[UPDATE: If you want to get a\look at the deliberate callousness and cruelty of the government’s behavior, read this sad and infuriating account by a public defender assigned to the detained parents who have been separated from their children.]

It turns out that the government has not only been separating immigrant children from their parents, it may have been been drugging and otherwise abusing them up too, according to a news article based on a report by Reveal of the excellent Center for Investigative Reporting from court filings protesting the practices. A lawsuit has been filed that charges that some immigrant children in detention centers who have been separated from their parents have been sent to shelters with long histories of abuse and are being forcibly injected with drugs to make them docile.
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[UPDATE: It appears that Trump is going to sign an executive order to end the child separation policy. Given that he and attorney general Sessions, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephen Miller, and Kirstjen Nielsen have been saying for days that this was not their fault and that they were forced to adopt the cruel policy because it was the law that was enacted by the Democrats and that it was up to Congress to change the law, this action would reveal it for the lie that it always was. But being caught in obvious lies does not bother this crew nor their supporters. They have no shame.]

It looks like the Trump administration which, as a matter of policy, tries to ramp up the cruelty of its actions against immigrants of color because it plays well with its base, is surprised that the level of anger against its tactic of forcibly separating immigrant children from their parents is rising. Increasing numbers of Republican elected officials are distancing themselves from the policy and even Trump bootlickers like British prime minister Theresa May are voicing concerns. And how bad must it be when even French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, a Trump soul mate if there ever was one, says that she disagrees with the policy of separating children from parents?
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The forcible separation of children, even those who are toddlers, from their parents at the borders and putting them in cages seems to threaten the Trump administration with being a step too far. The photographs and videos of the grim sight and the newly released heartbreaking audio recordings by ProPublica of children sobbing uncontrollably and calling for their parents seems to be too much to stomach for even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters. Even the evangelical zealot, Trump fan boy, and outright bigot Franklin Graham who had hitherto not allowed any daylight between him and Trump said “It’s disgraceful, and it’s terrible to see families ripped apart, and I don’t support that one bit.” Laura Bush has also come out against it, as have some other conservatives. Big majorities oppose these actions, with the only demographic group supporting it being Republicans.
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It is tempting to think that the current Trump administration is uniquely bad. In reality, in many cases they have continued polices that liberals and Democrats tended to downplay when they were done by the Obama administration. The harsh treatment of undocumented immigrants, the wars, the bombings and drone killings are things that Trump did not initiate but continued and intensified. This is not to say that Trump is just the same as Obama. He is worse and I think that Kevin Drum has put his finger on one trait that clearly characterizes this administration and current Republicans.
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Here are some good quotes from an essay by Stephen M. Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard University. He is by no means a progressive but belongs to the so-called ‘realist’ school of politics that says that the US should adopt policies that are in its own long-term interests and based on a rational weighing of evidence and not be driven by ideological motivations such as neo-conservatism or neoliberal interventionism that has got the US involved in so many unwinnable wars and locked into reflexive support for any and all of Israel’s awful polices.
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I linked to the press release earlier. This is a project for social change activists to find and work together more effectively on common interests. It can be roughly described as follows:

1. Pursuance is an encrypted toolbox for activists, by activists.
2. Pursuance is a new way to organize online: more secure, more structured, and more fun.
3. A pursuance is a sort of organization or group with a name and a mission that guides all the activity within that pursuance.
4. So what’s it like to use Pursuance? You log in, click on one of the pursuances you’re a member of, and then you see a hierarchy of tasks as well as a simple list of what’s assigned to you. You can then create new tasks, assign them to others, assign tasks to other pursuances(!) to leverage their unique expertise, plan and prioritize with others via text chat or video chat, and more.
5. The ultimate goal of Pursuance? Accountability. How? By building software and a network of people around it, thus unleashing a vast and formidable ecosystem of opposition to institutionalized injustice.
6. Feature set: each pursuance includes task management, chat rooms, and integrates with other tools for providing video conference functionality and crowdsourced journalism and research tools. You can invite other people to your pursuance by skill set.
7. Pursuance is an encrypted toolbox for activists, by activists. Populated by invitation and running on an integrated suite of digital tools, all designed to allow activists, researchers, journalists, artists, coders anyone with talent and a little time to collaborate on projects large and small, working within customizeable project groups called pursuances, aimed at achieving results with impact.
8. We are building a global federation of activism projects.

If you think it is worthwhile, then any contribution is welcomed. You can donate here. That link also contains short videos that explain more how the system works.