Not nasty enough..

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And these are Christians..

Attorney General Jeff Sessions ignited a public theological debate last week when he used the Bible, specifically Romans 13, to justify the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S. border. He likely took his cues from the White House Bible Study (WHBS), a weekly Bible study for members of the president’s cabinet organized by Ralph Drollinger of Capitol Ministries. According to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, significant staff time and resources go into coordinating the Bible study every week. Documents also show that Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who defended the policy during a press conference Monday, is heavily involved with the WHBS. In fact, she’s the only cabinet official whose direct email address appears on the electronic invitations to the WHBS..

The biblical parenting course advocates “corporeal [sic] punishment for wrong doing” because it “is replete throughout Scripture.” Biblical parenting requires that a parent dominate their child from a young age: “A parent must establish authority early on … This is done through spanking.” If you spare the rod, you spoil the child. This bible-based course also encourages parents to break the will of their children so that they do not become “rebellious toward God.” So many people are rebellious today because “The child never learned the value and fruit of correction at a young age. No one ever broke his self-will and as a re­sult he carries around a rebellious spirit today.”

The White House Bible Study group that influenced Trump’s family separation policy – ThinkProgress

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It's not only at the border, from Reuters:

Border-crossers aren't the only targets. Thousands of illegal immigrants with deep roots in their adopted communities are being locked up and separated from their families. And as Morena Vasquez’s experience shows, the impact can be devastating. 

For the next year, Vasquez languished in the crowded detention center. She repeatedly asked an immigration judge for bond so she could await her day in court back with her family. And repeatedly, bond was denied as ICE argued that she was a flight risk. Even after a judge ruled that she had the right to stay legally and permanently in the United States, she was kept locked up for five more months as ICE fought the decision. She lost her two jobs – teaching Spanish at a preschool, as well as the office-cleaning gig. She lost the five-bedroom house she rented. Her six children, ages 4 to 17 at the time of her arrest and all of them U.S. citizens, had to relocate in the middle of the school year to live near their ailing grandfather in another town, far from the detention center.

President Trump has often pointed to Central American gang members and other criminal “animals” as the main targets of his strengthened immigration-law enforcement. But as his administration has expanded its dragnet under a series of executive orders, ICE has locked up thousands of people like Vasquez – people with little or no criminal history, with deep roots in their communities, who present little flight risk.

In earlier years, ICE would have released many of these people on bond soon after their arrest, allowing them to live with their families while awaiting legal proceedings that can take years. Now, ICE is denying bond for many of those people and pushing to keep them in detention for the duration of their cases, Reuters found, based on an analysis of government data and dozens of interviews with immigration judges, lawyers and current and former officials.

Trump's catch-and-detain policy snares many who call the U.S. home

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Surprise surprise..

For Trump and Fox News, every immigration problem is something caused by Democrats.
Fox News host Sean Hannity said on Monday, “In fact, the Obama administration, not the Trump administration — they’re the ones who actually started the policy of detaining minors younger than 18 for months.” Hannity tried to paint family separation as a continuation of an Obama-era tactic, which is false.

Family separation at the border: On Fox News, it isn’t Trump’s fault. It’s Democrats’. - Vox

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It is getting nastier still..

A lawsuit made public on Wednesday alleges that immigrant children held at a detention center near Houston were forcibly administered drugs. Immigrant children at Shiloh Treatment Center, a government contractor that houses unaccompanied migrant kids, were held down and told they would not be able to see their parents unless they took the psychiatric drugs, according to documents filed April in U.S. District Court in California. “The supervisor told me I was going to get a medication injection to calm me down,” a young girl told attorneys, according to Reveal News. “Two staff grabbed me, and the doctor gave me the injection despite my objection and left me there on the bed.”

Lawsuit alleges drugs were forcibly administered to migrant children | TheHill

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President Trump caved to enormous political pressure on Wednesday and signed an executive order meant to end the separation of families at the border by detaining parents and children together for an indefinite period. But ending the practice of separating families still faces legal and practical obstacles. A federal judge could refuse to give the Trump administration the authority it wants to hold families in custody for more than 20 days, which is the current limit because of a 1997 court order.

