In a stunningly troubling admission today, the Trump administration acknowledged that it may be impossible to reunite thousands of children who were separated from their parents as part of their horrifically malevolent family separation policy.

The number of children at risk is not even known (though the number is at least 2,737) because of inadequate record-keeping. Because so many of the parents of these children were deported, and again, record-keeping was poor, reunification of the children with the parents was always going to be a difficult proposition. Then there was the patent absurdity of forcing immigrant children as young as 3 years old participate in their defense in their own deportation proceedings. Many of these children have been languishing in cages at facilities run by CBP. Staffing at these facilities is threadbare and oversight has not been allowed except in the rarest of cases.

Finally, and most disturbingly, a number of the children have been determined to have been abandoned by their parents. Migrant parents were often coerced into signing away the rights to their children prior to being deported. In many cases, the agreements they signed were not in a language they could read. Many of them were told by US immigration officials that they would never see their children again. As a result, some of them are in the care of adoption agencies, one of which, Bethany Christian Services, has close financial ties to Education Secretary Betsy De Vos and her family. Bethany has been profiteering off of their provision of care, to the tune of $700 per child per night, far higher than the normal rate for such care. Ultimately, some of these children have been adopted away. The family separation policy has resulted in nothing less than state-sponsored kidnapping.

Even when families have been reunited, there have been harrowing scenes of destroyed parent/child bonds. Young children have literally crawled away from their parents, and older children have been told that their parents abandoned them, and therefore stated that they did not want to be with their parents when they were finally reunified.

It is hard to fathom the mindset that would even concoct such a cruel policy, yet several potential authors come to mind in the Trump administration, including Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Sebastian Gorka, with Miller, Trump’s point man on immigration policy holding the inside track. Kirstjen Nielsen ludicrously tried to deny the policy both in public statements and in front of Congress. Now that the House is in Democratic hands, she may face hearings for perjury.

The long-term traumatic consequences of this policy are also difficult to measure. It is particularly harmful to separate children from their parents because of the damage it will do to parent/child bonding. These children will never have completely normal relationships with whatever parental figures they may have, and it is hard to measure the consequences of these disrupted bonds for adulthood and beyond. In the international community, separation of families is seen as a form of genocide for just these kinds of reasons.

It is unlikely that the Trump administration will ever have to face consequences for these crimes against humanity. But they should. At very least, they should be required to spend whatever money is necessary and use whatever resources are required to reunite these families. The callous disregard for human suffering is a low point in American history.