Mother’s Day is around the corner and while it is supposed to be a happy and celebratory occasion, for thousands of immigrant mothers and children it will be instead a day of fear and uncertainty. 

Count on the immoral Donald Trump administration’s heartless policies to turn even the most sacred holidays into nightmares, particularly for immigrant families continuously demonized and abused by the president himself and the gang of racists and liars he has shamefully surrounded himself with. 

For Trump and his minions, the rule of law is little more than an inconvenience to be ignored, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that this administration keeps separating migrant families despite a federal judge having barred family separations as a systemic policy last summer. 

"We are alarmed," Jennifer Nagda, policy director at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a Chicago-based national human rights group told USA Today. "In March and April, we again saw a notable increase." 

The newspaper lists several concrete examples: 

*Advocates at the Young Center's Harlingen, Texas, office said one in every five families they see at migrant shelters have been separated at the border for questionable reasons. The children ranged in age from 18 months to 15 years old.

*Attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project said they've counted more than 40 separated families a month in the McAllen area since the injunction in June.

*Officials at Al Otro Lado, which advocates for immigrants in California, said dozens of families are separated each day throughout the San Diego metro area. 

Not surprisingly, even though the government gives 389 as the number of families separated since last summer’s federal prohibition, advocates affirm the number of separated children, many of them less than 5 years old, is much higher. 

Almost incredibly, the government did not keep enough information about the separated families in order to be able to reunite them quickly or, sometimes, at all. 

"[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful," a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. "We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children." 

As a result, tracking separations manually would take months to reunite nearly 3,000 families separated under Trump’s "zero tolerance" policy. 

No, this Mother’s Day won’t be a happy one for immigrant mothers and children although their plight is not fake, is not an invention, is not an attempt to game the system to enjoy the riches of their powerful neighbor to the North. 

It is the U.S. craving for illegal drugs that fuels most of the gang brutality in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala that forces them to flee for their lives. As we have said before, these are persecuted people whose lives are in danger and deserve all the rights and protections afforded to refugees and asylum seekers. 

But Trump and his people have made racism, inhumanity and cruelty the pillars of this administration’s immigration policy, which means that this Mother’s Day sadness and uncertainty will shamefully take the place of joy and celebration for thousands of immigrant families. 

How much more of this administration’s racism, corruption and lawlessness can the country take?