To someone like Donald Trump—who measures success strictly through big ratings, big dollar values, just big numbers in general—his aggressive "zero tolerance" immigration policy is a huge success. In just six weeks his administration has forcibly separated 1995 immigrant children from their parents. The numbers of children living in prison-like facilities are so high that the administration is shopping for space to set up tent cities to house them all, and defense contractors are seeing a potentially massive pay day in the burgeoning child detention industry.

But Trump uncharacteristically doesn't want credit for these big numbers. In fact, he spent the week blaming his administration's unilateral decision on Democrats, saying the "law" is their fault and they won't come to the table to fix it; never mind the factthat Trump's party controls both houses of Congress and the Democrats couldn't even stop a train wreck like Betsy DeVos from getting confirmed.

Maybe even Trump realizes that running facilities that look a lot like concentration camps full of kids is bad optics. Such bad optics in fact that Trump's been condemned by usually stalwart supporters like the Southern Baptist Convention and evangelist Franklin Graham. And as more people actually get inside these centers and report on what they find there, the situation for these thousands of children in custody looks bleaker and bleaker. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited a shelter in Texas, where she was told that neither she nor staff members were allowed to touch or comfort distraught children. Kraft told NPR