Imagine being a little kid who's been taken away from your parents by men in uniform, and thrown into complete chaos. You're surrounded by strangers who may not even speak the only language you know, kept in a freezing cage where the lights are on all day and night and nobody seems to care that you're crying all the time, then later taken to a converted Walmart crammed with other kids, where you get to play outside on a dirt field once a day. Eventually, you're sent to "foster care or whatever," people you don't know, but who seem nicer even if they don't understand your language or your reflexive rocking in bed at night. If you're really lucky, you might even end up with a distant relative who lives in this strange country, though you may not have met them previously. (Unless of course, your relatives were arrested and deported when they came to rescue you from baby jail.) It's been three years since then and depending on how old you were when you were taken, you might still remember Mama's face. Or maybe the only family you can think of is your foster parent. There's little chance your real parents will ever be found.

Now imagine that 545 times and you'll have a very partial sense of the crime Americans committed so Donald Trump could brag he was finally cracking down on people who committed the misdemeanor offense of crossing the border without authorization. That's what a minority of American voters elected him to do.

In a court filing yesterday, ACLU lawyers said that after years of searching, they were still unable to find the parents of 545 of the kids who'd been taken in America's effort to "deter" asylum seekers and other immigrants by trying to be more monstrous than the countries they were fleeing. Why were ACLU lawyers (and attorneys from other nonprofits) tasked with finding the parents, and not the Department of Homeland Security, which took the kids away? Or the Justice Department, which ordered it? Or Health and Human Services, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) had custody of the kids?

Simple: The government refused to do it because it was too much work, so if the parents were going to be found, that was left to the attorneys for the kids and their parents.

NBC News reports that the attorneys say about two-thirds of the parents were deported to Central America without their kids. Let's all recite it together: The cruelty is the point.