Border agents are tearing infants away from their families -- MSNBC host gets choked up discussing it

Laura St. John, legal director of the immigrant support organization The Florence Group, shared Friday night the horrifying details of the U.S. government's policy of taking immigrant children away from their families to MSNBC's Chris Hayes.

"What's happeneing right now is really unprecedented," she explained. "What we've seen here in Arizona is actually, since January, over 200 cases of parents being separated from their children. And some of these children are extremely young, as you mentioed. We've actually seen children who are 2 years old, regularly, and just last week we saw a 53-week-old infant in court without a parent."

Hayes paused and gulped, betraying his inner emotions as he continued: "I'm sorry, I'm having a really hard time thinking about this."

He went on: "At some point, someone from the government in a uniform comes and physically takes a 53-week-old baby away from the mother?"

"That's correct, yeah," she said. "What happens oftentimes at the border is that the parents are separated and taken into separate custody, and the children are brought into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, and brought into shelters run by the government."

Watch the clip below: