Do not misbehave. Do not sit on the floor. Do not share your food. Do not use nicknames. Also, it is best not to cry. Doing so might hurt your case.
Lights out by 9 p.m. and lights on at dawn, after which you make your bed according to the step-by-step instructions posted on the wall. Wash and mop the bathroom, scrubbing the sinks and toilets. Then it is time to form a line for the walk to breakfast.
"You had to get in line for everything," recalled Leticia, a girl from Guatemala.
Small, slight and with long black hair, Leticia was separated from her mother after they illegally crossed the border in late May. She was sent to a shelter in south Texas -- one of more than 100 government-contracted detention facilities for migrant children around the country that are a blend of boarding school, day care center and medium-security lockup. They are reserved for the likes of Leticia, 12, and her brother, Walter, 10.
The facility's list of no-no's also included this: Do not touch another child, even if that child is your hermanito or hermanita -- your little brother or sister.
Leticia had hoped to give her little brother a reassuring hug. But "they told me I couldn't touch him," she recalled.
In response to an international outcry, President Donald Trump recently issued an executive order to end his administration's practice, first widely put into effect in May, of forcibly removing children from parents who had entered the country illegally. Under that "zero-tolerance" policy for border enforcement, thousands of children were sent to holding facilities, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles from where their parents were being held for criminal prosecution.
The government has returned more than half of the 103 children under the age of 5 to their parents.
But more than 2,800 children -- some of them separated from their parents, some of them classified at the border as "unaccompanied minors" -- remain in these facilities, where the environments range from impersonally austere to nearly bucolic, save for the fact that the children are formidably discouraged from leaving and their parents or guardians are nowhere in sight.
Depending on several variables, including happenstance, a child might be sent to a 33-acre youth shelter in Yonkers, N.Y., that features picnic tables, sports fields and even an outdoor pool. "Like summer camp," said Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., who recently visited the campus.
Or that child could wind up at a converted motel along a tired Tucson, Ariz., strip of discount stores, gas stations and budget motels.
Still, some elements of these detention centers seem universally shared, whether they are in northern Illinois or south Texas. The multiple rules. The wake-up calls and the lights-out calls. The several hours of schooling every day, which might include a civics class in American history and laws, though not necessarily the ones that led to their incarceration.
Leticia wrote letters from the shelter in south Texas to her mother, who was being held in Arizona, to tell her how much she missed her. She would quickly write these notes after she had finished her math worksheets, she said, so as not to violate yet another rule: No writing in your dorm room. No mail.
She kept the letters safe in a folder for the day when she and her mother would be reunited, though that still hasn't happened.
Diego Magalhaes, a Brazilian boy with a mop of curly brown hair, spent 43 days in a Chicago facility after being separated from his mother, Sirley Paixao, when they crossed the border in late May. He did not cry, just as he had promised her when they parted. He was proud of this. He is 10.
He spent the first night on the floor of a processing center with other children, then boarded an airplane the next day. "I thought they were taking me to see my mother," he said.
He was wrong.
Once in Chicago, he was handed new clothes that he likened to a uniform: shirts, two pairs of shorts, a sweatsuit, boxers, and some items for hygiene. He was then assigned to a room with three other boys, including Diogo, 9, and Leonardo, 10, both from Brazil.
The three became fast friends, going to class together, playing lots of soccer and earning "big brother" status for being good role models for younger children. They were rewarded the privilege of playing video games.
There were rules. You couldn't touch others. You couldn't run. You had to wake up at 6:30 on weekdays, with the staff making banging noises until you got out of bed.
"You had to clean the bathroom," Diego said.
Diego and the 15 other boys in their unit ate together. They had rice and beans, salami, some vegetables, the occasional pizza, and sometimes cake and ice cream. The burritos, he said, were bad.
Diego managed to stay calm, in part because he had promised his mother he would. Last week, a federal judge in Chicago ordered that Diego be reunited with his family. Before he left, he made time to say goodbye to Leonardo.
"We said 'Ciao, good luck," Diego recalled. "Have a good life."
But because of the rules, the two boys did not hug.
The kids are just kids. That is what it comes down to, according to an employee at Casa Padre, a shelter for 1,500 migrant boys that inhabits a former Walmart Supercenter in Brownsville, Texas, close to the Mexican border. Just kids, all being held in the custody of the U.S. government.
Take the mooing, for example. The walls that separate the sleeping quarters do not reach the high ceilings, which means that sounds travel in the yawning spaces within the 250,000-square-foot building. One boy will make a loud animal noise, after which another will emit an animal-like response.
[U.S. immigration: Data visualization of selected immigration statistics, U.S. border map]
"Someone will start mooing," the employee said. "They just think it's funny. They just do it long enough so everyone can hear, and then we all start laughing."
A Section on 07/15/2018