I’ve interviewed countless parents in their worst moments. The anguish of those whose children are abducted is unlike anything I’ve seen as a journalist.

Their eyes reveal the terror of not knowing whether their child is hurt or even alive. This is on top of the oppressive grief I’ve felt around parents who have to bury their children. It’s not knowing that keeps tearing you apart.

Not knowing if your child is being tortured is the worst torture a parent can endure.

That’s precisely why the Trump administration has implemented a new policy of separating parents from their children at the border. This is the message they want to send to desperate people seeking asylum or fleeing to our country: We will take your children. They might end up with human traffickers. You may never see them again. They may end up in a government center or a foster home or “whatever.”

This is what Chief of Staff John Kelly calls a “tough deterrent.”

It’s unspeakably inhumane.

Laura St. John, legal director with The Florence Project in Arizona, told MSNBC host Chris Hayes last week that she has seen a 53-week-old infant in court without a parent. The ACLU’s Lee Gelernt told Hayes of a mother hearing her daughter crying out, “Mommy, Mommy, don’t let them take me away.”

The New York Times reported that from October 2017 to April 2018, 700 children, more than 100 of them younger than 4 years old, had been taken from their parents at the border.

You can only tear children away from their parents if you don’t see these children as truly human.

The Washington Post reports that the consequence of this new “100 percent” prosecution policy for anyone who crosses the border illegally is that children will be separated from their parents as the adults are charged with a crime, even if the adults are seeking asylum and present themselves at official ports of entry. They may have to wait days or longer to find out where their children have been taken.

When you actually talk to parents who have a missing child, you will be haunted by their faces. When I would interview parents marking an anniversary of when their child went missing, I would try to wait until I was back in my car before I broke down crying.

Migrants escaping desperate situations in their home countries do not love their children any less than American parents.

Reports that the Department of Health and Human Services “lost track” of 1,475 unaccompanied migrant children last year are fundamentally misleading. You can lose track of your child in a mall if you get distracted. You don’t “lose track” of that many children at such high risk for human trafficking. That happens through deliberate neglect. Perhaps most of these children are with relatives or adult sponsors looking out for their safety and interests. No one really knows.

Ivanka Trump, who was so moved by images of gassed Syrian children that she personally intervened with her father, needs to speak up now. Pro-lifers who vote singularly on the issue of protecting unborn children need to stand up for these children. Our government is deliberately committing a large-scale human rights violation against the most vulnerable and voiceless.

Republicans and Democrats should set aside partisan differences and simply allow themselves to feel what a parent experiences when their child is taken from them. Allow children to remain with their parents as they go through whatever legal process they face. Traumatized people don’t just go away. Discarded people don’t disappear. We will bear the consequences of policies of cruelty designed to dehumanize and terrorize for generations to come.

Our government wants us to accept horrors done in our name to the most vulnerable and innocent.

But it’s not the victims who lose their humanity when this happens.

We do.

I felt my anger rising while I listened to a panel of students talk to a roomful of education journalists last week.

You may recognize a few of their names: Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg, two student survivors of the shooting at a Parkland, Florida high school in February. They were joined by fellow student activists Alex King of Chicago and Jackson Mittleman of Newtown, Connecticut, all of whom talked about how their personal experiences with gun violence turned them into activists for gun law reforms.

When I’ve watched teenage activists speak on television, I’ve been struck by how articulate and impassioned they are. They seem wise beyond their years. But when I watched them casually chat for an hour, I was taken by their youthful innocence. They teased one another, jumped in to finish each other’s sentences, rambled on while retelling stories and laughed at their own missteps. They sounded just like our kids, like teenagers in any school, any mall, any football game. And they had survived hell.

They described the trauma of massacres and killing that should be unimaginable to our kids.

I sat there seething. We’ve listened to these horror stories for years. It’s violence so obscene that it’s jarring to hear young people sitting around talking about it.

So far this year, more people have been killed at schools than have been killed as deployed members of the U.S. military. Every country has children struggling with mental illness and social isolation. America is the only one where they can easily acquire a weapon that can kill scores of people in minutes.

We are the only country where children are massacred in their schools over and over again, while politicians funded by the NRA do nothing. We all know that some changes would make these massacres less likely -- restrict access to assault-style semi-automatic firearms, close all background-check loopholes, make it easier to keep guns away from those with a violent criminal record or mental health issues, raise the age to 21 for gun buyers and hold gun owners responsible for leaving unsecured weapons around children and teens.

And yet, we haven’t made this a national emergency. Instead, people blame doors and Ritalin. Some argue that stronger laws won’t deter mass shooters. Why have laws at all, then, if people determined to commit crimes will do so anyway?

I listened to these kids, like the nearly 200,000 other American students who have been exposed to gun violence at school, while they begged for their classmates not be forgotten. They pleaded for us to tell their stories.

“You can’t let it fade away. It’s not something that should be insignificant to anyone,” Mittleman said. “We’ve just endured one of the worst things that people endure. You’re going to listen to us, and we’re going to start making change.”

