The Trump administration is promoting an especially cruel tactic in its anti-immigrant crusade. Parents who cross the border illegally will be separated from their children, a notion that adds trauma and anxiety to an already fraught process.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions toured a San Diego area border location to announce the latest and most deplorable step in the White House war on outsiders. If families cross over, they can expect to be pulled apart. Parents would go to lockups and children to shelters, a separation that could last months.

It’s a chilling but predictable new low for an administration that reacts blindly and harshly to any mention of immigrants. Families may be fleeing persecution, seeking a better life or trying to find relatives already in the U.S.

It makes no matter to Sessions, who wants nothing to do with unsanctioned immigrants. A hostile border policy is about to get more harsh and unthinking.

The attorney general is cashing in on a much-publicized caravan of asylum seekers who have traveled from Central America to the border. To the White House, this group represents a dangerous wave of border crossers, but it’s nothing of the kind. The numbers of undocumented immigrants stopped by border agents is near a 40-year low.

There’s a need for a secure border and an orderly immigration process. In most cases, people entering the country illegally are apprehended and sent back. Along with threatening to separate families, the Trump administration is adding extra sting: prosecutions that will swamp courts and detention facilities along the Mexican border.

Arresting and ripping apart parents and children is a new low in demagoguery. It’s another reminder of President Trump’s failure to craft a genuine set of border laws and his inhumane outlook. All he is offering is callous rhetoric, jails and now broken up families.

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