Most morn­ings late­ly, I’ve wok­en up to two things. First I hear my tod­dler, sound­ing off that it’s time to get up. Then I see the news sto­ries about oth­er tod­dlers our immi­gra­tion author­i­ties ripped away from their parents.

These detention facilities are no place for kids.

For weeks, I’ve felt the gnaw­ing need to write some­thing, any­thing, about it. But God, where even to begin?

First, there are the sto­ries. The Con­golese asy­lum seek­er who heard her six year old scream, ​“Don’t take me away from my mom­my!” and couldn’t reach her. The woman forced to put her 18 month old in a car seat in an ICE van, the door slam­ming shut before she could even say good­bye. The man who hasn’t seen his son in six months.

Then there are the pho­tos. The rows of chil­dren sleep­ing on thin mats behind chain-linked fences. The kids being led by guards to make phone calls, hands tied behind their backs. The prison van full of infant car seats.

These are just the ear­li­est fruits of the Trump administration’s ghast­ly new pledge to pros­e­cute every last undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grant who cross­es our bor­der. If immi­grant par­ents have their chil­dren with them, the kids are seized and ware­housed in some over­flow­ing deten­tion facility.

The New York Times count­ed over 700 kids who’d been sep­a­rat­ed from their par­ents this way from Octo­ber to April. But in the first two weeks of May alone, author­i­ties dis­closed that they’d tak­en near­ly 700 more — an aston­ish­ing­ly rapid increase. Already the ware­hous­es are fill­ing up, leav­ing author­i­ties to pre­pare hold­ing pens on mil­i­tary bases for the inevitable over­flow. The ACLU puts the sec­ond wave at 1,000 over five weeks.​