I promised myself that I would keep telling the stories of children we have failed to protect. The next day, a shooter in southeast Texas opened fire on his classmates, killing 10 people.

News reports described the victims in ways that could be familiar to any parent:

Aaron Kyle McLeod, 15, was described as a bright student and a great athlete who enjoyed a good tennis match against his sister. He was a movie buff who liked watching musicals and playing on his PlayStation.

Angelique Ramirez, 15, was part of the youth ministry at Dayspring Church and attended Sunday services with her brother and parents.

Kimberly Vaughan, 14, was an avid reader and a senior Girl Scout who had learned sign language.

Cynthia Tisdale was a substitute teacher. Her husband has a terminal lung disease. They have four children.

Sabika Sheikh, 17, was an exchange student from Pakistan who was planning to return to her family in a few weeks.

Chris Stone, 17, played football and was described by his sister as adventurous and willing to try anything, including parasailing, jet skiing, zip-lining and hiking in the mountains.

Jared Black turned 17 three days before the shooting. He was looking forward to his birthday party on Saturday.

Shana Fisher, 16, was in her art class when she was killed. Her mom has said the shooter kept making advances on her for four months and she repeatedly told him no.

Glenda Ann Perkins was a substitute teacher. Her family described her as an amazing and devoted daughter, wife, mother, grandmother and friend.

Christian Riley Garcia, 15, was killed while blocking an art classroom door to try to protect his classmates from the gunman. His pastor said he was the first to help, loved football and enjoyed being outdoors.

I listened as four young people who also have lost classmates and friends begged us to hear their voices.

I’m keeping my promise.

The heckler was an eighth-grader. I was teaching youngsters about journalism at a middle school in suburban St. Louis this spring, and when I got to the slide labeled “Fake News,” a boy yelled “CNN!”

Most of the class laughed.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. I wanted him to think about what these words really meant. His heckling gave me a chance to ask a few more questions: Did he believe a news network was making up stories out of thin air and broadcasting them? Did he believe they were presenting facts from a biased perspective? Or did he just not like the stories they reported?

This student struggled to say exactly what “fake news” meant. Nowadays, it’s used as a joke or throwaway phrase when you disagree with someone. A similar exchange about “fake news” played out in every class I taught that day. It opened my eyes to the extent of one of the biggest problems facing parents and educators: How do we raise children in a post-truth world?

Originally, “fake news” referred to deliberately false stories designed to influence public opinion. One analysis found that fake or hoax stories got more reader engagement on Facebook than real news stories during the last three months of the 2016 election. Russian propaganda mills banked on Americans’ inability to separate fact from fiction.

But something far more sinister than naivete has crept into the understanding of “fake news.” President Trump revealed it in his own words, tweeting: “The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy and all things else, 91 percent of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?”

The president defines “fake” as “negative” stories about him. For him, a provable, real fact turns “fake” because it makes him look bad or he doesn’t like it.

That’s not how facts work. Information that can be demonstrably proven true does not become untrue because you disagree with it. Let’s say it one more time for those in the back: Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s fake.

For example, here’s a fact that I do not like, but is true nonetheless: I occasionally make errors in my stories. I hate when it happens, but it does, and I’ve had to correct those errors. Here’s another: St. Louis has high levels of gun violence. It’s an unfortunate fact, but one I can’t deny exists. One more: Obamacare increased the number of insured Americans, but also caused problems that need to be fixed. It’s possible to agree with the values of a policy objective and still accept the facts that reveal its shortcomings.

Historically, this is how we have understood facts and truth to work. They stand independently of our feelings.

Initially, when we were concerned about whether young people would be able to tell if information was true or not, we taught them to visit other independent sites to try to verify what they had seen. We can teach them to check Internet rumors on independent fact-checking sites like Snopes.com, Politifact.com or FactCheck.org.

But now we have to back up in this conversation. Let’s start with why truth matters. And let’s ask ourselves: How do you feel when your children lie to you? How would you react if your spouse lied to you? What about your boss or your doctor?

We would all be legitimately upset if our children, spouses, bosses or doctors lied to us. How can we make decisions about our lives if we can’t trust people to tell us the truth? Our basic autonomy depends on being able to tell what is real and what is not.

Cognitively, people are wired to believe what they want to believe. A significant percentage are willing to discount facts if they challenge what they “feel” to be true. Feelings can be swayed easily, as our emotions can be separated from logic and reasoning. The spread of social media and agenda-driven opinion shows allow people to stay in a bubble of what feels true as opposed to what is true.

So we have to be super clear about what words literally mean.

“Fake” means false or untrue. “Negative” means unfavorable or disagreeable. These words mean entirely different things. Something can be negative and also 100 percent true.

When our children can no longer tell the difference between fake and negative, when they don’t understand what “fake news” is and how it can be used as a political tool, when they are willing to disbelieve their own eyes and ears, that’s when they’ve lost their freedom.

In my discussion with the skeptical eighth-grader, I pointed out that if he only wanted news to exist that supported his preferred political party or candidate, we would end up with media a lot like North Korea’s.

No one found that scenario very funny.