And these are not—like it or not, these aren’t our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas,” announced Brian Kilmeade. His Fox & Friends co-host Ainely Earhardt added, “Yeah, well he just wants to make sure we vet who’s coming across the border, in case it’s MS-13 or drugs.” Neither discussing children as somebody else’s nor worrying about crime is unusual. But the combination is dangerous.

Many of the worst episodes of child abuse and neglect at the hands of state and federal officials have taken place amid moral panics about crime. These brief periods of hysteria have often disproportionately portrayed youth of color as dangerous “others.” During these panics, public figures have advocated draconian policies to punish youth from marginalized groups, portraying them as “exogenous,” that is, outside of society and less deserving of the protections afforded to children. Since the 1960s, sociologists have warned us against moral panics fueled by distorted images of “folk devils,” who might simply be other people’s children. Too often, we have failed to heed this warning, causing untold pain and suffering to generations of young people and their loved ones.

We need not look too far back in our history to find shameful examples of such panics. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the nation was gripped by a moral panic over the latest folk devil: the so-called “super-predator.” Experts warned of an explosion of violent juvenile crime committed by African American and Latino youth. News accounts regularly portrayed youth accused of violent crimes as “savage, wild animals.” Indeed, one of the “super-predator” era’s first episodes was the Central Park jogger case, which took place in New York City between 1989 and 1990. Five African American and Latino teenagers from Harlem, all between the ages of fourteen and sixteen years old, were charged with assaulting and raping a white woman, an investment banker who barely survived the attack. In the ensuing media frenzy, the boys were portrayed as “savage, wild animals.” Tabloids ran headlines such as “Wolf Pack’s Prey” and “Park Marauders Call It ‘WILDING’ . . . and It’s Street Slang for Going Berserk.” Donald Trump, then a private citizen, took out a full-page advertisement in four of the city’s newspapers, including the New York Times and the New York Daily News, which called for the death penalty for the “roving bands of wild criminals who roam our neighborhoods.” Lamenting “the complete breakdown of life as we knew it,” the advertisement insisted that “these muggers and murders… should be forced to suffer.”

And suffer they did. The police and prosecutors coerced the Central Park Five, as the boys became known, into giving false confessions. These confessions in turn were used as the main evidence during their trials in adult criminal court in August and December of 1990. Despite the lack of eyewitness testimony or DNA evidence tying them to the crime, the boys were convicted and served between five and thirteen years in prison. Vindication for the Central Park Five would not come until 2002, when a serial rapist already imprisoned for other crimes came forward and confessed to having assaulted the Central Park jogger in 1989. By 2014, the Central Park Five, now approaching middle age, had seen their sentences vacated and won a $40 million settlement from the City of New York for wrongful conviction and imprisonment.

So pervasive was the “super-predator” panic that it even swept up poor and working-class white teenagers in its wake. In 1994, three white teenage boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, were convicted of the torture and murder of three young children primarily on the basis of their supposed membership in a Satanic cult rather than any direct evidence connecting them to the crime. As in the Central Park case, police and prosecutors coerced confessions from the boys. Meanwhile, the media presented religious leaders in place of child welfare experts to comment on the boys’ alleged motives, resulting in a portrayal of the boys as “evil people.” Convicted in adult court, the alleged ringleader, seventeen-year-old Damien Echols, was sentenced to death, while his two co-defendants received life sentences. Over the next two decades, a campaign to overturn the convictions of the West Memphis Three produced three widely viewed documentary films, numerous books and articles, celebrity fundraising events, and websites devoted to proving their innocence. Finally, in 2010, new DNA evidence and witness testimony resulted in their release, although the boys were now men in their thirties.

These episodes illustrate the irrevocable harm wrought by the “super-predator” panic. Criminologist John J. DiIulio cited the Central Park jogger case as evidence for a generation of “super-predators” who were uniquely violent. More broadly, the concept influenced a flurry of “tough on crime” policies that helped fuel the mass incarceration of youth, particularly those who were black or brown, even as the violent juvenile crime rate was dropping dramatically. Between 1992 and 1996, nearly early every state adopted harsh sentencing guidelines that allowed children to be prosecuted as adults and spent millions of dollars constructing prisons for their incarceration. The nation is only beginning to come to grips with the terrible human toll of such measures.

Now, we find ourselves facing equally awful consequences of a moral panic that began years ago, concerning undocumented immigrant youth. Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County and now a candidate for the U.S. Senate, operated a tent city in the Arizona desert for nearly two decades based on the premise of protecting Americans from “illegal aliens” who were inherently violent and dangerous, despite the fact that data shows immigrants commit crimes at significantly lower rates than native-born Americans. Two years ago, then-candidate Trump explicitly drew on the language of the moral panic by declaring Mexicans migrants to be “rapists” and “drug dealers.”  More recently, he pardoned Arpaio, who had been convicted of criminal contempt for violating a federal judge’s order to stop racially profiling Latinos. The moral panic over immigration has become tightly wound into our politics.

And it is now in the phase of splashing onto children. Today, defenders of the family separation policy liken immigrant children, some still in diapers, to the Central American drug gang MS-13. President Trump himself refers to them as “animals” who threaten to “infest” the US, evoking a global tide of nonwhite immigration into Western Europe as well as the US.

In the past, when Americans have decided that other people’s children are not really human, they have become complicit in cruel and unusual punishments. Today, we are putting children in cages and separating infants from their mothers to keep them in “tender age shelters.” These children are at-risk, for sure. And so is our shared humanity.