The Trump administration believes its cruel policy of taking children from parents deters illegal immigration. It must not be aware of the horrors the immigrants are escaping. A federal judge in Connecticut has given a glimpse in a landmark ruling.

Warning: The details are grisly.

A 9-year-old saw “his grandmother dead, with her body tossed into a river and her neck split open.” He saw a neighbor’s dead body in his backyard.

His father — his protector — got him out of that hellhole, but the escape wasn’t easy. “There would be times when his father did not eat so that (the boy) could eat,” the judge wrote.

Once they made it to Texas, the 9-year-old was taken from his father and sent nearly 2,000 miles away, to Connecticut. He got to speak with his father only twice in three weeks.

These chilling details are from Friday’s significant ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Victor Bolden in Bridgeport — the first in the nation to make clear that the Trumpian policy of separating families without a hearing violates the children’s constitutional rights, not just the parents’.

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We applaud Judge Bolden’s Constitution-grounded compassion. He ordered the federal government to bring the boy’s father to his Bridgeport courtroom this week, to let the two talk, and to deal with the PTSD that the child’s awful ordeal had caused.

Fortunately, Connecticut U.S. Attorney John H. Durham — long known locally as a “decent guy” and a “white knight” — did one better: He announced that the boy and his father would be reunited on Monday.

Also reunited were a 14-year-old girl held in Connecticut and her mother, detained in Texas. They had fled El Salvador when the girl’s stepfather was killed by a gang.

Held In “A Freezer”

These aren’t families coming to the U.S. “bringing crime,” as President Donald Trump famously said when he announced his run for president in 2015. They are fleeing crime, terror and death, as Judge Bolden’s ruling made clear.

Yet they were met at the border with inhumanity.

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The 9-year-old said he and his father were shut up in what he called “a freezer” in Texas and soon separated by hundreds of miles with very little communication.

No wonder, as a Yale psychiatrist reported to the judge, the boy “does not trust adults, and is depressed and tearful.” Also, no wonder that “he is terrified of the prospect of returning to Honduras because of his fear of gang violence there and the harm that could befall his father or his family.”

The 14-year-old girl also talked of being held in freezing conditions in Texas before she was sent to Connecticut, far from her mother.

She was “so distressed that she did not understand certain simple concepts and therefore could not answer the questions coherently,” the psychiatrist told the judge. She cried often and “would hide her face.” In six weeks, she got to speak to her mother just once.

Cheers to the heroes in Connecticut who wouldn’t stand for this abuse of children. We applaud them.

Cheers to Judge Bolden for standing up to the Trump administration and the terrible damage its “zero tolerance” policy is wreaking on already traumatized kids.

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Cheers to Connecticut Legal Services and the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School for taking on the children’s cases.

And cheers to the U.S. attorney in Connecticut for doing the right thing in ending these inhumane family separations earlier than expected.

They make this state proud.

Editorial by The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.)

Visit The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) at www.courant.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.


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