I can’t stop blogging about this seminal moment for our country.

Yesterday I heard isolated stories of reunification. One couple’s 14-month-old was taken and then returned 85 days later. He was filthy, and lice-ridden! Days later, he will not let his mother put him down, even to sleep.

Even so, HHS has no overarching plan to reunite kids already separated. Their cases will “proceed through the system.”

239 girls, the youngest 9 months old, arrived at a care facility in NYC, where they will be cared for during the day and spend the night with foster families. They arrived with lice, bedbugs, chicken pox, and other communicable diseases. Two other facilities in that city, Catholic Guardian Services and Lutheran Social Services, refused to reveal whether they are housing forcibly-removed children, but an 11-year-old staying at CGS had met younger children who had been separated from their parents.

Apparently the US has been paying for migrant shelters which transport, house, and maintain youths who cross the border alone for years, with over 30 facilities in Texas and 100 more in 13 other states. It’s a lucrative business. According to NYT, a single company, Southwest Key, won $955 million in contracts since 2015. Their CEO made $770,000 in 2015.

To be sure, these aren’t the temporary facilities with the lice and the cages. They are more dorm-style, with educational and recreational facilities, and movies.

Like white-collar crime prison.

In any case, they are filling up quickly, and they aren’t appropriate for “soft” Trump’s goal of detaining entire families. Besides new facilities, that plan depends on overturning the Flores decision, which prevents ICE from detaining children more than 20 days. It’s the reason for the existence of the billion-dollar industry of youth migrant shelters.

Unintended consequence?

Faced with an immigrant spike in 2014, Obama decided it was untenable to either separate children from their families or seek to extend child detainment, so his administration devised a plan involving close case management and ankle bracelets. Under this strategy, 95% of immigrants were showing up for their court dates, including ones who would be deported.

That’s the policy Trump replaced with Zero Tolerance and port-of-entry blocking in April. Then on May 20, Trump cancelled the funding that provides legal representation for unaccompanied minors, because with the influx it would cost too much. Remember, all the separated children are reclassified as Unaccompanied.

We don’t have a category for Ripped from Parent’s Arms or Virtual Orphan by Subterfuge.

There is so much more, but I should get to the positive stuff: Millions of dollars of pro-fairness donations–$15 million for RAICES alone–are pouring in from individual donors,* and at least one billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, has contributed as well as condemned. Led by American, multiple airlines have refused to transport forcibly-separated kids. A law firm in Washington state will represent immigrant-agency employees who want no part of the new policy. A few workers have resigned, while others are sneaking audio and video to the press.

This is a fight for America’s heart.

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* Wanna donate? You can find lists of organizations online, or if it’s hard to choose, ActBlue has an aggregation: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/kidsattheborder.