Earlier this month, a Texas reporter released photos he had taken of immigrants — many of them children — being warehoused along the border in crowded, windowless, cement cells. The photos depict these temporary detention centers as the worst of what we might imagine of prison cells — no where but the cold hard ground to sit on, if there is even enough space to sit among all the other bodies around you.

Presente.org has started a petition — which you should sign — demanding that the Obama administration grant asylum and legal representation to children being held in these detention centers. The fact that even children are being held in what look like dog kennels is terrifying, and is a testament ...