Over the past month, the Trump administration has enacted, denied and now reversed the policy of separating children from their parents at the borders and detaining the children in prison-like immigrant housing facilities while they await criminal trial for simply trying to cross the border.

Now, the ethics of this policy are beyond civil discussion. There is nothing I can say in a 500-800 word article about forcing children and infants away from their parents that can do justice to this horror. And luckily, I am not alone in my opinion: 64% of voters and even 34% of Republicans opposed this policy even before Trump signed the executive order quasi-ending it. However, the immediate visceral reaction opponents of the policy had to the news that this was going on leaves some historical accuracy to be desired.

More specifically, I speak of the "this is not us" rhetoric I've seen tossed around on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and others. "This is not the America I know" is common language in these types of posts.

But the thing is, this absolutely is America.

America has a long-held history of forcing atrocities on immigrants, children and anyone else it finds inconvenient or threatening. We are just really good at covering it up and lying about our history.

The Japanese internment camps are a prime example of history repeating itself. Non-offending naturalized Japanese families were ripped from their towns, communities, and jobs and forced into internment camps for no other reason than their ethnicity while the US was fighting WWII. The irony of America enacting similar policy on its own citizens while fighting Germany for doing close to the same thing is an important insight into the blinding power of nationalism that America is all too guilty of.

But the Japanese internment camps are not the only example. America was founded on these very principles when we forced Native Americans out of their own homes into increasingly small areas of land where they were treated as aliens in a land they had more claim to than any of their oppressors.

Over the past two and a half centuries that America has existed, we have continued to restrict Native Americans more and more to where now Native Americans who live on reservations are subjected to, according to experts, near-Third-World conditions.

Separating families isn't a new policy for the American government: From 1860-1978, Native American children were routinely taken from their parents and forced into boarding schools where they were subject to abuse, were denied any practice of their culture and weren't allowed to see or communicate with their families except over holidays.

And yet, these facts are continuously looked over in history books and are seldom taught in schools. State curriculums heavily discourage teachers from informing students about the US's history of xenophobia while still keeping the Holocaust as a major part of the curriculum. Elementary school students are openly lied to about American treatment of Native Americans, and many students don't learn the truth until college. Some never learn it.

Which is probably what scares me the most about this Trump policy, before the executive order and even going forward. Next to those tweets about how "this isn't us" and "this is not the America I know" are tweets wondering about what future generations are going to think of us when they're taught this in schools. And I honestly don't know.

I don't know if this will be taught in schools. I don't know if we will finally learn from our mistakes or fall into the same trap we always do: covering up our history and acting surprised when we fall back into the same patterns. And I don't know how we can improve as a nation without accepting responsibility for our failures.