By Susan Ferriss,

Replay video: Project Lifeline hosted a panel and community discussion and interactive event, "Immigrant Children, Detention Without End?" on Friday, Sept. 28, in the Student Engagement Ballroom at the University of the Incarnate Word. Each year, as many as 90,000 immigrant children spend time in U.S. detention centers. Those who monitor the conditions say the children often are kept for months at a time in unsanitary conditions without proper medical care and are denied food and clean water. Recent proposals could make their stay in detention indefinite.

“It was painful how hungry we were.” “I begged for water for my daughter but the officials wouldn’t give her any.” “The temperature was extremely cold. Children were crying all the time. Human heat was not enough to warm the babies.” Each year in U.S. immigration detention facilities, 90,000 children are systematically deprived of food, water and basic medical care, and exposed to extreme temperatures and unsanitary conditions.

By Isaac Stanley-Becker, The Washington Post A federal judge in San Diego on Tuesday barred the separation of migrant children from their parents and ordered immigration officials to reunify within 30 days families that have been divided as a result of a zero-tolerance policy enforced by the Trump administration until last week. Judge Dana Sabraw of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California granted a preliminary injunction sought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

To see and feel the anguish of a Syrian child refugee, look no further than the Portraits of Compassion exhibit on the walls of the banquet hall at San Antonio’s Trinity Baptist Church, on view until the end of April 2018. The painting, titled “...the least of these...,” is a hauntingly poignant portrait of a Syrian child. His eyes beseech us, in their sad determined gaze, to seek our humanity, wondering what went wrong.