Trump's Inhumane Border Policy Tests America

IT IS A CRISIS DONALD TRUMP CREATED AND always had the power to solve. At detention facilities across the country, children are penned in cages, crying out piteously for the parents from whom they have been torn by border agents on orders from Washington. Some children may never see their mother or father again.

- Molly Ball

In a presidency marked by serial outrages, the scandal over family separations at the southern border has been unlike any other. The President didn’t just say something offensive, he intentionally turned the machinery of the state on some of the world’s most vulnerable humans. He applied his signature approach—brutal toughness—to his trademark issue, immigration. He greeted criticism of his policy with mockery, falsehoods and blame casting. He handcuffed the Republican Party and hamstrung understaffed federal agencies. All the themes of Trump’s character and Administration were embodied in this wrenching calamity.

At first, Trump embraced the outrage, as he so often does. Even as the pictures, video and audio began to trickle out of the detention facilities, and awful stories spread—a woman deported without her son; older children changing younger ones’ diapers—supporters predicted that Trump would stand his ground. “The President is stubborn enough to stick with this,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tougher immigration laws. “If they can weather this, they can just about weather anything.”

But the images of young children sobbing for their parents created an outcry that neither Trump nor his opponents anticipated. Recriminations poured in, some of them from unexpected quarters. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham called it “disgraceful.” Former First Lady Laura Bush wrote a scathing op-ed. Even Melania Trump issued an unusual statement deploring the situation and worked her husband behind the scenes, according to a White House official. The President and his party faced a toxic scenario in an election year that was already looking grim. “It’s political insanity,” a top Senate Republican aide told TIME. “It will kill us.”