*CRUELTY - IMMIGRANT- STUDENTS*

A LIFETIME AGO, Anne Frank's family applied for visas to the United States to escape Hitler, but-

We rejected the Franks and other desperate Jewish refugees.

We thought : This is Europe's problem, not ours, and we don't want to be overrun 'by those people'.''

Today President Trump is slamming the door on desperate refugees.

Indeed, the Trump administration is going a step further by wrenching children from the arms of  asylum-seekers, apparently as a way of inflicting gratuitous cruelty to discourage new arrivals.

Jose Demar Fuentes, a 30 year-old college graduate, arrived last November, with his 1-year-old son Mateo, from EI Salvador, where Fuentes was on a gang's execution list, according to his lawyer, Noreen Barcena.

Father and son entered the United States legally, presenting themselves to to an immigration officer, providing birth certificates and other documentation, and requesting asylum to save their lives.

Several days later, immigration officers came and took Mateo.

''They basically pried my client's son from his arms and told him that he he had to give up his son,'' Barcena told me.

''They were both crying.''

Mateo ended-up in foster care in Texas for about three months and had little or no contact with his family. Even kidnappers allow more communication.

Caitlin Dickerson of The Times reported that more than 700 children/students have been separated from immigrant parents since October.

I sought a comment from Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, but she declined to respond.

Tyler Houlton, a spokesman said  Homeland Security ''does not currently have a policy of separating families at the border for deterrence purposes .''

The administration notes, correctly, that some asylum seekers bring in unrelated young children to create sympathy.

Obviously, the authorities should crack down on that, but it's increasingly clear that family separation is in part about traumatizing children/student so as to discourage parents from coming to the U.S.

Indeed, the White House chief of staff , John Kelly, [at the time] said publicly last year that he was considering routine family separation ''to deter'' new arrivals.

The White House later backed the plan, although it has never been announced.

Why do we tolerate policy that is so cruel to young children/students?

For precisely the reason Dr. Seuss identified in a 1941 cartoon.

While Dr Seuss is best known for the likes of ''The Cat in the Hat,'' he published this cartoon as a commentary on America's turning away Jewish refugees trying to flee Hitler.

!WOW! thanks author and researcher Nicholas Kristof, as the *Operational Research* on the state of the world continues to Part 2.