And the president’s order does nothing to address the plight of the more than 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents under the president’s “zero tolerance” policy. Federal officials said those children will not be immediately reunited with their families while the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration proceedings. “There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,” said Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Wolfe said the decision about the children was made by the White House, but he added, “I can tell you definitively that is going to be policy.”

The president signed the executive order days after he said that the only way to end the division of families was through congressional action because “you can’t do it through an executive order.” But he changed his mind after a barrage of criticism from Democrats, activists, members of his own party and even his wife and eldest daughter, who privately told him the policy was wrong.

Trump Retreats on Separating Families, but Thousands Will Remain Apart - The New York Times

A grandmother says she hasn’t seen her autistic grandson since they were separated at the border 10 months ago, according to an immigration attorney.  Maria de Bastos arrived with her 16-year-old grandson in New Mexico last August at a port of entry, the attorney, Ed Beckett, told a Fox TV affiliate in San Antonio. He said she told federal authorities she and her grandson were seeking asylum.  De Bastos and her grandson were held for two days before being separated, Beckett told the TV station, adding that the woman’s grandson was classified as an unaccompanied minor by the Department of Homeland Security. "When she came in, she did have legal paperwork to show she was the legitimate guardian, a court order from Brazil. CBP ignored the paperwork," Beckett said, referring to Customs and Border Protection.

Grandmother hasn’t seen grandson with autism since border separation 10 months ago, attorney says | TheHill

Seeking asylum a criminal offense?

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Young migrants placed in a Virginia facility say they were abused during their time there, according to an  Associated Press report published Thursday. A lawsuit filed against the facility reportedly includes abuse allegations from young Latino migrants, some of whom were held at the detention center for years. The immigrants say they faced beatings and were placed in solitary confinement at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Charlottesville, according to the AP report. “Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” one immigrant from Honduras, who was 15 when placed in the detention center, said, the news service reported.

Immigrant children held in Virginia say they were beaten

Trump’s response to the crisis at the US-Mexico border — where toddlers are in internment camps and older kids are in tent cities at frightening expense while children sob, health deteriorates, and the long-term damage of toxic stress accumulates — reminds us that he does not know anything about public policy, diplomacy, constitutional law, or legislative strategy. So you get instead what he’s delivered over the past two weeks — aggressive hostage-taking, lying, trolling, chaos, dissembling, and cruelty — none of which is going to advance Trump’s legislative goals or address the underlying issue of the northward flow of asylum seekers. Even the executive order he signed on Wednesday raises more questions than it will probably solve. All presidents are tested now and again, and Trump is failing massively. It’s not quite the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last. Being president of the United States is a difficult job, and Donald Trump has no idea how to do it.

But while reasonable people can disagree about which problems are important, there’s simply no denying that the origin of this problem is in Central America. If Trump wants to make solving the problem a major priority, he needs to make Central America a major policy priority. Instead, he’s picked a secretary of state with no experience in the region, made himself politically toxic by calling El Salvador a “shithole country,” embroiled the country in pointless fights with Mexico over NAFTA and a border wall, repeatedly threatened to end aid to Honduras for no reason, and decided not to show up at the Summit of the Americas. Drastically improving living conditions in the Northern Triangle would, obviously, be difficult. But Trump isn’t even trying. Meanwhile, he exacerbates his problems with the fact that he can’t even remotely get his story straight on what he’s even trying to accomplish.

Family separation at the border: Trump is in over his head - Vox

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Here are the damaging effects:

Groups of pediatricians and mental-health experts have said that the trauma of these separations could cause irreversible lifelong damage. Researchers have identified many of the ways that family separation and detention can affect children. We've listed the primary findings of that research below, drawing from previous reporting on the topic and a Twitter thread from Dr. Aaron Carroll, a researcher, author, and pediatrician.

• Detaining children and separating families can lead people to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
  
• Detention and family separation also raise the risk of anxiety and depression.
  
• Keeping kids away from their parents can harm their developing brains.
  
• The trauma of separation and detention raise risks of self-harm and suicidal ideation.
  
• Research indicates that detention of families and asylum seekers will raise already high levels of psychological disturbance and psychopathology.
  
• The effects of this significant trauma may ripple through to future generations.
  
• Because of these alarming risks (and others), a number of scientific institutions have come out against family-separation policies.
  

How family separation and detention affect children psychologically - Business Insider

See the article for the links to studies and evidence.

