'This amounts to child abuse': Pediatrician tells CNN Trump is permanently scarring immigrant kids

A pediatrician told CNN's Kate Bolduan on Monday that President Donald Trump's policy of separating children from their families could be doing irreparable harm to their emotional and cognitive development.

Dr. Colleen Kraft, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, outlined all the ways that the Trump administration's family separation policy is harmful to young children -- and she described in heartbreaking detail what she saw first-hand when she visited a detention facility where immigrant children were being held.

"I can't describe to you the room I was in with the toddlers," Kraft said of the detention facility. "Normally toddlers are rambunctious and running around. We had one child just screaming and crying, and the others were really silent. And this is not normal activity or brain development with these children."

According to Kraft, this could have a long-term impact on these children, whose brains are not yet equipped to handle these kinds of stressful situations.

"It disrupts their brain architecture and keeps them from developing language and social emotional bonds, and gross motor skills, and the development that they could possibly have," she said.

In the end, Kraft said that there's no other way to describe the administration's family separation policy except to say that, "This does amount to child abuse."

Watch the video below.