What...Reunification Videos...Reveal About the Trauma of Separated Children.

[NNadir]

WHAT VIRAL REUNIFICATION VIDEOS REVEAL ABOUT THE TRAUMA OF SEPARATED IMMIGRANT CHILDREN



If for nothing other than this, Miller and Trump deserve to be hauled before the Hague:

A Guatemalan mother falls to her knees as her seven-year-old daughter walks through the door. They've been separated for 55 days, and the mother is completely overcome with emotion. She embraces her child, rocking her and rubbing her back, openly weeping and speaking to her daughter in Spanish. When she pulls back, the child's face appears somewhat frozen, but she clearly has tears in her eyes; her mother wipes her face with the tissue she has been clutching.

This video from CNN is just one of many that have gone viral in the past couple of months, showing immigrant children and their parents' first reunification after months of separation as a result of the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy. Something that is strikingly uniform in each of the videos is the frozen, non-emotional responses of the children as their parents weep over them. One video shows a devastated mother whose toddler continues to crawl away from her as she tries to talk to him and pick him up.

Even to a layperson's untrained eye, these reactions appear to be confirmation of the significant trauma mental-health experts warned would happen as a result of separating children from their adult caregivers.

Karen Johnson, senior director of trauma-informed services at the National Council for Behavioral Health, says that what we're likely seeing in these children's responses is a protective numbing or disassociating. Weeks- to months-long separations have an impact on a child's brain, Johnson says, "which speaks to the urgency to make sure that children do not spend one hour longer than they need to separated from their parents..."

[Hekate]

1. Stephen Miller and his wife need to be separated from their infant by a long jail term...

That is all.

[demtenjeep]

2. that poor kid

Katie poo knew what she was doing when she married a vile thing.

Their son had no choice

[alwaysinasnit]

5. I second that.

[malaise]

7. I leave them to time

They will pay

[cally]

3. Thanks for this

This trauma will be hard to address. It’s easy to get caught up in the hopes for happily ever after seeing the initial reunification but it is the beginning of a long difficult journey. Still, we all need to see and celebrate some moments where things are visibly improving.

[NNadir]

8. The thing is this, these children will become adults...

...living far into the future, with all the power for good and all the power for harm adults possess.

It would be entirely unsurprising if they grew up with hatred for all things American.

This of course need not be the case, but, again, it would be unsurprising.

A famous historical case of separation from parents is the case of the Kindertransport, where several hundred Jewish children escaped from Nazi Germany to England without their parents just before the European outbreak of World War Two. Their parents, in general, did not survive, but at least in their foster families they were treated with love and compassion. Overall, the children grew up with a remarkably disproportionate record of success, many contributing greatly to humanity, one actually winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

But there is a vast difference between treating a dispossessed child with love and putting such a child in a cage like an animal.

[Enterstageleft]

4. Every single ICE agent should be treated like Hitlers SS troops and go before the Hague...

If I am remembering it correctly, the "I was just following orders" excuse was not allowed.

If you have ANY kind of moral compass, you NEVER willingly separate a child from their parents for a "political" reason.

All of the agents need to pay the price for their cruelty and racism.

Miller should spend the rest of his life in prison, and never be allowed to see his child again.

[onecaliberal]

6. Omg.. I can't

[WhiskeyGrinder]

9. Abolish ICE now.