To quote Corey  “Loopy” Lewandowski, “womp! womp!” Seems like Melania has more clout in the White House than anyone could have guessed.  Trump, with great fanfare and hostage DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at his side, signs an executive order to reverse the policy that wasn’t  (a policy, that is) to stop separating mothers (or fathers) from their children.

You’ve seen the videos and heard the crying of small children for their mothers or fathers. You know that there are three or four detention centers for children of “tender age”–with varying descriptors of that age might be. Like everything the Trump administration does, chaos rules. We know he likes it like that.

The chaos means that there are children still in one internment camp or another (location currently unknown for many, if not most, parents). Meanwhile, some of those parents have already been deported back to Honduras, Guatemala or elsewhere!  The chaos means that toddlers, children with disabilities and even infants will be emotionally scarred. Listen to what the pediatric psychologists have to say about that. Then there’s the parents–undergoing enormous psychic trauma as well, with the enormity magnified with the knowledge of an adult.

Eventually, the whole process may be stopped completely–with intervention by Congress and the courts. Will the families be reunited? Will many–or any, receive asylum? Whether they are ever reunited or not, the families will have been harmed by the actions of Trump, Jeff Sessions, Kirstjen Nielsen and others. Harm that was reasonably foreseeable. Harm to people with the zone of the action. Harm that at best was negligent, but arguably was intentional–all the better to play on the political stage and prove to Trump’s base how much he wants to stop the “infestation” of America. 

Legally speaking, what cause of action do those actions and harms lead to? Depending on what plaintiff’s lawyers allege and can get a court to agree: Either intentional infliction of emotional distress or negligent infliction of emotional distress. Those are torts, civil actions like the defamation case Summer Zervos is suing Trump for.

Cases for the infliction of emotional distress will be countless. I don’t know whether they might be combined into a class action (not too likely, in my opinion). The only question is how quickly will they be initiated and in court. I have no doubt, there are lawyers out there making preparations RIGHT NOW for suing Trump, et al. Only massive damages will fund the aggregate costs of therapy that those families will need.

Make no mistake about it–the financial damages in individual cases of this particular emotional distress are likely to be substantial. In the aggregate, for all those affected, the damages could be astronomical.  Amounts so large that the total might drain whatever “wealth” Trump might still have after all the other suits currently pending.  We can hope the emotional distress suits successfully proceed and Trump has one more bankruptcy–the biggest one of all!

In the midst of the “Zero Tolerance” concentration camp  horrors, how can one find any humor–even if it’s biting satire? It takes a mind like mine. Feel free to retweet this if you like; I don’t tweet myself–it’s too risky a proposition given what I might foolishly say.