For seven weeks in 2017 it was the official policy of our government to remove migrant children of all ages from their parents and house them in a cage. Even now the inevitable bureaucratic messups have lost some of these kids; it's possible these families will literally never be whole again. Everyone has their own horrors I guess, but this was what did it for me.
> The idea that this is simply a continuation of an Obama-era practice is "preposterous," said Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School. "There were occasionally instances where you would find a separated family — maybe like one every six months to a year — and that was usually because there had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn’t actually the parent."
> Once custody concerns were resolved, "there was pretty immediately reunification," Gilman told NBC News. "There were not 2,000 kids in two months — it’s not the same universe," she added.
That's not to say that the Obama administration didn't do some other cruel things to migrant families in an effort to deter them. Some of which got smacked back down by the courts, too. But separating families as a matter of policy was not one of those policies.
