While I was wrapping up this article, events at our southern border continued to accelerate. Over 5,000 troops were bivouacking there, setting up barbwire, firing tear gas, and taking a Thanksgiving break, as migrants/refugees began attempting entry. Meanwhile Trump was working to ban asylum seekers. Accordingly, the situation's turbulence resists finality and can only be treated as an ongoing work-in-progress. But if we can't predict where all this is leading, we can at least shed some light on how it fits into a larger picture. Reflections on children's traditional place in family and culture suggest that howsoever welcomed and cherished, they were often deployed to meet pressing needs of the group. We may trace an evolution in children's overall welfare being confirmed by reduced mortality rates. But on balance their condition is highly mixed: we merely need to observe the plight of today's immigrant children as bargaining chips for passing President Trump's pricey Wall. Cited below are historical precedents for treating children not as ends but as means to secure cultural/political goals alien to their developing natures. Occurring in Canada as well as the U.S. and Australia were systematic removals of indigenous peoples from their native lands. A different, ostensibly benign policy was the evacuation of English children from urban centers to safer rural areas during World War II bombings. Somewhat akin to these practices was our wartime removal of Japanese families to internment camps. Also closer to home were the early 20th Century Orphan Trains that shipped migratory youths from New York streets to labor in the Midwest. These precedents provide contexts for our central focus on current U.S. policies under Trump's Zero Tolerance: the separations of minors from their migratory parents. Just as previous historical practices reveal distinctive psychohistories, today's situation merits in-depth exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]