in the oil fields of Texas? All to handle what they call an influx crisis, but what is really the direct result of long, punishing sentences for innocent children who bear the brunt of the draconian belief that the worse we make it for them, the less likely migrants will come to our land with hope.

Hope is what they want to destroy. And we are watching, witnessing, as they step up their war against it. We watched busloads arrive yesterday, their heads silhouetted against the tinted glass.

It has been a challenging week.