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Our statement on the current administration’s policy separating children and families:

As an agency committed to protecting the physical and mental health of children, and preventing and treating trauma from abuse that some children suffer every day, Family & Children’s Place forcefully condemns the policy and practice of separating children from their parents at our nation’s borders.

There is overwhelming evidence that separating children from their parents has significant and lasting consequences on the safety, health, development, and well-being of children. Separating children from their parents puts the children at greater risk of future significant physical, emotional, and mental illness.

Adverse Childhood Experiences – ACES – including the incarceration of a parent are proven precursors of negative health outcomes later in life. Institutionalizing children, and keeping some of them in cages, compounds their trauma.

The toxic stress and distress the government is forcing upon these children – and their parents – is cruel and inhumane. It’s abusive.

We call upon the nation’s leaders, beginning with Kentucky senator and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Rand Paul, and Rep. John Yarmuth, immediately to end this policy of separating children and families.

Immigration is a complex and critical issue that demands solution, but that solution must not come at the price of broken families and broken children, whose futures are being sacrificed for political purpose.