When I can’t concentrate on Caroline’s letters any longer, I read Twitter instead, swiping, tapping, swiping. In the US, the children of asylum seekers are being taken from their parents at the border. There are photographs on social media of minibuses fitted with rows of baby-carriers for transporting infants to ‘tender age’ shelters. There is shaky hand-held footage and anonymous testimony. Children led away from their parents to be bathed, never to come back. Breastfeeding babies pulled from their mothers’ arms. Sobbing toddlers clinging. A newsreader breaks down on live TV, unable to read the autocue. The US president rants on Twitter, self-righteous, or affecting outrage. I think of George Norton, suspicious, capricious, belligerent, ploddingly unintelligent, an ungovernable child. Foaming and stamping and rambling from one accusation to another, so that it was impossible to make out, wrote a clergyman attempting to mediate, what he wanted, or whom he meant to attack.

Laura Barrera, an attorney at the UNLV Immigration Clinic in Las Vegas, Nevada, tweeting from Paradise, NV.

@abogada_laura

5:55 PM – 28 Jun 2018

My 5-yr-old client can’t tell me what country

she is from. We prepare her case by 95

drawing pictures with crayons of the gang

members that would wait outside her school.

Sometimes she wants to draw ice cream

cones and hearts instead. She is in

deportation proceedings alone.

I read and read the stories online, unable to look away. A six-year-old who is blind, and her non-verbal four-year-old brother, non-verbal in part because he’s traumatised. An attorney quoted on the BBC: ‘Even a five-year-old who wasn’t traumatised can’t always tell you their address or what their parents look like or their last names. How do you expect a child to do all that? This is not something that the kids or their parents will ever get over.’

They do the scans; in a darkened room they do a biopsy. The results will be back within seven to ten days; the receptionist makes an appointment for exactly two weeks’ time for me to come back and speak with the specialist. Back home, I quiz my not-yet four-year-old son: What’s your full name? What’s mine and Daddy’s? What’s our address? Half of the time, he gets most of it almost right.