Compensate migrant families hurt by cruel family separation border policy.

Compensation to separated migrant families for their trauma is appropriate.

How do you compensate for harming the brain of a child?

That was the question posed last week when lawyers filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of young girls and boys taken from their parents under the Trump administration’s disastrous “zero tolerance” policy. Begun in April, halted in June after a torrent of outrage, the plan criminalized anyone who crossed into the United States without papers, including families seeking asylum.

As a result, even asylum seekers faced criminal charges in federal court, then removal proceedings. Their children who came with them were sent to federal shelters. The lawsuit alleges that the government violated due process by taking children from their parents and exposing them to trauma while in custody.

It’s up to the courts to decide if this complaint has merit. But the suit is a needed foray into demanding accountability for the Trump government’s cruelty to children — and what could be a lifetime of aftereffects.

Many Americans believe the detention of children is over. The opposite is true: A range of administration policies are normalizing child detention. Even now, scores of children remain separated from their parents. New plans for child detention are chugging ahead: The Department of Health and Human Services announced it will triple the size of a Texas tent colony for migrant children to 3,800 beds, and the administration is asking the Pentagon to house children on military bases. The administration has proposed regulations allowing children to be detained indefinitely, without their parents and without court oversight.

The lawsuit represents two Guatemalan families seeking asylum, but asks for certification to cover all other migrant children taken from their families now and in the future. Embracing all those minors in one lawsuit isn’t far-fetched. The types of trauma described by the Guatemalan families have been echoed by hundreds of young detainees.

Consider the story told by one family in the lawsuit: Soon after the 17-year-old boy and 9-year old girl were taken from their mother, they say immigration officials locked them in the “hielera,” or refrigerator, an icy-cold, concrete-floored room where migrants are routinely confined with only Mylar sheets for warmth. The girl reported that officers pulled her hair and woke her at all hours of the night; the boy stated that an officer kicked him repeatedly in the back. Both siblings described border officials deriding the weeping children around them, calling them “trash” in Spanish, and yelling at them to stop crying.

Hundreds of other children describe similar cruelty. A child welfare veteran who volunteered at the Dilley family detention center told the Chronicle she interviewed an 8-year-old boy who had witnessed a guard at another facility kicking a child. Other volunteers detailed reports of rampant emotional abuse: officers telling children they had been put up for adoption, promising to bring back a child’s mother and never returning, telling children they would never see their parents again. The children the volunteers talked with often acted manic, cried inconsolably or rocked back and forth.

No child deserves such treatment, which medical experts call abuse. It’s worth noting, though, that hundreds of families ended up in this situation after following U.S. law scrupulously, declaring themselves asylum seekers upon crossing the border.

It doesn’t take a doctor to know that ripping children from their most-trusted protectors harms them deeeply, both emotionally and physically. Prolonged trauma has been shown to stunt brain development. Millions of Americans know that the trauma of family separation echoes for generations. The haunting book “Help Me To Find My People” documents the lengths to which AfricanAmerican children went seeking their parents, sometimes after whole lifetimes separated by slavery. In Houston, 89-year old concentration camp survivor Ben Waserman remains haunted by the loss of his father, arrested and murdered by Nazis when Waserman was a child: “It is a tremendous thing to be separated from your parent.”

The migrants’ lawsuit doesn’t specify damages, but it does call for creation of a mental health care fund, which lawyers say could run to the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Legal accountability isn’t just for these children. It’s for all of us. One trait that really does make America great is the use of law to correct past wrongs. That’s why President Ronald Reagan signed a bill in 1988 apologizing to Americans of Japanese descent for their incarceration during World War II — and providing money in symbolic redress. Advocates for the bill invoked the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., arguing, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Social science bears this out. Legal consequences for discrimination do more than simply punish bad behavior. When we see anti-discrimination laws enforced, the values they stand for can sink into our bones and become norms. They guide our behavior.

Almost unfathomably, hurting children as a matter of policy may become the new American normal. Let’s keep up the bipartisan outcry to stop it.