Few images evoke a more visceral reaction than seeing authorities tear children from the arms of their mothers. As the men in uniform pry hands from their mothers’ legs, the children are wide-eyed in terror while the mothers scream in panic.

Since early May, ICE employees, acting on orders from Trump, have been separating parents and children at the border, including those seeking political asylum. The children have included 18-month old toddlers and a six-year-old blind girl. ICE is prosecuting the parents as “child traffickers” while declaring the children “unaccompanied minors” and sending them off to relatives or foster homes. There are plans to house them at military bases. A lawsuit by the ACLU seeking a restraining order against the separations is pending.

There is little video footage from the border, but this scene in San Diego, in which a woman who has lived in the community for years, is taken from her family provides an indication of the trauma:

The comments on the video illustrates the widespread public support for this cruelty.

This scene, involving white authorities and brown children, is a recurring pattern on US soil over the centuries. It is a policy designed to make America whiter by terrorizing people of color, specifically by targeting mothers and children. Each time it is part of an over-arching policy to build a white society, and each time it has had the support of at least a third of the white population.

Most Americans are familiar with this drama at slave plantations, such as this scene depicted in Roots, made more tame by the fact that Kizzy is a young adult:

Less familiar to many, child separations occurred repeatedly from 1879 to at least the 1950s with regard to Native American children and boarding schools. The enlightened policy articulated by Richard Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was to “kill the Indian, save the man”. That is, instead of massacring them all, it was more humane to simply take their children and strip them of their name, language, identity, and culture. Tens of thousands of children were sent across the country to boarding schools far away, forever disrupting their lives and connection to their home communities.

There was resistance. Parents hid their kids when government officials arrived. In 1895 nineteen Hopi men were imprisoned on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay for refusing to allow their children to be taken to a boarding school. They were to be “held in confinement, at hard labor, until they shall show they fully realize the error of their evil ways, until they shall evince a desire to cease interference with the plans of the government for the civilization and education of its indian wards.” As they were loaded onto the boat at the Clay Street Wharf, a crowd of whites teased them while the local paper reported that there were “cruel, cold-blooded savages”.

There are no videos from that time, but there are some accounts from boarding school survivors, such as this one:

While the psychological effects of a single event like this will no doubt stay with a child forever, a recent story about an Alaskan Native illustrates the impact of such actions on future generations.

Last week, in the midst of the controversy over the child removals at the border, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke suggested sending troubled Native children to a boarding school over a thousand miles from their reservation.