1. United States
2. S.C.
3. Letter

This week, the beloved children's educator Ms. Rachel arrived at the Capitol in her signature pink, wheeling a suitcase packed with 535 packets of letters and drawings from children held in ICE custody at the nation's largest concentration camp for children in Dilley, Texas. She had one packet for every member of Congress. "I cry a lot," a 7-year-old boy wrote in one of them. "I want to get out of here." Ms. Rachel spent two days going office to office urging lawmakers to end family detention and reunite children separated from their parents. She told you about the kids she's come to know over months of video calls with detained families. - Deiver, the 9-year-old who just wanted to compete in his state spelling bee Amalia, the 18-month-old who suffered a near-fatal health crisis in custody Guri, a 12-year-old detained with his family since February who has suffered from blood in his stool for months without ever being referred to a specialist "This is not a partisan issue," Ms. Rachel maintains. "We will all look back on this time and remember if we stood with children being abused in detention centers." As she was leaving the Senate office buildings on Tuesday evening, the news broke that the House had just passed, in a virtually party-line 214-212 vote, a $70 billion package to fund Trump's mass detention and deportation campaign through the end of his term -- including $38 billion for ICE alone. The money will fuel a vast expansion of the detention system, which has already swelled to a record 70,000 people and is on track to exceed 100,000 beds, some of them in facilities designated to hold families and children like the ones whose letters she carried. That evening, Ms. Rachel sat quietly on the Capitol steps, taking in the weight of the vote. She then recorded a message for the children whose words she carried. "I have your words right here. I'm always going to stand with you." She has heard the criticism that a children's entertainer should stay out of politics, and her answer has always been simple: "I am political. It’s political to believe that children are worthy of love and care, and that every child is equal, and that our care shouldn’t stop at what we look like, our family, at our religion, at a border." (Ms. Rachel has drawn a direct line to her hero Mr. Rogers, who faced the same accusation of being political in his day.) The next morning, she came back to meet with more lawmakers and make sure every one of the 535 packets was delivered. "I'll never stop trying, for them," she said. "I can't say, 'I'm just one person, so I'm not going to make a difference.' What if everyone said that?"