The Witnesses

Kathleen O’Gorman noticed the teenage mother as she was wheeled into the conference room. At eight months pregnant, the 17-year-old had fled her home in Guatemala, had an emergency C-section in Mexico, and somehow made it across the southern U.S. border with a premature baby girl. Sunken-eyed, she slumped over in pain.

O’Gorman took in how thin she looked, the gray pallor of her face. The English professor had spent the past two days talking to Central American teenage mothers and their children in a sprawling border-patrol warehouse in McAllen, Tex. It was nicknamed “the icebox.” Mothers who came before O’Gorman apologetically wiped their babies’ runny noses when mucus dripped onto their already filthy onesies. In a holding facility like this one, there always seemed to be a shortage of food, clean water, and warm clothing. Sickness ran rampant.

Stains. Sallow skin. Matted hair. What O’Gorman saw and smelled translated to one thing: raw trauma. Her job was to translate this trauma into straightforward, typed-out narratives that can be used as evidence in a longstanding federal case. The rules were clear. O’Gorman, who teaches at Illinois Wesleyan University, and others were there to document, not to interfere. They told the mothers and children they weren’t their lawyers. The information they took down could be submitted to a judge, who could order enforcement if the conditions were bad enough.

The conditions O’Gorman saw were horrendous.

Scholars spend their careers in studious observation. The word “academic” has an inescapable connotation: theoretical, not consequential. But in the Trump era, chaotic politics and shocking indecencies have prompted some scholars to question whether they can simply stand by and watch.

In Texas, a cohort of scholars were there to document, but the desperation they witnessed hit parts of them that lay deeper than their academic personas. It would force them to decide: Should they act?

A fellow interpreter got O’Gorman’s attention. The gaunt Guatemalan mother was nodding off from fatigue. Her baby, wrapped in a soiled sweatshirt, was about to slide off her lap and onto the floor.

O’Gorman stood and hurried toward the child. Another rule: Volunteers were not allowed to touch anyone. But the professor scooped up the baby, barely a month old, who didn’t make a sound.

Its tiny body in her arms, O’Gorman grew certain. This child was deathly ill. Without medical attention, she thought later, the child would die.

She knew what a sick baby looked like. She’d cared for her own, years ago.

Years before that, O’Gorman was a high-school exchange student, speaking beginner Spanish in Bogotá, Colombia. She spent a weekend in a poor neighborhood, collecting donations for charity. Children offered their only centavos, O’Gorman remembered. At first, she told them no. But she learned to respect their dignity and take what they gave.

O’Gorman eventually became fluent in Spanish and kept a fondness for Latin America during her years teaching British and Irish literature at Illinois Wesleyan, a small college in Bloomington. When she got a chance, she’d teach the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Isabel Allende.

In 2018, a wave of national stories described migrant parents being forcibly separated from their children when they entered the United States without documentation, an effect of a “zero tolerance” policy that required all unauthorized migrants to be criminally prosecuted. The Obama administration had adopted harsh policies to deter migration, but the Trump administration’s approach and other changes had made conditions much more hazardous for migrants who made it to the border.

O’Gorman watched a jarring segment on MSNBC, detailing family separation. It hit her like a jolt.

About that time, she saw a call for volunteer translators put out by the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, an organization that helped litigate what’s known as the Flores settlement. The settlement and subsequent litigation established standards for the treatment of migrant children in immigration custody and limited the time they spend incarcerated. Lawyers and interpreters interview minors about what life is like while detained. Those interviews can be used to compel court action.

The application asked where O’Gorman would be willing to go. As a professor, she says, she has some freedom and flexibility. She clicked every single box.

Months later she was on a plane flying to Texas, then to New York, then back to Texas. Each dayslong trip cost O’Gorman about $2,000 in last-minute airfare, meals, and hotel rooms. It was financially irresponsible, she says, but felt morally necessary.

At the facilities, O’Gorman found she was suited for this work. Her academic training had taught her how to study characters closely, how to pay attention not just to what was being said but how, and where the silences were.

