The Reality of Current US Immigration Policy 39 such as emotional instability, high anxiety, suicidal ideation, and prolonged depression. Experts pointed out that the terror of separation from a parent and removal to an unfamiliar, punitive location for an indefinite time, without explanation or family contact, could cause life-long damage.17 Predictably, accounts of serious mental distress ensued.18 Though the president has been forced to change course on family separation itself, it is not clear that his administrators will be able to rectify the immense harm done anytime soon. The instructions they are supposed to abide by are clear. On June 27, 2018, in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, a district court judge in San Diego decided that family separation was unconstitutional, that separated children should be promptly reunified with their parents (within fourteen days for those under five, within thirty days for older children), that parents not yet in contact with their separated children should be provided with telephonic contact within ten days, and that no parents should be deported without their consent prior to reunification with their separated children.19 However, government officials were unable to comply with the court order. Astoundingly, no clear or centralized tracking system had been put in place to document and register each child taken from their parent into federal custody, no alien registration or other identifying number was given to parents to enable them to trace their children’s whereabouts, no cross-referencing system linked separated parent and child, and no liaison with consular authorities was established to ensure diplomatic contact between vulnerable foreign nationals and their national representatives. As the San Diego judge hearing the ACLU case, Judge Dana M. Sabraw, bitingly commented: “The unfortunate reality is that under the present system, migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.”20 As a result the agonizing separation of parents and children continued for weeks, in some cases months. Even worse, some families seem to have been permanently separated as already deported parents, without access to lawyers or other advisers, encounter unsurmountable difficulties reuniting with children for whom they have been given no tracking details.21 The indiscriminate separation of parents and legal guardians from children accompanying them was stopped by public outcry. But, out of the glare of public 17 Hearing on Migrant Family Separation Policy before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce & Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, 116th Congress 3 (2019) (statement of Jack P. Shonkoff, M. D.). 18 Ms. L v. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 310 F. Supp. 3d 1133, 1149–1150 (S.D. Cal. 2018). 19 For excellent accounts of US policy in respect of migrant children, see L. Briggs, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020); P. G. Schrag, Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). 20 Ms. L v. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 21 Personal communication to author from ACLU lead counsel. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press