Think child separations are unprecedented?

Just before sunrise on a summer Sunday morning, 120 government agents swoop down on a remote community in Arizona. By the time they are done, 36 fathers will be arrested, and 86 women and 263 children, many of them crying, will be herded onto buses and shipped hundreds of miles away, where some of the children will be placed in foster care.

This was not a scene along the U.S. border with Mexico in 2018. It happened in 1953, in a place called Short Creek, on the Arizona-Utah border, during an attempt to crack down on polygamy.

Some of the women involved were "sister wives," married to the same man, and remained separated for as long as two years before they were allowed to return to their homes. The national furor over the raid would eventually cost Arizona’s governor his job.