With outrage growing over the Trump administration’s decision to detain and separate immigrant parents and children, Jacobin’s Meagan Day sat down with Georgetown professor Susan J. Terrio, author of the 2015 book, Whose Child Am I? Unaccompanied, Undocumented Children in U.S. Immigration Custody, which examined migrant kids who had traveled to the US by themselves, without a parent or guardian by their side.

As Terrio points out, those kids often had family members in the US who were waiting for them and whom they were trying to reach. In assuming the role of legal guardian for unaccompanied minors, the US government was practicing a form of family separation that predated the current crisis. Here, she talks about what happens to immigrant kids when the state falsely claims there’s no one else to care for them.