38 Jacqueline Bhabha child asylum seekers to await their asylum hearings in places, such as the Mexico borderland, known to be crime and violence infested. More generally, under Article 24 of the ICCPR, the United States is obliged to provide children with special “measures of protection.” From this one can infer that official policies targeting children in the United States, whatever their citizenship or immigration status, need, at a minimum, to protect their health, well-being, and development.13 Policies that subject children to unsanitary conditions, traumatic experiences, or situations where essential health care is unavailable violate this fundamental obligation. Family Separation The welcome U-turn on the blanket Trump administration family separation policy, which ripped all children away from parents entering the country without prior authorization, came fairly promptly. On June 20, 2018, two months after the presidential order that legitimized the policy, the government was forced to neutralize it. Family separation on that scale only worked as long as it was a closely guarded secret.14 Once photos of toddlers ripped from distraught parents, internment camps with children in cages, images of young children bottle feeding unrelated infants, and tapes of babies wailing while their jailers sardonically commented on the “orchestra” they were holding became public, the administration faced a watershed moment, even against the backdrop of its increasingly inhumane border control policies.15 The bipartisan storm of protest that erupted branded the government’s version of migrant deterrence as un-American. And indeed, the widely circulated images evoked the darkest days of American history – family separation under slavery, abduction of Native American children from their families, internment without trial of Japanese Americans wrongly considered enemy aliens. The images also triggered alarming expert pronouncements about the devastating, and likely longterm, impact of the traumatic separation on the mental and emotional health of the affected children. Scholars of early childhood development characterized the experiences willfully imposed on the separated children as “toxic stress,”16 known to affect neural pathways in the brain in young children and to lead to grave risks 13 ICCPR, art. 24. A modified version of family separation, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, continues to this day. 15 “Kirstjen Nielsen Addresses Families Separation at the Border: Full Transcript,” New York Times, June 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/us/politics/dhs-kirstjen-nielsen-families-sep arated-border-transcript.html; G. Thompson, “Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated from Their Parents at the Border,” ProPublica, June 18, 2018, www.propublica.org/article/ children-separated-from-parents-border-patrol-cbp-trump-immigration-policy. 16 J. P. Shonkoff et al., “The Lifelong Effects of Early Childhood Adversity and Toxic Stress” (2012) 129(1) Pediatrics e232–e246. 14 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press