Rachel Maddow Breaks Down During Broadcast About Migrant Babies Being Taken From Parents

Rachel Maddow reacts while reading the AP story about the babies and toddlers

During the Tuesday night broadcast of her MSNBC talk show, Rachel Maddow began to describe a breaking AP story about the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy and its effect on migrant families. Maddow struggled to read the first sentence—"Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to at least three 'tender age' shelters in South Texas"—stopping every few words to try to regain her composure.

Maddow tweeted an apologetic message shortly after the show ended:

Others understood why Maddow broke; Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffrey summed up the feelings of many:

Meanwhile, over on Fox News, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski mocked the children when Democratic strategist Zac Petkanas mentioned a 10-year-old migrant child with Down syndrome being separated from her parents:

Since early May, over 2,300 children have been taken from their parents at the southern border and placed in makeshift government-funded facilities. (Yahoo News has revealed five of the companies that are profiting off of operating the facilities.) An untold number of the children are pre-verbal, and it's unclear how they will be reunited with their parents, if ever.

Alicia Lieberman, who runs the Early Trauma Treatment Network at University of California, San Francisco, said the separations are likely to cause permanent psychological damage for the children.

"Children are biologically programmed to grow best in the care of a parent figure," Lieberman told the AP. "When that bond is broken through long and unexpected separations with no set timeline for reunion, children respond at the deepest physiological and emotional levels. Their fear triggers a flood of stress hormones that disrupt neural circuits in the brain, create high levels of anxiety, make them more susceptible to physical and emotional illness, and damage their capacity to manage their emotions, trust people, and focus their attention on age-appropriate activities."

Some Senate Republicans are searching for a way out of the border crisis, and last night some House Republicans met with President Trump.

According to the Wall Street Journal, "In the controversy over immigrant families, Mr. Trump said: 'We have to take care of separation,' according to a lawmaker in the room. 'It’s too nasty, it’s too nasty.'" However, the WSJ notes, "[H]e stopped short of telling them he would immediately reverse a widely condemned policy that has separated thousands of migrant children from their parents."

Here's how you can help the migrant children.