On Sunday, the first of the migrants who trekked across Central America and Mexico reached the U.S. border. A by all accounts peaceful march toward an entry point veered out of control when a massive police presence blocked them, and in the ensuing chaos some migrants made a mad dash to cross a sewage-filled river to reach the border. In response, Customs and Border Patrol agents on the U.S. side fired tear-gas canisters into the crowd.

It's a bleak and inevitable-seeming outcome considering how Donald Trump has been milking the spectacle of a migrant caravan that under normal circumstances would hardly merit any attention. But Trump's popular support is built mostly on anti-immigrant fear-mongering, so he's been spending weeks pretending the caravan was full of criminals and terrorists, despite all the photographs showing children and families and despite the fact that applying for asylum is a completely legal, non-criminal process.

An administration that enthusiastically imprisons children in desert camps wouldn't presumably have any qualms about tear-gassing them either, and that certainly seems to be the case. And just like when news broke this summer about the Trump administration's "family separation" policy, conservative media figures have been quick to rationalize, justify, and at times celebrate state authorities using chemical weapons on toddlers.

The Trump administration has had plenty of time to prepare for the caravan's arrival. We know that because Trump made a huge pre-election show of sending troops down to the border to wait for weeks with nothing to do and declared that rocks are the same as guns so U.S. soldiers were free to fire on them for barely any provocation. If they wanted nonviolent options, they could have implemented them. But as right-wing pundits have made clear, they don't consider these people to be people.

Of course, Fox & Friends was quick to give the president cover, claiming that getting hit with tear gas is the same as getting a speeding ticket (just one that can cause convulsions and fainting in adults). And they found a guest willing to misrepresent pepper spray as little more than hot sauce.

It's hard to stress just how contrived and manufactured this is. Had Trump not spent the weeks before the midterm elections goading his base with stories of the "Middle Easterner–filled" caravan, sending troops to line the border with "beautiful" razor wire, and threatening Mexico over the migrants' arrival, then these people would have just applied for asylum at a port of entry, a process that, again, is completely normal and legal. Instead he's whipped up a legal and military frenzy, the 2018 version of the "9/11 mosque" hysteria ahead of the 2010 midterms. Still, for his cheerleaders, there's no such thing as unjustified violence against immigrants.