This is Creon’s position: The law is the law and must be followed, and it is good to follow it because it is the law. But Creon ends the play a husk, destroyed by the cruelty of his own arguments. And reading the 2,500-year-old text today is a reminder both of the visceral wrongness of what is happening at the border and of the emptiness of the administration’s arguments about law enforcement.

Antigone is a simple story. Polynices, the brother of the play’s heroine, is killed while leading an attack on the city of Thebes during a civil war. Creon, who has taken power, orders his corpse left outside the city walls as a warning. Antigone nevertheless insists on her religious obligation to bury her brother. Creon himself is convinced of his own error only after he orders Antigone killed and his own son—Antigone’s fiancé—kills himself in protest.

The play is about law, authority, and defiance. It is also about borders. In banishing Polynices’s body, Creon is reaffirming the distinction between whom he wants in his city and whom he doesn’t, defining the boundaries of his community. He refuses to allow Polynices back into Thebes, even in death, and refuses Antigone passage out of Thebes to bury her brother. When she sneaks out in the night and does so anyway, Creon is furious. He demands her execution. The choice is either order or disorder, he reasons, and the danger of disorder is so great that the cruelty of order is justified.

Like Creon, the White House uses the specter of chaos to justify its “zero tolerance” policy. “There is nothing worse than disobedience to authority,” Creon says, explaining why Antigone’s transgression must be punished with death. “It destroys cities, it demolishes homes.” Similarly, Miller told the Times, “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement.”

The anxiety of the border as the focal point of lawlessness has been a theme throughout Trump’s presidency: In October 2017, for example, Sessions linked what he described as an absence of immigration enforcement with a wider breakdown in “ respect for the rule of law .” And on Monday, the president declared : “A county without borders is not a country at all. People coming into the country are bringing death and destruction.”

One way to read Antigone is as a total repudiation of Creon’s vision of authority. The other—adopted by, among others, the philosopher Hegel—is that Antigone and Creon are both partly right. Law is not the single, rigid thing both Creon and Antigone imagine it to be. Law, instead, is a network of sometimes-conflicting obligations, tempered by choice and mercy. It can require both the maintenance of order and the burial of the dead.

But family separation is the result of immigration enforcement only if you take the harshest view of the law possible. There is no legal requirement as such that migrant families be separated. Rather, the Trump administration is pushing to refer 100 percent of adults apprehended crossing the border illegally for criminal prosecution—a change from previous administrations. The children are then removed as a result of their parents’ detention before trial.