We have our answer now, Americans. A cruel and abusive policy of splitting up families at the border and warehousing young children is not America after all.

It is not what this country stands for. It is what we stand against. And we did.

President Trump has announced his retreat from traumatizing practice that led to the traumatic practice of separating Central American families seeking asylum at the border.

EDITORIAL: Forget law and order at the border. Trump wants pain.

OPINION: Separating families? Not in our backyard.

LAURA BUSH: Separating children from their parents at the border 'breaks my heart'

It’s a welcome change, albeit a surprise after the president himself threw up his hands and indicated only Democrats could fix the problem. Congressmembers such as U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, meanwhile, insisted that only legislative action could stop the heart-wrenching scourge. And Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen fell back on semantics, insisting at a press conference that a policy specifically ordering separations didn’t exist. It didn’t, but the weeping, frightened children were the direct result of a policy that did exist: Trump’s zero-tolerance edict ordering criminal prosecution of unauthorized migrants.

That Washington, D.C. double-speak was only swept away by a torrent of protest and direct action by concerned leaders and everyday Americans who inundated our nation over the past several days.

Politicians like Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, and U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, marched on the detention facilities along the border demanding transparency. Journalists exposed the reality of mourning parents, kids in cages and missing children shipped across the country. People protested in the streets, and outside detention centers, and at their representatives’ offices.

Activists from the Democratic Socialists of America went even further, personally confronting Nielsen in a Mexican restaurant.

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At a time when gerrymandering and dark money can make the average American feel powerless to influence the political machine, this moment reminds us that the levers of our republic remain firmly in our grasp — so long as we hold dear to the rights of free speech and free press.

Too often during his administration, the burden of preserving the conscience of our nation has fallen solely on the people in the absence of its leaders, whether at airports in opposition to a travel ban on Muslim countries or in the streets to save the Affordable Care Act — a protest that may need to start again soon.

The power to speak freely, for average people and the media to criticize top levels of government without fear of retribution, is the only way to ward off the creeping claws of tyranny.

It is the power we saw at the Euromaidan, when Russian influence tried to repress a nation leaning toward a liberal West, and in South Korea, when political corruption was exposed at the highest levels over government.

It is a power written into the soul of our nation at the Lincoln Memorial and at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

And the march doesn’t end here.

EDITORIAL: Who is dying at the border? Texas needs to know.

The Trump administration will likely keep enforcing a so-called zero tolerance policy that holds refugee families locked behind bars — conditions that could violate a federal settlement requiring children to be kept in the least-restrictive environments. Meanwhile, federal officials will likely continue to undermine our national policy by refusing to accept pleas for asylum. And children will still need to be reunited with their parents.

Our ship of state will remain under the direction of xenophobes like Stephen Miller, the White House’s 32-year-old self-appointed enforcer of racial purity who reportedly relished in the images of grief-stricken families at the border. And our national dialogue will still include the likes of Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who when confronted on Fox News with the story of a 10-year-old girl with Down Syndrome separated from her mother, responded only with a mocking “wah wah.”

Across the nation, we must grapple with the fact that a core rump of Trumpian sycophants has grown numb to the humane sense of morality and shame many of us were raised to heed.

Their numbness requires the vigilance of compassionate Americans. We must remember the outrage stoked by seeing children penned in chain link fences. Remember the nausea that churned upon hearing a recording published by ProPublica of frightened toddlers wailing.

Keep those memories fresh; keep your poster board handy. The moment we move on, the Trump administration is empowered to advance with a corrosive agenda that casts aside all pretense of better angels and harbors no hesitation for inflicting pain on those deemed unworthy.

And here’s one more thing to remember: Election Day is Nov. 6.