Traumatized children are a Trump legacy

We don't know that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt's brother called ICE on his ex. We also don't know that he didn't. 

What we know is that Bruna Ferreira was detained earlier this month as she left home to pick up her 11-year-old son, Michael Leavitt Jr. We know that Ferreira was brought to the U.S. from Brazil as a six-year-old by her parents; her attorney has told reporters she was a DACA recipient in the process of getting her green card.

(The Department of Homeland Security says Ferreira has a prior arrest, but since we know that they lie nonstop, until there's another source on that we'll assume it's a lie.)

Instead of doing anything to help Ferreira, Michael Leavitt Sr. and his father called her sister, Graziela Dos Santos Rodriques and “They just kept saying, ‘Tell her to self-deport.” she told the Boston Globe. “Self-deport to where? Brazil is not her home.”

Ferreira's son lives in New Hampshire with his father, but Ferreira shares custody. Her sister told the Globe that the child is asking about his mother, wishing her home for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

So here's something else we know about Michael Leavitt Sr.: Whatever role he did or didn't play in having his son's mother detained by ICE and put into deportation proceedings, he is not moving heaven and earth to do anything he can – like using his Trump administration connection, or speaking out publicly, or, hell, even just not pressuring his ex to self-deport – to ensure that his son has his mother in his life at 12, 13, 14.

Michael Leavitt Jr. is one of countless children likely to be traumatized by the Trump administration's vicious war on immigrants. There are so many children whose parents have been disappeared into this deportation system. Children who've watched as armed, masked agents of the state broke in car windows, pointed guns, manhandled and kidnapped their parents or other family members. 

There are also children whose families have not been touched by deportation but have been witnesses to this violence, like the Chicago-area Girl Scouts who canceled a food drive earlier in the month after ICE started grabbing people off the streets in their neighborhood. It turns out that even when it's not their family members affected, children are traumatized by seeing armed, masked agents of the state kidnap people out of their neighborhoods. (To be sure, it's likely that there are little kids out there who've been brought up hate-filled enough to celebrate if they saw that happening – there's historical precedent from the era of the public lynching, for instance. But if so, that, too, is a moral injury to the nation.)

It was in fact the Girl Scout food drive that made me realize it was time to talk to my kid about this. Seeing a friend post on Facebook about their child witnessing the neighbor's landscaper dragged away will do that. We gave him a barebones description of what the Trump administration is doing. We told him we'd give him a whistle, and if he saw anything like that, he should stay away – should run straight to a safe place – but as he went, he could blow the whistle to let people know what was happening. 

Then he said something I can't remember him saying in years: "I'm getting a little scared." 

So should we all.