Tender Age Shelters: Separating and Warehousing Infants and Toddlers

Overview

The Zero Tolerance family separation policy is documented separately. This entry addresses a specific and especially grave dimension of that policy: the separation of infants and young toddlers from their parents — children for whom separation from a primary caregiver at a critical developmental stage causes the most severe and lasting harm.

The administration did not exempt young children from the separation policy. There was no minimum age. Infants as young as a few months old were taken from their mothers or fathers and placed in facilities staffed by strangers.

The Tender Age Shelters

The Associated Press reported on June 18, 2018 — the same week Trump signed the executive order purportedly ending separations — that facilities in South Texas were holding babies and young children who had been separated from their parents. The shelters were not equipped or designed for infant care in the way a family or foster home would be. Staff described children who could not be comforted, who cried constantly, who could not understand where their parents were.

The ProPublica audio, released the same week, put sound to the images: migrant children at CBP facilities sobbing for their parents. A Salvadoran child crying "Papá" again and again. The audio became the most-shared piece of media coverage of the Zero Tolerance crisis.

The Medical Warning

The American Academy of Pediatrics — the nation's leading authority on children's health — was categorical. The policy was child abuse. Parent-child separation in early childhood disrupts the neurological and psychological development of children in ways that research shows are lasting. The earlier the separation and the longer its duration, the more severe the damage.

The administration continued the policy after receiving the AAP's warning. It was not an inadvertent harm — it was a foreseeable harm the administration chose to inflict.