Last week, Shahid Buttar, a 45-year-old San Francisco attorney, visited San Diego to investigate human rights violations at the Mexican border — abuses in which, he says, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “has been complicit.” He was shaken by what he saw. “There’s a lottery every day where three people from the hundreds or thousands who are waiting will get a chance to seek asylum, as they are entitled to by a matter of right,” he says.

To understand why Buttar is launching a primary challenge against Pelosi, consider a few other recent stories from the US-Mexico border: a teenage mother at a detention center who begged the guards for something in which to wrap her shivering infant was handed a dirty towel; a twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t sleep from hunger pangs was too scared to ask the guards for more food; a baby was forced to sleep on a cold floor. Child welfare visits across Texas Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) facilities paint a grim picture of life in immigrant detention. Children in CBP custody face extreme hunger, medical neglect, and outright hostility from the guards.

These are the conditions that Pelosi and 129 House Democrats voted to support in a recently passed, $4.6 billion border aid package containing virtually no protections for immigrant children detained by the Trump administration.