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.
[For more on this story by KATHI VALEII, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...d-immigrant-children]
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