This past June, she got the call to go to “Ursula,” as the McAllen center is known, for its address along W. Ursula Ave. It’s the largest U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing and detention center in the country. A few days later, O’Gorman was on a plane.

She’d been told by the organizers that Ursula would be more severe than anything she’d seen yet.

As she settled into the conference room and faced the first interview subjects, she realized just how right the supervisors were.

Seated inside the conference room, Katherine Hagan felt a wave of shock when she surveyed Ursula’s roster. Some detained children were listed as “0” years old. Hagan, a clinical-psychology Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon, quickly grasped the reality: Babies were being locked up.

Then Hagan heard how long they’d been detained. Under U.S. law, minors are supposed to stay in border-patrol stations for 72 hours at most. At Ursula, that limit was frequently flouted. Her first day there, Hagan translated the responses of a teenage mother who had been detained for 20 days.

For hours, Hagan and O’Gorman spoke with teenage mothers and children who, O’Gorman says, were enduring techniques that torturers use: freezing-cold cells, lights on all night, sleeping on hard surfaces under reflective blankets.

With not enough food to eat, some mothers could not produce enough breast milk to feed their hungry babies, they told the interpreters. Diarrhea flooded diapers. A stench followed unwashed bodies. Most everyone was desperate. As Hagan translated, she felt a growing sense of horror. O’Gorman got angrier.

O’Gorman met a young mother who was made to sleep on the ground with her 8-month-old, adding that a guard said her baby “did not have the face” of a sick child. The mother was angry not just on her own and her daughter’s behalf, but on everyone else’s. O’Gorman understood that feeling.

“I remember thinking, Hold on to that anger,” O’Gorman said. “That’s going to serve you well.”

It was while talking to that mother that O’Gorman spotted the 17-year-old Guatemalan and her premature baby girl. Cradling the dark-haired newborn, the professor felt the baby’s hands, which were cold. Her eyes were glassy and distant.

It was just like holding Anah.

Thirty years earlier, O’Gorman and her then-husband had traveled to Paraguay to meet their adoptive daughter, a 4-month-old, eight-pound baby with cracked, bleeding feet and scabies. Back in the States, they’d learned that Anah’s heart was like a worm-eaten apple, riddled with holes.

She needed a pulmonary-artery band immediately, O’Gorman was told, and open-heart surgery in a few years’ time. Pacing hospital hallways in tears, wondering if her daughter was going to die, O’Gorman realized it wouldn’t do anyone any good if she fell apart. “I had to be there to advocate for my child,” she said. And she did.

When Anah had been pricked for blood one too many times, O’Gorman got angry. She demanded to see the head of pediatric cardiology. She refused to let anyone touch her child until she did.

He appeared, trailed by underlings. “You are torturing this child,” O’Gorman told the man, “and you can’t do that.”

In McAllen, O’Gorman, Hagan, and the other volunteers would debrief and try to unwind, either over dinner or back at the Cambria Hotel, where some of them stayed. During breakfast, they kept their conversations low. Border Patrol agents were staying at the hotel, too.

If O’Gorman viewed the trip through a personal lens, informed by a sense of moral obligation, then Hagan saw it through a psychological lens, informed by her fields of study.

Hagan is fascinated with childhood attachment. For her research, she’d watched dozens of videos of an experiment called the Strange Situation, where a caregiver leaves her baby with a stranger for just minutes, and the baby reacts in distress. So when she saw news reports of family separation, she felt concerned about the consequences. She applied to be a translator. When she got picked for the trip to McAllen, she put about $1,900 in travel expenses on her credit card and filled out a grant application in an airport terminal.

Hagan reacted to the horrors of Ursula by doing what scholars do: observation and inquiry. She overheard a guard say that he would never put his children through this, implying that the Central American parents were to blame for what their children endured. The “just world” phenomenon, Hagan thought to herself, the tendency to insist that the world is fair, especially in the face of abject cruelty.

The trauma to the children would last long after they left this place, Hagan was sure. She knew the science. Intense stress can disrupt the architecture of developing brains. Early-childhood adversity becomes embedded in our bodies, and it lingers.

