Here’s how a recent Times report described an immigrant detention facility in Clint, Tex. , that was built during the Obama administration but overfilled under Mr. Trump: “Outbreaks of scabies, shingles and chickenpox were spreading among the hundreds of children and adults who were being held in cramped cells, agents said. The stench of the children’s dirty clothing was so strong it spread to the agents’ own clothing — people in town would scrunch their noses when they left work. The children cried constantly. One girl seemed likely enough to try to kill herself that the agents made her sleep on a cot in front of them, so they could watch her as they were processing new arrivals.”

This week , Mr. Trump announced a new series of raids by ICE in at least 10 cities, aiming to arrest thousands of people who have been issued deportation orders.

“We’re focused on criminals,” Mr. Trump sai d on Friday, dodging the truth that his administration’s hard-line policies make little to no distinction between people who pose a genuine risk and those who miss an immigration court date.

The administration, for instance, publicly warned of collateral arrests as part of the new raids, threatening to detain other unauthorized immigrants who happen to be on the scene (children or other relatives, perhaps), even if they are not the main targets of the raids.

Publicity over the raids has rattled immigrant communities, as the administration clearly intended. For Mr. Trump, deterrence of illegal immigration has been a guiding principle — if not by means of a wall, then by means of cruelty toward migrants, from the squalid conditions in detainee facilities to separating children from their parents.

“It’s the complete, 100 percent focus on harsher options that will deter the influx, with a disregard for managing what’s happening,” a Department of Homeland Security official told The Times earlier this year. “We have a lot more families, a lot more unaccompanied children, and the focus has just been on how can we deter, rather than how can we handle.”

But deterrence alone can’t explain a slew of other moves — scaling back a program that protects the families of members of the military and veterans from being deported, for instance. It doesn’t explain the frantic — yet unsuccessful — effort to put a question about citizenship on the census, which experts agree would lead to an undercount of people in immigrant-heavy communities. Nor does deterrence explain removing deportation protections from nearly one million people who live in the country under the auspices of humanitarian programs or because they were brought to the country as children.