A story from NBC News Tuesday found that lawyers appointed by a federal judge have been unable to track down the families of 545 children separated from their families by the Trump administration.

The article quotes Lee Gelernt deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project as saying, “It is critical to find out as much as possible about who was responsible for this horrific practice while not losing sight of the fact that hundreds of families have still not been found and remain separated.”

According to the story, Trump’s administration enacted a “zero tolerance” policy in 2018 and later confirmed that they had been separating families in 2017 in selected parts of the border as part of a pilot program, the article states.

In an article by the New Yorker entitled “How the Stress of Separation and Detention Changes the Lives of Children,” Harvard professor Jack Shonkoff was quoted as saying, “…if children are in these large institutional settings, where there are tens or hundreds or thousands of kids, the issue here is the lack of individualized attention, and lack of ability to form relationships with adults that can be responsive to them.”

We at the Daily Eastern News believe that this family separation issue is possibly the darkest moment of Trump’s tumultuous presidency.

This policy and its repercussions will traumatize children for years to come. Separating children from their families at a young age is a terrible thing to do and harmful to both the parents and the children. It is unacceptable.