She, O’Gorman, and the other volunteers looked for ways to make a difference on the margins. When they asked the guards for things, they got them. So they started requesting whatever they could: more food, a shower, fresh diapers, a clean onesie. Getting soothing cream for a baby wasn’t life-changing. But it wasn’t nothing.

Days after leaving McAllen, Hagan, O’Gorman, and a new cohort of lawyers and translators walked into a border-patrol station on the main drag of Clint, Tex., that was designed to hold about 100 men for a few hours.

Instead, when they arrived, it held 351 children — many of whom had been there for days, if not weeks.

The sheer number made Warren Binford’s jaw drop. Binford, a law professor at Willamette University, had been to Cambodia and researched children who were forced to staff a torture prison. She had visited the former Yugoslavia, engulfed in war, to examine how land mines altered the lives of children.

A few years ago, Binford was approached to conduct interviews inside an immigration facility in Dilley, Tex. After one trip, Binford was committed. In the United States, she never expected to witness the “rampant violation” of children’s rights that she saw, and has continued to see during interviews over the last three years, she said.

Clint was the absolute worst of it. Not enough food. A lice outbreak. Flu-quarantine cells. Older children slept with younger children on top of them, so the little ones would not feel the cold concrete against their skin.

One girl’s hair was terribly matted. Binford urged a guard to shampoo and condition it, and bathe the girl. When the professor returned the next day, she saw that the girl hadn’t been washed at all.

Driving the circumference of the compound, the inspectors discovered a flimsy metal warehouse. Children appeared to be sleeping there for lack of space.

Even after Ursula, O’Gorman was appalled by what she saw. There, many children had at least been with their mothers. In Clint, many of them were alone, terrified, being cared for by no one.

In interviews, some of the children were totally silent, even as the adults blew bubbles, trying to coax them to play. As bubbles danced in the air around them, the children just sat.

“That,” O’Gorman said, “felt very familiar to me.”

It felt like when Anah was 3 years old. She’d undergone open-heart surgery, but during her recovery had been diagnosed with “intensive-care syndrome.” In short, she’d been cooped up in a sterile bed where painful things were done to her. She retreated, refusing to do what children do: play.

O’Gorman and Anah’s father did what they could. She still remembers, and still has, the first toy that Anah played with during that period: a circle of bells and a mallet. Hearing their tinkling sound felt like salvation.

In Clint, sitting near silent children, O’Gorman longed to hear that tinkling of bells, longed to see the clouds part from their faces. They’ve been brutalized, O’Gorman said, and at least in the moment, they were unreachable.

In these children, O’Gorman saw her own daughter. Hagan saw a future of psychological trauma manifested in bodies. Binford saw a violation of principles she’d dedicated her career to upholding. They all came to the same conclusion:

Children could die in the hands of the U.S. government. They had to do something, quick.

After the second day at Clint, some of the volunteers thought about going public. National attention could result in swifter protection for these children.

But they were bound by nondisclosure agreements with the nonprofit litigating the Flores case. To their knowledge, in the history of the case, people were rarely, if ever, released from those agreements. Going public could jeopardize the very oversight they’d been asked to perform — one of the migrants’ major sources of protection.

But people were dying already. Seven children were known to have died in federal immigration custody or shortly after being released during the previous year. That was after nearly a decade of no reported deaths, according to an immigration expert.

So Binford and others decided to act. They called the lawyers litigating Flores infractions and described what they saw. With their permission, Binford said, she and another lawyer who visited Clint met a reporter from the Associated Press in Binford’s hotel room. For more than three hours, she and her colleague described the layout of the facility, the quarantine cell, the children who’d gone weeks without bathing or a change of clothes. The reporter scribbled through an entire notebook, Binford recalled.

When Binford saw the story the next day, her heart sank. It was short, with a headline that focused on the lawyers — not very eye-catching, Binford remembered. She thought they had lost their shot.

But then the reporter called Binford, said the story was gaining traction, and he doubled its length. Then he called again and said the story was going viral. He asked for an on-camera interview, so Binford rushed to the airport lobby to film it right before her flight took off. By the time she landed, the news was everywhere. She and other lawyers were flooded with media requests.

