Hillary Clinton: Question of family reunification 'keeping me up at night'

"I was hopeful that I wouldn't see the worst of my fears come true," Clinton told The Guardian in an interview published Friday. "But it has been worse. I have to tell you, even I did not believe this would happen.

"The question of how we reunite the children who were taken from the parents is the one that's keeping me up at night."

Clinton attributed the family separations policy as a move by the administration to make the border wall look less extreme, in a strategic move Clinton said plays to Trump's base. The "zero-tolerance" policy has left over 2,000 children in the government's custody separated from their parents. Clinton called the policy "truly unimaginably cruel."

"I mean, you just ... who thinks like that? Who does these things? How can anybody look in the mirror? How can they actually live with themselves? If you heard about it in some third-world banana republic, you'd say: 'That's horrible! Stop it! Who would do that?' Now it's happening in our country, and it's just so distressing. I think a lot of us keep waiting for the bottom -- and it just seems to be bottomless."

Clinton has publicly addressed the "zero-tolerance" policy before, calling it a "moral and humanitarian crisis" last week at an awards lunch for the Women's Forum of New York.

"Every one of us who's ever been a parent or a grandparent, an aunt, a big sister, any one of us who's ever held a child in our arms, every human being with a sense of compassion and decency, should be outraged," she told the audience at the time.

In the Guardian interview, Clinton said she feels a duty to continue speaking out.

"It feels like a duty. It feels like patriotism, and it feels necessary," she said. "I'm not going anywhere."