The Children’s Defense Fund is part of the National Coalition to End Family and Child Detention, a network of dozens of organizations first convened in San Antonio to connect what is happening on the ground in Texas with advocacy at the national level.

“The horror that we are seeing right now is happening on such a shocking scale. There’s no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse,” she added.

And yet, the psychological toll of detention persists. “He’s not the same boy he was before,” Ramos’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told Minnesota Public Radio. “He can’t sleep well at night. He wakes up three or four times a night screaming: ‘Daddy, Daddy.’”

“What we are putting these families through is going to affect the entire planet for generations to come. I really have no doubt about that,” Walter said. “We’ve got to stop this trauma and cruelty and death dealing as soon as we possibly can.”