Heart of Clay

In President Obama's 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father, one passage describes a day when he is still a kid in Indonesia, walking down a road with his Indonesian stepfather.

His stepfather asks him how much money he has in his pocket. Then the stepfather asks how many beggars he sees ahead in the road.

The stepfather's point is plain: If Barak, the soft-hearted boy, gives money to every beggar he comes upon, then he will give away all of this money every time he walks down the road. Like greed, the stepfather teaches, charity, too, must have limits.

Two weeks ago we published a collection of reports, called "The Surge," painting word portraits of the children who are flooding across the Texas border, most of them from Central America. The scenes in the stories are heart-rending, from parents who must send their children off alone to save their lives to the icy wall of bureaucratic resistance the children confront once they cross the border.

Absolute right and absolute wrong are hard to find in the border children issue. It's not fair to paint people fighting for border control as unfeeling fiends, nor is it fair to paint the people whose arms are open to children in need as profligate fools. But I do find myself wondering about a more inner, less political aspect: Why do some people look at the kids at the border and feel an immediate pang of empathy, maybe even a painful one, and other people not so much, not so quickly?

It occurred to me that we have a pretty good example of the immediate pang of empathy response here in Dallas County in the person of County Judge Clay Jenkins, the elected president of the county commission.

When the surge of children became big news in June and July, Jenkins traveled to the border and then quickly announced he was leading an effort to provide emergency housing here for thousands of children. Later, when the surge of child immigrants slowed, the need for housing here went away, and those plans are off the table — at least until the surge returns.

I wondered what Jenkins saw at the border. How did it affect him? Someone in his position may make a million political calculations, but was there a deeper more personal factor? We met a few weeks ago, and I asked what he saw when he went to McAllen last July.

He said he found the children in McAllen were not being held in a facility like the one that had been shown widely on TV.

"The ones you see on television are mostly the chain-link type. That's Nogales, Arizona," he said. The children in McAllen, instead, were in "kind of like drunk tank holding facilities.

"If you have ever been into a jail where they have a drunk tank, what you've got is an observation pod in the center, a glass pod, and then coming around that pod you've got tanks that face the pod.

"They would separate them. You've got a 14-year-old girl, and she is bringing over her 11-year-old sister and her 8-year-old brother. They have traveled 1,000 miles. Statistically they've got a 50-50 shot at being sexually assaulted if they're young girls, a little less if they are boys, and that's just reported assault. We know that sexual assault is one of the least reported crimes that there is. So they've been through a lot together."

The children, he said, had been instructed by their parents or by the smuggler who helped them across the border to surrender themselves immediately to Border Patrol or other uniformed authorities, in the certainty that the uniformed adults would take them to shelter.

"They get here, and they find that man in the green uniform. They give him their scrap of paper or the phone number of an uncle they've got written on their belt. They're taken to this holding facility.

"Little boys go over here, little girls over there, other little girl over here, because you separate them by age and sex. If you've got a 6- and a 7-year-old, they might be in the same place, or if you've got a 16-year-old carrying a 1-year-old, if they're under 3 they stay with their older sibling. Otherwise they're separated into these holding cells.

"You might have 30 little boys in this holding cell. The cell, if you've ever been in the drunk tank, you can think back to your college days, it's a cinderblock room. On one wall is a concrete bench for people to sit on. In the corner is a stainless steel toilet with no privacy whatsoever.

"Think about it. The reason for that is that it's an observation tank. You've got a group of people being held there, and you want to make sure that guy isn't fighting with that guy, that guy doesn't go into the bathroom and slit his wrist or hang himself. So you have a situation where kids were eating and going to the restroom all in the same place.

"Plus, in a detention facility you don't have showers. You have children who were supposed to be there not more than three days, and they're in there for nine days. They're given limited cleanliness, very little exercise.