President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy drew sharp rebukes after it was announced in April 2018 — especially after children who had been separated from their parents started being placed in a tent city in Tornillo. Trump signed an executive order June 20 that would keep immigrant families together, but it’s unclear how — or if — families that have already been separated will be reunited. With support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Texas Tribune has been reporting on the issue from the Texas-Mexico border, Washington, D.C., and Austin. You can help by sending story tips to tips@texastribune.org.More in this series

The youngest children separated from their parents at the border — some of them infants — are housed in three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, with a fourth planned for Houston, according to the Associated Press.

Doctors and lawyers who visited the facilities described them as clean and safe. Still, the children housed there were crying hysterically, reports said. The three centers, in Combes, Raymondville and Brownsville, have been quickly repurposed to serve the needs of children younger than five years. The shelters are “specialized facilities” with “very well-trained clinicians,” Steven Wagner, an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told the AP.

A new Trump administration policy of “zero tolerance” has led to the separation of more than 2,300 children from their parents, who are uniformly prosecuted for the federal misdemeanor crime of crossing the border illegally. Because children can’t be sent to jails along with their parents, they are instead housed in shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services. 

Lawmakers who toured the HHS facilities described seeing children as young as 8 months old. 

At a Brownsville roundtable on Monday, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, said “conditions are spartan” at Casa El Presidente, one shelter. 

The infants “were being taken care of by good people, but there was no determination as to when they might be reunited with their natural relatives,” said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston.

“We will continue to raise our voices to stop patent, overt and definitive child abuse and we believe that we are going to be successful with ending this kind of treatment of our children — not by those who are taking care of the children but by the zero-tolerance policy,” Jackson Lee said.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and other local officials have made it clear they do not want the fourth facility in their city. Turner said at a press conference Tuesday he does not want to be an “enabler.”

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Emma Platoff was a reporter at the Tribune from 2017 to 2021, most recently covering the law and its intersection with politics. A graduate of Yale University, Emma is the former managing editor of the...