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The Nasty party in action

The House Budget Committee on Thursday rejected an amendment to the House Budget Resolution for fiscal year 2019 that would bar the Department of Homeland Security from using funds to separate families detained after crossing the border illegally. The Democratic amendment failed by a 16 to 9 vote along party lines. “Children are being ripped from their parents arms along our southern border,” said Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), the amendment’s sponsor and the chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “Not one penny of taxpayer dollars should ever be used to inflict pain and suffering on a child in order to punish their parents and push a political agenda,” she added.

House panel rejects amendment barring family separations | TheHill

Against an imaginary crisis:

For one thing, despite a small uptick since 2014, violent crime in America is actually at historical lows, with the homicide rate back to where it was in the early 1960s. (German crime is also at a historical low, by the way.) Trump’s carnage is a figment of his imagination. True, if we look across America there is a correlation between violent crime and the prevalence of undocumented immigrants — a negative correlation. That is, places with a lot of immigrants, legal and undocumented, tend to have exceptionally low crime rates. The poster child for this tale of un-carnage is the biggest city of them all: New York, where more than a third of the population is foreign-born, probably including around half a million undocumented immigrants — and crime has fallen to levels not seen since the 1950s. And this really shouldn’t be surprising, because criminal conviction data show that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are significantly less likely to commit crimes than the native-born. So the Trump administration has been terrorizing families and children, abandoning all norms of human decency, in response to a crisis that doesn’t even exist.

Opinion | Return of the Blood Libel - The New York Times

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The way the administration has framed the issue, the situation on the border leaves them with only two options to enforce its “zero tolerance” policy: either separate parents from their children (because kids can’t stay in federal prison while their parents are criminally prosecuted); or keep the family together in detention — possibly indefinitely — while the parents’ case makes its way through the court system. But these are hardly the only options to enforce the president’s immigration policy.

Under past administrations, DHS has usually chosen to lock up immigrants arrested at the border — but the agency has also created several effective alternatives to detention. The White House could prioritize these programs instead of trying to find more places to lock up families. One alternative is to release immigrants under community supervision, in which a non-profit group or government contractor provides families with social workers, who help them find housing and transportation, and who make sure they attend court hearings and comply with the law. Another alternative is to release immigrants with electronic monitoring, which generally involves placing GPS ankle monitors on the parents and assigning them case workers.

Alternatives to detention: Trump can enforce immigration laws without jailing families - Vox

The article has lots of details, that is, there are alternatives. Nastiness is a choice and the government used traumatized children as a deterrent and a negotiating chip and then lied about it.

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Immigration and crime statistics, some basic facts from Cato (hardly a left-wing rag)..

The literature is summarized in a 2015 Cato Institute report entitled, “Immigration and Crime — What the Research Says.” Here are some key findings from studies cited in the report.

— One study found that “roughly 1.6 percent of immigrant males 18–39 are incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of the native-born.” The study found the disparity in census data spanning three decades — from 1980 to 2010.
— Another found that the phased rollout of the Secure Communities (S-COMM) immigration enforcement program didn’t reduce crime in affected communities. S-COMM “led to no meaningful reduction in the FBI index crime rate,” researchers found. If undocumented immigrants were more likely to commit criminal acts, you’d expect to see crime rates decrease as undocumented immigrants were removed from communities. That wasn’t the case.
— Another study “looked at 159 cities at three dates between 1980 and 2000 and found that crime rates and levels of immigration are not correlated,” the CATO report says, summarizing the findings.
— Another “looked at a sample of 150 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and found that levels of recent immigration had a statistically significant negative effect on homicide rates but no effect on property crime rates.” Yet another study found that an influx of immigrants is actually correlated with decreases in homicide and robbery rates.
— A study that looked looked at 103 different MSAs from 1994–2004 found that “the weight of the evidence suggests that immigration is not associated with increased levels of crime. To the extent that a relationship does exist, research often finds a negative effect of immigration on levels of crime, in general, and on homicide in particular.”

Trump spreads disinformation about immigrant crime during profoundly bizarre White House event – ThinkProgress

But, as you can see in the linked article, for Trump you only exists as a crime victim if that crime has been perpetrated by an illegal immigrant (or Muslim terrorist).