It’s difficult to stay on top of everything that’s been happening with family separation at the border. I don’t mean it’s emotionally difficult, though that’s true, too. Anybody who heard the recordings of the Central American children sobbing and begging for their parents can attest to that. What I mean is, it’s almost impossible to know basic factual things, like how many kids were taken, and what happened to them.

An October 2018 analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union indicated that at least 2,654 immigrant children were separated from their parents or caregivers as a result of Trump Administration policies. Hundreds of these children remain separated from their families, and the ACLU, which filed the class-action lawsuit on behalf of the separated parents, worries that the data provided by the administration is unreliable and there may be even more children affected.

Despite repeated lies by President Trump that his family separation policy at the Mexican border was not new, it was. This was not something refugees from south of the border had been subjected to before. Yet a cursory look at American history shows us that the government has had plenty of practice at dividing up families, almost always racial minorities, and forcing them to live apart, often forever.

As far back as the 1860s and on up to the 1970s, Native American children, some as young as five, were taken from their families and brought to government-run boarding schools. Native organizations, including the National American Indian Court Judges Association (NAICJA), spoke up against the horror being inflicted on immigrant families.

“We as Native Americans have our worst memories resurrected when we see children torn from their parents at the hands of law enforcement, taken to unknown locations, and with an unknown path to reunification,” NAICJA said in a 2018 statement, reflecting on the Trump Administration’s separation of Latin American families. “We as a people have historically suffered the consequences of such forceful removal of its children from parents and caretakers that created intergenerational harm that we as courts and professionals still struggle to address.”

Family separation was also an integral part of chattel slavery, as the historian Damian Alan Pargas has explored.

“Virtually no slave family in the nineteenth-century American South was completely safeguarded from forced separation, yet the extent of family breakups throughout the slave states remains far from clear,” Pargas wrote in the abstract for a 2009 article. Yet certainly “the threat of forced separation was inextricably linked to the nature of regional slave-based agriculture.”

The government has had plenty of practice at dividing up families, almost always racial minorities, and forcing them to live apart, often forever.

The trauma of this separation is documented in the slave narratives held by the Maryland State Archives, which tell heart-breaking stories of children taken from families. “For most slave children, the separation from their parents and the siblings was the hardest aspect of being sold,” notes an article on the archive’s website. “Slaves went to great lengths to keep their family together, but there [were] often limits to what they could do.”

In modern times, separation has long been part of U.S. immigration enforcement, most often involving adult family members, especially fathers. In 2012, more than 90 percent of the people deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were male. Some were the breadwinners for families that included U.S. citizen children or DACA recipients; but none of that mattered to the Obama Administration, just as none of it matters to the Trump Administration now.

These latest family separations also make me think of the eleven million undocumented people living in this country, many of whom cannot leave the country without being banned from returning for a decade. This means that they will likely never again see or touch members of their own families in their home country, unless they give up their family and life here.

In 2016, the nonprofit Border Network for Human Rights began its Hugs Not Walls program. When the Rio Grande is low, which happens twice a year, families with members in Mexico and in the United States wait for hours in lines controlled by Border Patrol guards. When they get the signal, they run to one another, they hug, they weep, they catch up.

Their allotted time together? Three minutes.