The Bahamas are in crisis. More than a week after Hurricane Dorian devastated the island, the bodies are still being counted, many are missing and neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. The U.N. estimates that around 70,000 Bahamians are in need of food and shelter. The logical outlet for this relief is the United States, where Bahamians are allowed to go without visas.

But on Sunday evening, a reporter from the disaster zone recorded Bahamian hurricane survivors being kicked off a ferry before its departure for Florida. In the video, ferry staff can be heard telling passengers without visas to get off the boat.

Naturally, this incident has exacerbated the trauma and anxiety that Bahamians are already grappling with. Imagine enduring a category five hurricane, or any cataclysmic event that leaves you in need of help, only to be told that a once-reliable "safe haven" is now closed to you.

The reason visa-less Bahamians were booted from their ride to Florida is still being debated. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol claims that no immigration rules for Bahamians have changed and that ferry staffers were out of line.

Trump then contradicted CBP and suggested that "very bad people" might exploit the disaster and sneak into the U.S. among the masses of Bahamian survivors.

Even if CBP is telling the truth, it's worth noting that this event occurred during an era of increasingly nationalist immigration policy that the agency has enforced. The victims of those policies — particularly the people languishing in detention centers along the southern border — include people who’ve been displaced by wars and climatological disasters. In 2018 alone, 17 million climate-related displacements were recorded by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

Tens of millions more will follow.

As climate change and weather disasters like Dorian drive more desperate people to our borders, it's incumbent upon us, as a nation, to decide how exactly we will respond to this unprecedented humanitarian crisis. But what we've seen happening along the southern border, and especially what took place in the Bahamas on Sunday night, foreshadows a darker path that many among us are already inclined to take. As I watch the video of those distraught Bahamian ferry passengers being told they're suddenly not welcome here in the U.S., I see glimpses of a once-dormant but now resurgent movement that's best described as ecofascism.