To someone like Donald Trump—who measures success strictly through big ratings, big dollar values, just big numbers in general—his aggressive "zero tolerance" immigration policy is a huge success. In just six weeks his administration has forcibly separated 1995 immigrant children from their parents. The numbers of children living in prison-like facilities are so high that the administration is shopping for space to set up tent cities to house them all, and defense contractors are seeing a potentially massive pay day in the burgeoning child detention industry.

But Trump uncharacteristically doesn't want credit for these big numbers. In fact, he spent the week blaming his administration's unilateral decision on Democrats, saying the "law" is their fault and they won't come to the table to fix it; never mind the fact that Trump's party controls both houses of Congress and the Democrats couldn't even stop a train wreck like Betsy DeVos from getting confirmed.

Maybe even Trump realizes that running facilities that look a lot like concentration camps full of kids is bad optics. Such bad optics in fact that Trump's been condemned by usually stalwart supporters like the Southern Baptist Convention and evangelist Franklin Graham. And as more people actually get inside these centers and report on what they find there, the situation for these thousands of children in custody looks bleaker and bleaker. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited a shelter in Texas, where she was told that neither she nor staff members were allowed to touch or comfort distraught children. Kraft told NPR that the kind of trauma the government is inflicting is often permanent:

"By separating parents and children, we are doing irreparable harm to these children. The long-term concern of what we call toxic stress is that brains are not developed efficiently or effectively," Kraft says. "And these children go on to have behavior problems, to have long-term medical problems."

Antar Davidson quit his job at another center in Arizona after realizing that the staff there was completely unequipped to give so many isolated children the care and services they need. Davidson told the Los Angeles Times that his breaking point came when he was instructed to tell three Brazilian siblings who thought their parents were dead that they weren't allowed to huddle together and hug each other. From the Times:

The caseload is straining a facility he described as understaffed and unequipped to deal with children experiencing trauma, such as the three Brazilians. During his time at the shelter, children were running away, screaming, throwing furniture and attempting suicide, Davidson said. Several were being monitored this week because they were at risk of running away, self-harm and suicide, records show.

So why has nothing changed if this policy is so heinous that no one outside of Jeff Sessions wants credit for it? Because it's a way for Trump to get what he wants. He's already tweeted that he's willing to hold literal child hostages to force Democrats to support his immigration demands, like a border wall and an end to immigration policies that allow family reunification. And a White House official basically told reporters the same thing, saying, "The president has told folks that in lieu of the laws being fixed, he wants to use the enforcement mechanisms that we have. The thinking in the building is to force people to the table.”

It's essentially the same game Trump has been playing with DACA, threatening to imprison and deport nearly a million people who grew up in America with no criminal record if Democrats just agree to sell out every other immigrant in the country. He's even sworn that he'll oppose any immigration reform with a whiff of compromise, which means, in this case, returning children to their parents without getting his ransom first.