According to this article from NPR, pediatricians in South Texas, in the US near the border with Mexico, became concerned with the increasing number of young children being separated from their families and placed in detention centers and raised the alarm to Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Kraft went to Texas and visited one of the shelters. There, she saw a two-year old child "just crying and pounding and having a huge, huge temper tantrum. This child was just screaming, and nobody could help her. And we know why she was crying. She didn't have her mother. She didn't have her parent who could soothe her and take care of her." Pediatricians in the US are raising concerns about the harmful impacts that the toxic stress of family separation will have on these children, particularly as the children being placed in these shelters are increasingly very young, often under the age of ten.
