As the United States government continues to commit crimes against humanity—and against human children—along its southern border, we now have the iconic images for our most recent national disgrace. Earlier, we had Nick Ut’s shot of nine-year old Phan Thị Kim Phúc, fleeing naked down a road near Trang Bang in Vietnam in the aftermath of a United States napalm attack in 1972. We had Eddie Adams’s shot of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan’s summary execution of a Vietcong officer named Nguyen Van Lem.

We had John Filo’s shot of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling in Jeffrey Miller’s blood at Kent State. We had hundreds of shots of civil rights workers being bludgeoned and beaten and Robert Kennedy on the floor of the kitchen in Los Angeles. In a sense, you can trace this history in images dating back to Alexander Gardner’s tour of the battlefield at Antietam, when The New York Times wrote that, if Gardner had “not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it…"

And now we have the still photos and videos of children being forcibly removed from the parents who have brought them here from the charnel houses of Central America—the culmination of decades of brutality to which American meddling made a not-inconsiderable contribution. We see children weeping as their mothers are frisked by ICE agents up against automobiles.

Getty Images

We even had a little slice of a Theresienstadt strategy on Wednesday, when the people running one of the centers allowed reporters to take a tour of their facility. But even this carefully arranged visit couldn’t keep the essential authoritarianism of the place out of plain sight. In this, the ploy was a debacle for the administration*. The reporters allowed into the abandoned Wal-Mart facility knew a jail when they saw one. Jacob Soboroff of MSNBC deserves special huzzahs for his clear-eyed summary of the visit.

The nation’s capacity for shame, which has been shrinking almost by the hour for the last couple of years, is now being tested at the outside limits. A renegade president* hired Bull Connor in an expensive suit to run the Justice Department, and the latter has proven to have even less of a conscience on this issue than the president* he serves. From CNN:

Sessions wrote that since "generally" asylum claims on the basis of domestic or gang violence "will not qualify for asylum," few claims will meet the "credible fear" standard in an initial screening as to whether an immigrant can pursue their claim before a judge. That means asylum seekers may end up being turned back at the border, a major change from current practice. "When you put it all together, this is his grand scheme to just close any possibility for people seeking protection -- legally -- to claim that protection that they can under the law," said Ur Jaddou, a former chief counsel at US Citizenship and Immigration Services now at immigration advocacy group America's Voice. "He's looking at every possible way to end it. And he's done it one after the other."

This is now clearly a war on all immigration, legal and otherwise. The history of this country would be immeasurably different—and immeasurably worse—if you eliminated from it all those people who came here fleeing violence and oppression. In fact, if you did that, you wouldn’t have a country here at all. Maybe we don’t any more.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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