Adam Kinzinger, former member of Congress, reports on the Trump administration’s cruel policy of separating children from their parents–even when one or both of their parents are U.S. citizens.

He writes:

Report Reveals Trump Has Separated 100,000 Children From Their Parents — and 75% Are U.S. Citizens

In a brand new Brookings Institution report, researchers estimate around 145,000 U.S. citizen children have had a parent detained since Trump returned to office. About 22,000 have had every parent in the home taken into custody. More than a third of those children are under six years old.

And here is the part that should stop you cold. Only about five percent of these children have been touched by the child welfare system. The other 95 percent are scattered: some with relatives, some left the country with a deported parent, some simply unaccounted for in any government data.

The Department of Homeland Security responded with a sentence they have been recycling for a year: ICE “does not separate families.” That is the official line while 145,000 American kids are missing a parent.

In Trump’s first term, family separation at the border ended in 2018 because the country saw the photos and refused to live with it. This time around it is more than twenty times bigger, it is happening in our cities rather than at the border, and the official government response is to deny the separations are happening at all.