Members of the U.S. Coast Guard are deployed to carry out a very important mission at the U.S. border with Mexico and images from the front lines show they’re giving it their all, even if they have no clue what they’re doing.

KGBT reporter Sydney Hernandez posted a picture to Twitter on Friday of two Coast Guard officers on duty at the McAllen processing center in Texas, and it’s clear they’re in over their heads.

“#BORDERNEWS As multiple agencies have been sent to help Border Patrol with the increase in immigrants crossing, they are given different assignments,” Hernandez posted. “This exclusive picture was taken in McAllen at a processing center showing members of the U.S. Coast Guard taking care of babies.”

The image shows two toddlers in an office with two Coast Guard soldiers attempting to keep them busy. One of the soldiers, a married man with a penchant for tattoos, cradled one of the children on his lap as he played with a small toy, while the other looked through a book with 100 origami designs as the second child pulled purple paper from the desk drawer.

The office was otherwise fairly sparse, with what appeared to be a mat, a doll, and another toy to occupy the youngsters. The picture shows the group dined on potato chips and Starbucks, though there was also plenty of water on hand.

The Los Angeles Times detailed a similar scene in McAllen on Thursday:

In a cavernous former warehouse, three toddlers played with uniformed U.S. Coast Guardsmen, tossing colored rings and fitting blocks into a box next to playpens as Border Patrol agents looked on.

The guardsmen are among hundreds of extra federal employees deployed to the Border Patrol migrant holding area that has been overwhelmed in recent months by thousands of migrant families, many with small children.

In a nearby hallway, an infant slept intertwined with a woman on a mat spread across the cement floor. In one of the chain link-fenced cells that earned the facility its nickname – the doghouse – a man clutched a baby to his chest.

The reports stem from a media tour through the facility on Thursday, following reports children in custody were filthy, tired, scared and uncomfortable – a traumatizing end to a dangerous and recklessly irresponsible journey initiated by their parents.

Agents in the Rio Grande Valley are catching 1,500 illegal immigrants per day, but only have facilities to house about 7,600. It’s the same situation in every sector on the southeast border, where a total of 144,000 illegal immigrants crossed into the U.S. in the last month alone. The total for fiscal year 2019 is about 600,000 – roughly the population of Denver – and it’s projected to easily eclipse 1 million before the year’s end.

In McAllen, a facility built for 1,500 houses 1,900, including 400 children sent to the border by themselves, Carmen Qualia, executive officer there, told the Times.

“This is ground zero,” she said. “This is way more than we ever anticipated.”

President Trump has used virtually every available option at his disposal to send support, from directing military personnel and other federal employees to help out to an executive order to use military funding to build a wall and beef up security.

He’s also played hardball with Mexico by threatening steep tariffs on all imports if officials below the border don’t do more to fix the situation, a threat that resulted in promising measures to curb the massive migration, including the deployment of thousands of Mexican National Guard soldiers to seal off the country’s border with Guatemala.

But Democrats in Congress continue to block more comprehensive solutions, while also decrying border facilities as “concentration camps” designed to make migrants miserable. Many 2020 candidates are campaigning in front of the detention centers to draw attention to themselves.

Activists, meanwhile, are suing the federal government over the allegedly squalid conditions in an effort to force officials to release the children back into the arms of the folks who put them in danger to begin with.

Brandon Judd, president of the Border Patrol union, told the Times the law enforcement agents at the overwhelmed facilities aren’t Nazis running death camps as some Democrats suggest, but they are forced to perform medical evaluations and care for small children on an unfathomable scale.

And they’re simply not prepared.

“We want to make sure people are safe, but we’re just not trained to do that,” Judd said. “When you see deaths in our custody and quarantines, it’s because we’re not trained to do that. Things like that are going to get by us.”