In the early months of 2018, a disturbing rumor traveled from the southern border of the United States into the office of Dr. Colleen Kraft: Pediatricians in the Southwest were reporting that they had begun to encounter migrant children whom the government had separated from their parents.
The reports began to reach Kraft soon after she began her one-year term as president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, one of the country's foremost professional organizations of doctors dedicated to children's health, in January of 2018. As individual reports gathered in her office, Kraft became one of the first people in the country to understand that the government was separating migrant children from their families. The Trump administration would not admit to the practice until June, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the administration's "zero-tolerance" police. Just this week, an internal government report revealed that potentially thousands more children were separated from their parents before that announcement was made.
Kraft says it was hard to comprehend the initial reports. "You don't want to believe that your country is doing something so awful," she says. "So my first thought was that we need to see what's happening. If we need to be advocates for these kids, we need to know what's going on on the ground, and then be able to speak from that position."
[For more on this story by JACK HERRERA, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...efore-the-public-did]
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