Can we at least agree that the video that seems to show an immigration agent shoving a three-year-old Honduran boy’s attorney to the ground in Kansas City this week makes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers look just as hateful as their critics make them out to be?

Maybe there’s more to the story, and let’s hope so, because the images we’ve seen so far reinforce our worst fears about our constantly changing, increasingly chaotic and inhumane immigration policy. But whatever caused the melee, the footage perfectly distills the free-for-all that the broader debate has become.

Immigration attorney Andrea Martinez says ICE Officer Everett Chase pushed her as she was trying to follow him into the ICE office before dawn on Tuesday. Then he locked her out and separated her from the child she was accompanying.

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Unless Martinez has been secretly practicing to challenge soccer player Igor Rossi’s place in the fake injury hall of fame, she was either pushed or rebuffed so forcefully that she fell and broke her foot. She was bringing her 3-year-old client, Noah, to be reunited and deported with his pregnant Honduran mother.

Against the backdrop of the could-hardly-be-hotter immigration debate, the sound of the lawyer screaming, “No! No! No!” as she’s separated from her young client became both national news and a symbol of what President Donald Trump means when he brags about how tough he is.

It also focuses attention on unfortunate recent changes in immigration policy that have gotten far less attention than the Trump innovation of systematically separating migrant parents from their children.

Why had the child’s mother, Kenia Bautista-Mayorga, who is six months pregnant, been in jail at all? Because in March, ICE issued a directive that “ended the presumption of release of pregnant detainees.” Trump personally directed ICE to keep more pregnant women in jail.

Why is she being deported despite her asylum claim that she came to this country to escape a violent relationship? Because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently said that domestic violence is no longer grounds for asylum.

Angelica Erazo, a relative of Bautista-Mayorga, told The Star that her she fears being murdered by her abusive husband, a Honduran police officer who barred her from leaving the house without him. “She tried going to court in Honduras, but her case against him was shut down. It’s one of the murder capitals of the world, but the government protects its police.”

Assuming it’s not in keeping with protocol to further traumatize a child needlessly, a lack of planning and training come through in the video.





Are agents winging it as heedlessly as our president? Trump’s support for immigration legislation has been so on-again, off-again that Republicans on Capitol Hill now say he’s blown whatever chance they had of reaching an agreement.

The only good thing about scenes like the one in Kansas City this week is that they’re increasingly played out in the open, with advocates looking on and filming.

The president seems to think looking heartless on immigration will help rather than hurt his party in November, and it will be up to us to let him know if he’s right.