As a child psychologist, I spent my career helping young children make sense of life’s toughest realities. There are ways of talking with children about such things that honor both the truth and their developing understanding. There, she told her mother, she saw her father on the sidewalk crying, surrounded by strange men. I explain to the mother that our aim is to tell children a version of the truth that matches in some respects what they saw — so they don’t question their own eyes. When the immigration policies of a nation allow federal agents to drag a crying father away in the dark, they leave children behind whose sense of joy and safety are permanently broken.