“Well, we have an orchestra here. What’s missing is a conductor.” Yesterday, we got sound from the border as ProPublica released audio of kids just separated from their parents (as a border patrol agent jokes about their crying), and we got an image of a sobbing toddler watching her mother get searched. These were just two elements that pushed America’s border policy shame to front pages and the front of our collective mind. Alexis Madrigal with an interesting look at how the many-chambered heart of the internet turned the Trump administration’s family-separation policy into a different kind of scandal. “The main reason that this story has received so much attention is simple: It is awful … But in today’s splintered and strange media environment, the more difficult question to answer is how so many people did end up seeing these images and hearing these stories. After all, this may now be the most notorious injustice at the American border, but it’s not the first.”

+ One American not moved by sobbing children separated from their parents as they flee political violence and the ravages of the drug war: Donald Trump (Maybe we do have a conductor, after all…). “Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13.” (Something has infested our country, that’s for sure.)

+ “If the crisis being described is a historically high number of immigrants caught at the border, then there isn’t one, according to DHS statistics for recent years. Those numbers show a steady decline in border apprehensions over the past two decades.” Buzzfeed on a major aspect of this story that keeps getting lost in the shuffle: There’s not a crisis at the border. The reasons for the crackdown are made up.

+ The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer: The government has no plan for reuniting the immigrant families it is tearing apart.

+ Vox with a visual explainer of the separation policy.

+ Will the administration back down? Actually, they might ratchet things up.