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Donald Trump finally yielded to public outrage Wednesday and Watch I Did It For You Onlinesigned an executive order to halt the separation of migrant parents and children crossing the border. It ended one chapter of a crisis created by his own administration and began another phase that should elicit the same level of public fury.

SEE ALSO: How to stop feeling helpless when you hear about immigrant children taken from their parents

First, that executive order makes no mention of government efforts to reunite more than 2,000 children with their parents. Many advocates fear such reunions will never happen given what they're hearing from detained parents who cannot locate their children and have been given no information about their whereabouts. That alone should provoke swift, impassioned demands of accountability from those who opposed family separation.

But Trump's executive order also replaces tearing families apart with an equally inhumane alternative: detaining them together indefinitely. We've seen what that looks like before. President Obama's administration expanded the use of family detention centers at the height of a refugee crisis in 2014 that sent tens of thousands adults, families, and unaccompanied children to the border seeking asylum, particularly from Honduras and El Salvador.

"If it looks like a prison and feels like a prison, it’s a prison."

The abuses documented in those centers included sexual assault and prolonged stays with no sight of release. The conditions were often deplorable and access to medical and mental health care was unreliable. Young children experienced stress that affected their development, and some witnessed abuse of their mothers. Indeed, these facilities were jails in everything but name, treating refugees like people who'd committed a crime.

Layla M. Razavi, policy director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, toured a family detention center in 2014 in Karnes City, Texas.

"If it looks like a prison and feels like a prison, it’s a prison," Razavi says. "There’s no world in which a family detention center operates at all like a migrant shelter or where people seek refuge and asylum."

Advocates successfully pushed the Obama administration to drastically reduce the use of family detention centers for migrants awaiting court hearings for their asylum cases. Instead, many families were able to stay with community or relative sponsors. Advocates do not want to see the Trump administration resurrect family detention as an alternative to the cruel practice of separating children and parents.

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The crux of this problem, they say, is Attorney General Jeff Sessions' "zero-tolerance" policy of prosecuting "illegal entry" into the United States. That includes charging refugees who cross the border anywhere but an official port of entry, where they are supposed to present themselves with an asylum claim. Yet, the federal government has increasingly shut down those ports or told refugees to return another day.

Since every migrant crossing without permission is being prosecuted, and is thus detained for criminal court proceedings, it's creating a surge in a system without the capacity to handle it. The administration also ended a successful program used by the Obama administration that paired families with a case manager and legal guidance so they knew how to apply for asylum and when to attend immigration court proceedings. Families in that program could live with community or family sponsors.

"This is absolutely part of a coordinated strategy [by the Trump administration] to do everything they can to criminalize immigrants who are here and scare away the ones who might come," says Jess Morales Rocketto, political director of National Domestic Workers Alliance, an advocacy group that's helped lead resistance to Trump's policy and spearheads the Families Belong Together campaign.

"We did not mean families belong together in jail," says Morales Rocketto.

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The NDWA is calling for an end to Sessions' policy, and other advocacy organizations have criticized the executive order as harmful to migrant families and children.

The ACLU said it "would replace one crisis for another." The American Psychological Association said it "could create new challenges to the health and well-being of immigrant families" through the possibility of prolonged or indefinite detention. Michelle Brané, director of the migrant rights and justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said the order "effectively creates family prisons" which have "repeatedly been found to be unsuitable for children."

Morales Rocketto, who recently visited a processing center for migrant children in McAllen, Texas, is urging the public to "double down" on its outrage about how migrant families are being treated, and to pressure the administration for an end to the zero-tolerance policy.

"There is no way to exaggerate on this," she says. "The more we uncover, the worse it is."

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Topics Activism Social Good Donald Trump Politics Immigration