Rio Grande Valley, Texas

Tossed out: American border officials deported Central American children who crossed the southwestern border by themselves to Mexico, even though they may have had no family in the country, The New York Times reported last week. U.S. policy and diplomatic agreements require that most undocumented child migrants be flown back to their home countries.

But the chief of the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector acknowledged that an unspecified number of kids from countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were expelled into Mexico and placed with child welfare authorities there. One Salvadoran father who lives illegally in California said he learned from a phone call that his 15-year-old daughter had been deported to Mexico. She has since returned to America and is being held at an Arizona shelter. “I’ve been out of my mind,” he said. “This is a really, really stressful situation.”