The Victims of Trump’s Family Separation Policy Will Not Be Fine

“They are so well taken care of. As my colleague Jeremy Stahl points out, this isn’t the first time that an administration official has argued that because the separated children—over 500 of whom are still being kept from their parents—have been physically taken care of, they should be “just fine.” But if the life histories of children forced to be parted from parents for years of their childhoods are any indication, these periods of separation will have long-lasting, devastating, and unpredictable effects. Asking the historical record, and the grown-up survivors she interviewed, how this period of separation had affected the children’s lives in the long term, Clifford found things that she described as “not only unexpected, but shocking.” One such finding was the fact that for many of the kids, the war years were fine; it was liberation that was traumatic. “Family reunions could be among the most difficult and distressing experiences that children went through after the war,” Clifford writes. Right after the war, adults debated whether those children could ever be “rendered normal.” Social workers and psychiatrists called “war orphans” “mal-adjusted,” “war-damaged,” “war-handicapped,” “de-normalized.” The children, in turn, had, as Clifford puts it, “often developed a deep suspicion of adult motivations and behavior.” Adults working with children in group homes noticed that they trusted one another much more than any adult authority figure.