You're also allowed to be here if you're seeking asylum.

But, at the end of the day, if your basis for the family border separation policy is to defend it with "well, criminals also have their families broken up," then I'm not sure how to convince you it's right to care about and have empathy for families and other human beings.

Not at all. I just find it curious that this one particular application of what is actually a common policy has suddenly become protest-worthy. By all means protest it in its entirety (if you think it’s appropriate for children to serve sentences alongside their parents in the same cells) but anything else just looks politically motivated.

What would be humane treatment? Hold kids together with parents? Same people will be outraged by putting kids behind (hypotethical) bars.

b) The effects are actually even worse than they are in the jail/prison situation. The kids themselves are incarcerated, as they don't have family that they can be placed with. We know that there are many migrants who have been deported after being separated from their children, who are now still in custody.

"At the moment, the government’s rolls include hundreds of children in shelters and temporary foster care programs who were taken from an adult at the border, whether a parent, grandparent or some other companion. About 13,000 children who came to the United States on their own were being held in federally contracted shelters this month, more than five times the number in May 2017." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/migrant-children-famil...