Financial Times: “Might some immigrants, desperate to cross the border, bring children with them as — to speak figuratively — ‘human shields’, hoping that the presence of minors will protect them from arrest? This is conceivable. But even then the innocence of the children would remain a stubborn fact. Either it is acceptable for the US government to use children as leverage to further its policy goals, or it is not.”

“Mr Trump and his inner circle have suggested that the separation of families at the border might be stopped if Congress acted on new immigration laws. But neither of the bills currently before Congress address the issue directly. And even if they did, the moral proposition would be the same: Mr Trump is using children for political leverage.”

Washington Post: “This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.”

“Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit mes­sages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.”

Said Harvard Medical School professor Charles Nelson: “The effect is catastrophic. There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”

ProPublica has obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children can be heard wailing as an agent jokes, “We have an orchestra here.”

A new Quinnipiac poll finds that American voters oppose the policy of separating children and parents when families illegally cross the border into America by a wide margin, 66% to 27%.

However, Republican voters support the separation policy 55% to 35%, the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group to support it.

American voters also support 79% to 15% allowing immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, so-called “Dreamers,” to remain and ultimately to apply for citizenship.

A new CNN poll finds 67% of Americans opposed the policy while just 28% approve.

President Trump “remained resistant on Monday in the face of growing public outcry over his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border, repeating the false assertion that Democrats were the ones to blame for it, and suggesting that criminals — not parents — were toting juveniles to the United States,” the New York Times reports.

Said Trump: “They could be murderers and thieves and so much else. We want a safe country, and it starts with the borders, and that’s the way it is.”

Politico: “The defiant posture comes amid a torrent of criticism as stories and images have emerged of young children being ripped from their immigrant parents’ arms and put in detention facilities akin to prisons.”