Honestly, I've been struggling for a while now because I just don't know how we got here. Maybe I was naïve to the racism, sexism, and bigotry that seems to be running rampant in our country. Maybe it's the fact that the current POTUS embodies all of these awful traits that others aren't afraid to show them as well. Whatever the case, I'm honestly scared for our country and for our future.

When I was learning about the Holocaust in middle school, my classmates and I were horrified that someone so evil could rise to power and that people would blindly follow him. You would hope that we would learn from history and not let it repeat itself. Yet, here we are, separating families, putting children in camps, killing and jailing people for their race while pardoning people who aren't minorities. I am not being dramatic; these things start slow.

Hitler also began with fascism and deporting minorities.

No matter what your politics are, I don't understand how anyone can look at a child in a cage and think, "That seems right." There are children being ripped from their parents with no indication of when they may see them again, if ever.

In case you're confused, let me clear something up. When undocumented immigrants are detained, the government can either submit them for deportation, or prosecute them for unlawful entry, which is a misdemeanor. Common misdemeanors include getting a parking ticket or public intoxication, but you don't see parents having their children ripped away from them for those. In May, the Trump Administration issued a "zero tolerance" policy.

Because there was no warning, the Office of Refugee Resettlement can't keep up with the job of finding family members for children whose parents have been jailed for unlawful entry. This led to these children being sent to detention facilities (where 1,500 children were lost and most likely sold into human trafficking).There is absolutely no reason to split these families up; it is cruel and unnecessary.

What a lot of people seem to not understand is that there is a difference between unlawful entry and lawful application for asylum. Yet under the Trump Administration, those applying for asylum are still having their families ripped away from them. These people are presented with the option to either continue the asylum process while still being separated from their families (which takes an average of 400 days), or to be found guilty of immigration fraud and being deported, even though they did nothing wrong.

This was not a policy under the Obama Administration. President Obama never ripped families apart and put children in cages. This has not been going on for years, it is happening now and it needs to be stopped. Congress has a bill right now that could stop all of this but not one Republican senator has stepped forward to support it, only Democrats.

Trump is blackmailing Democrats into providing funds for his wall (weird, I thought Trump was going to make the Mexicans pay for that), and he will not support any legislation that will make it illegal to separate families at the border until it is combined with funding for the wall. He is lying when he says that the Democrats are making it impossible to stop the tragedies that are happening at the border. This is not me trying to pit the parties against each other; this is me listing facts.

This is just the latest in horrors that have plagued our country since Trump was voted into office. We have seen Nazis marching without consequence. Black people are suffering every day, whether they are being killed or jailed for crimes that they did not commit. A blonde girl can proudly tote her machine gun around a college campus without being bothered, but a black man was shot and killed for holding a cell phone. Women's health care is constantly in jeopardy.

A detention officer raped a four-year-old girl and threatened to deport her mother if she told authorities. NFL players have been told that if they express free speech and protest peacefully, they will be fined. This is disgusting.

I don't care that some of these people were trying to enter the U.S. illegally; children should not be in cages. These children are not "crisis actors" (neither were the victims of the shooting in Parkland). To those who think that they are, are you that dumb, or that in denial of what's going on? If you think that these people deserve to be ripped apart, you are a racist. It is that simple. By the way, a man who can't even spell the word "border" shouldn't be in charge of one.