With headlines came Congressional attention. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic lawmakers toured the Clint facility and another in El Paso. Elora Mukherjee, a Columbia law professor who directs the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic there, testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee that she had never “witnessed, heard of, or smelled such degradation.” (In an email, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman said that the agency’s leadership has “consistently sounded the alarm about the ongoing humanitarian crisis” and its impact on their facilities. Since the inspectors’ visit to Clint, he noted, “many changes and improvements” have been made, including hot-meal delivery, on-site medical professionals, and a greatly reduced population of children.)

The inspectors who visited the McAllen center identified five babies who needed immediate hospitalization, and were subsequently admitted to the neonatal intensive-care unit of a local hospital. In Clint, Mukherjee met a 6-year-old with no relatives with her who just said, “I’m scared,” over and over.

“I have never before met with anyone — adult or child — who could only repeat that they were afraid,” Mukherjee told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

And all this was avoidable, she said. The denial of basic hygienic measures is a cruel policy choice, she said, with cruel consequences that the government has defended.

Across disciplines, some scholars and scholarly organizations have followed the lead of academics like Binford — speaking out in defense of the children who are facing those consequences.

In September, experts traveled to Washington to share with lawmakers and their staff members the research on how the stress of family separation and detention damages children. One of those scholars is Jack P. Shonkoff. As a professor of child health and development at Harvard University, Shonkoff knows the scholarship intimately.

“People always ask, could you explain the science to us? I always feel like I have to start with, ‘Sure. I’ll be glad to.’ But this is not a scientific challenge,” he told The Chronicle. “This is a humanitarian crisis.”

“As a human being,” he said, “it’s making me crazy.”

It wasn’t O’Gorman’s academic expertise that brought her to Ursula and to Clint. It was a knot of outrage and her deep sympathy for vulnerable children. What she saw there has only deepened her resolve. To this day, she’s conducting more visits. She must continue to bear witness.

The act of bearing witness hasn’t brought about much visible change. Children were shuttled from Clint immediately after the volunteers went public. But soon after, some were returned, The Texas Tribune reported. A federal judge ordered a mediator to quickly improve health and sanitation in McAllen and in Clint, but information about any changes has been slow to reach the public. (In October, Kevin McAleenan, then the acting secretary of homeland security, planned to tell an audience at Georgetown University that the “very difficult humanitarian conditions” experienced in border facilities earlier this year have been alleviated. Before he could begin his speech in earnest, protesters shouted him off stage)

Meanwhile, untold harm has been wrought. The public decried the conditions, believing them to be unacceptable. Then time passed, and we, at least tacitly, accepted it. Outrage fatigue has left us winded.

O’Gorman worries constantly. She worries about whether the children she’s met are safe, whether they can go outside, if the people they meet are being kind. A child told her he crossed the border “by the light of the moon.” She wonders if he can see the moon now, and how it makes him feel.

She worries about the children’s isolation. Their confusion. Their fear. She wonders how that pain will manifest, and if it will ever become a small part of much fuller lives.

Right now, any healing can seem so far away. But O’Gorman has a little hope. She knows what happened with Anah.

Today, Anah Jacob is a 30-year-old schoolteacher who works with underserved children. It was Anah who sent her mother the call for volunteers, an opening to help people facing more dire circumstances than either could imagine. They both signed up, and Anah embraced the chance to translate, for her first time, alongside O’Gorman in McAllen. To intervene in the lives of children who would someday become adults and carry with them, in their brains and bodies, all that they’d seen and thought and felt.

In the same conference room where O’Gorman rushed to hold the baby, she watched her daughter be light in the darkest of circumstances. Anah chased a young boy around the room as he laughed. She dragged him back and forth in a cardboard box that became, in her hands, a choo-choo train.

For the trip, Anah brought a notebook and erasable colored pens. Children, she knew, tend to draw what’s happening in their lives, which can crack a door to what they’re feeling.

After Anah was hospitalized, all she remembers drawing were hearts with objects stabbed through. At a table in McAllen, she watched a young girl write the names of the relatives she’d traveled with in loopy script.