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The administration’s brand of constant chaos has in recent weeks distracted from the presidential policy that had dominated attention at the start of the year: Donald Trump’s atrocious abuses of immigrants. Unfortunately, those policies continue unabated.

What’s worse, children are bearing the brunt of these measures—in more ways than you might expect. As local officials are widely seen to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement brutality, young people in general are either growing more adversarial toward law enforcement in their own communities or imitating the bullying and abuse of marginalized peers that they see from officers of the law. Many youth—not just those who have had the grave misfortune of being arrested and stuck in hellish immigration detention centers—are intently watching these interactions and wondering what’s next for them. There are too many such stories to list them all.

Consider the 16-year-old who was trying to prevent ICE officers from arresting and taking her mother and 3-month-old sister, while local police restrained and arrested her to stop her from blocking the ICE vehicle with her mother inside it.

Or the child following an ICE agent in Portland, banging her hand on the agent’s car until the agent called local police to ask for help: “Send someone over, or I’m gonna shoot this kid.”

Or the 13-year-old who was picked up by police at a bus stop in Everett, Massachusetts, on suspicion of threatening a peer. The police called his mother, who waited to take him home, to no avail: As she waited, the police had arranged for ICE to take the boy to a detention center in the state, before detaining him for three months in Virginia, at which point he “decided” to “self-deport.”

Then there are the officers conducting these operations intentionally in front of children, under a series of Trump executive orders that ended the prior policy of........

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