In a hospital hundreds of miles away from the US–Mexico border, Tara Neubrand saw the gutting, alarming effects of separating migrant children from their parents.

The 36-year-old pediatric emergency physician says she has evaluated three undocumented children in the past six weeks at her Denver hospital. The toddlers were placed with foster families in the area after immigration officials detained and charged their parents with illegally entering the US, holding them in custody until their hearings.

The children, between the ages of 1 and 2, came in with mild childhood illnesses, the doctor wrote on Facebook. Issues like gastroenteritis, dehydration, upper respiratory infections, and rashes — nothing really out of the ordinary for kids recently placed with foster families.

What struck the emergency physician, though, was their behavior: The toddlers were petrified and seriously traumatized.

"Children this age are rambunctious. They climb on everything, they put things in their mouth that they're not supposed to, they begin to explore the world away from their parents, they begin to seek and to find the limits of their world," Neubrand wrote in a lengthy Facebook post Monday, which has since gone viral.

But the three children who were removed from their parents somewhere along the border "clung so tightly, and so completely, to their foster mothers, both in the ED [emergency department] and at home, that they were literally unable to be put down. They didn't explore the world, they were terrified that their world would be broken for a second time. Their trauma, and the direct effect it was having on their development, was obvious."



Helpless and concerned, the foster parents, all of whom are experienced, the doctor noted, said they had no idea what to do.

"I'm just trying not to ruin his life. He screams every day for his pappa, and I don't even know where his pappa is," she said one foster mother tearfully told her.

Speaking to BuzzFeed News before her shift Tuesday, Neubrand said that two of the children were from Guatemala and one was from Honduras.

That's really all she or the foster parents knew about them.



"They know that the kids' parents are being detained by ICE, but they don't know where. They didn't have a timeline in terms of when the kids might be reunited with their parents or any type of plan, contact, or communication at all," she said.

The toddlers came with no documentation about their medical history or anything about who they are, the doctor said.

"These kids were not connected to the foster families in any way," Neubrand continued. "The parents told me they had gotten the babies on very short notice."