No tumult in the Donald Trump administration has probably been more controversial than the recent separation policy. This "zero-tolerance" policy allows the government to separate children from their parents as they try to enter the United States.
It has sparked outrage across the country for its inhumane implications. Immigration advocates are furious. So are human rights groups and citizens across the political spectrum. Now joining that list a professor from Harvard Medical School, who says children forcibly separated from their parents can trigger severe effects on their psychology.
Here's what happens to them: their heart rates go up. Their bodies release a bevy of stress hormones. This in turn can lead to the killing of dendrites, the branches in the brain that communicate with the rest of the body. Eventually, high stress levels can kill neurons, which can then yield long-term damage in both children's psychology and their brain's actual physical structure.
''The effect is catastrophic,'' said Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard. ''There's so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.''
Psychologists, Mental Health Experts Against The Separation Policy
Buoyed by their knowledge on the effects of child-parent separation, an increasing number of psychologists, pediatricians, and other health experts have unsurprisingly announced their opposition to Trump's new policy, which has separated nearly 2,000 immigrant children from their parents in recent weeks, as The Washington Post reports.
Major institutions centered on the protection of children in the United States, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association, and others, have all spoken out against the policy. Almost 7,700 mental health practitioners and 142 organizations — and counting — have also signed a number of petitions encouraging the president to chuck the policy in the bin.
Nelson regards the policy as "child abuse" and against "everything we stand for as paediatricians."
"This is completely ridiculous and I'm approaching that not as someone who's taking a position in the politics, but as a scientist."
Jailed And Kept For Months
Not only are families being separated, but the adults are also being jailed and prosecuted for illegally crossing the U.S. border, with the children put into shelters overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Several reports show children being held for as long as 57 days, but there are other reports of months-long separations and parents being sent back to their home country without knowledge of their children's whereabouts.
Here's what you can do to help families separated from their children at the border.
