Certain moments in this era serve as grotesque mile-markers on our national march towards a place beyond redemption. The white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. The Definitely-Not-a-Muslim Ban. The revelation that some California college kids were victims of two mass shootings in the space of just over a year, the first of which left 59 people dead and 527 wounded, without a single substantive change to federal gun laws in between. The President of the United States mocking a woman who says she was sexually assaulted as a teenager from the campaign rally podium, spurring cheers and jeers from the assembled mob, because she dared challenge his Supreme Court nominee.

But perhaps nothing compares to our treatment of children brought to our border by their parents. Many have traveled more than a thousand miles by foot from Central America, fleeing rampant gang and drug violence in societies on the brink of collapse—a situation for which the United States bears some responsibility. They wish to declare themselves legally to U.S. authorities and get an asylum hearing. This is their right under international law. We once called them "refugees."

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The Trump administration has periodically closed ports of entry and slowed the entry process, making it harder for people to declare themselves. It has infringed on their due-process rights. And it has sought to restrict the legal criteria for asylum claims to exclude gang and domestic violence—precisely what many Central America immigrants say they are fleeing.

But beyond all that, we tore some of these kids away from their parents. After an exhausting and terrifying journey through the Mexican desert, the wild lands beyond the law where some of the world's most dangerous criminal organizations operate to meet America's insatiable appetite for drugs, we ripped these young children away from the only sense of security they can still cling to in this world.

That may have been the worst mile-marker of them all, and President Trump's bitter and reluctant reversal of the policy has not erased it from the nation's moral record. The policy was put in place to "deter" would-be immigrants, by treating those who made the trip with cruelty. Since they were fleeing horrific conditions back home, this put the government of the United States of America in a contest of cruelty with Honduran street gangs.

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And, as we learned today, via perhaps the very worst story the Washington Post could have brought us, even keeping kids with their parents can't always save them in these desperate conditions.

A 7-year-old girl from Guatemala died of dehydration and shock after she was taken into Border Patrol custody last week for crossing from Mexico into the United States illegally with her father and a large group of migrants along a remote span of New Mexico desert, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Thursday...

According to CBP records, the girl and her father were taken into custody about 10 p.m. Dec. 6 south of Lordsburg, N.M., as part of a group of 163 people who approached U.S. agents to turn themselves in.

More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6:25 a.m., CBP records show. Emergency responders, who arrived soon after, measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”

This has the hallmarks of a tragedy borne of desperation: this father pushed himself and his child too far in a frantic search for safety and freedom. But it is not actually clear yet whether they received appropriate treatment once they entered Border Patrol custody.

Food and water are typically provided to migrants in Border Patrol custody, and it wasn’t immediately clear Thursday if the girl received provisions and a medical exam before the onset of seizures.

Border Patrol sources told the Post that they are overwhelmed by an influx of family units at the border, where facilities were mostly built for single adult (male) migrants. And the task border agents face, including in patrolling those wild lands near the border, is immensely difficult. But this simply cannot happen in the United States if the United States is anything approaching what it claims to be. As another Post reporter put it:

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The girl had a temperature of 105.7 degrees. She hadn't eaten or consumed water for several days. But she was detained for eight hours before emergency responders arrived. https://t.co/M4RKTR7wSI — Kevin Sieff (@ksieff) December 14, 2018

And as an immigration reporter put it, the idea detainees like this seven-year-old girl are regularly given adequate food and water when they arrive at the initial detention facility is not something to bank on:

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To claim that Border Patrol regularly serve food and water to people in hieleras is a serious stretch of reality and it indicates to me you don't talk to people about hieleras and rely instead on what the administration is telling you. Hence your narrative. — Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) December 14, 2018

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Here's a cropped @jbmoorephoto from a hielera. This is the water people are forced to drink. It's grey and it's disgusting. It routinely makes people sick. There isn't even a place to dry your hands after you wash them. Everything is full of fecal matter. pic.twitter.com/VrdqjiBO1P — Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) December 14, 2018

The president and his allies often claim that they don't like what's happening at the border, but Congress must pass more comprehensive fixes for the system to really get at the problem. Border Patrol personnel I talked to down in Texas agreed, and it's true: the system of laws and policies and detention facilities is broken. It's just that the president and his allies are not acting in good faith when they turn to this rhetoric. His staunchest allies in Congress, the House Freedom Caucus and other varieties of right-wing extremist, have torpedoed any reasonable attempts at immigration reform for years.

And the Trump administration's attitude has never been clearer. It's not about illegal immigration—the regime has repeatedly sought to severely restrict legal immigration, too. That's why we now intend to deport people who fled here decades ago because of our intervention in Vietnam. It's about reminding everyone the U.S. is a country for some people, and not for others. That's why departing Chief of Staff John Kelly, once foolishly regarded as one of the Adults in the Room, dismissed concerned about kids separated from their parents on the basis they'll be "put into foster care, or whatever." The cruelty, as Adam Serwer put it in The Atlantic, is the point. We got another stunning, disgusting reminder of that this week via NBC News:

Federal authorities have arrested 170 immigrants who came forward seeking to sponsor migrant children in government custody, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.

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ICE said Tuesday that the arrests were of immigrants suspected of being in the United States illegally and took place from early July to November. They were the result of background checks conducted on potential sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children placed under the care of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Nearly two thirds of those arrested — 109 in total — had no criminal record, the agency said. Another 61 of those arrested did have criminal records, but ICE did not specify the crimes and said it could not break down convictions by violent and nonviolent offenses.

They don't care about these kids, who are alone in a strange land where they don't speak the language, sleeping in tent-city barracks in the Texas desert. (The Obama administration built facilities to house unaccompanied children in response to a 2014 wave of migration, though they were not tent cities in the desert and they didn't separate kids from their parents.) They don't care. These children's need—any child's need—for a loving, stable home to grow in, and the empathetic intervention of strangers to help them find it, are just an opportunity to get more of those Certain People out. People with no criminal record who want to help kids? Not the kind of people we want in this country. Or is there something else about them that's a sticking point?

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Yes, nearly all the children who remain in custody today came unaccompanied, and were not separated from their parents. But it wouldn't matter to this administration if it were the opposite. The point is to be cruel—to perform the cruelty against The Other so the Ralph Steadman figures who show up to the rallies will keep whooping and hollering and chanting the president's name.

That's why he keeps screaming about The Wall, which won't keep drugs or all that many people out, and which nobody serious thinks is a 21st century solution to immigration issues. It's a giant middle finger to The Others courtesy of White America—a big stone monument that exists only in the mind's eye of our most viciously resentful citizens. Remember when Fox News' Laura Ingraham said the child detention facilities at the border were "summer camps"? Sean Hannity's reaction to the death of a seven-year-old girl was to use it as an opportunity to shill for The Wall.



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When I visited the border patrol processing facility in McAllen, Texas, this summer—a place nicknamed "the dog kennel" for the rows of cages in which inmates are kept—I met a young Guatemalan mother who described traveling with a group until they abandoned her and her one-year-old daughter, leaving her to try to reach the border alone while carrying her baby the rest of the way. And we wonder why people choose to travel in larger, slow-moving "caravans." That detainee, Valesca Merida, hadn't heard she could be separated from her child before she made the journey—but others in the facility had, and chose to make the journey anyway.

That is the state of affairs now in Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador. You are extorted by the local gang, or you're abused by a domestic partner, or the gang comes to recruit your young son enough times that you feel you have no choice. It is worth trekking a thousand miles through an unforgiving desert for a slim chance at freedom. Even under the Obama administration, the chances were slim: Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley told me just one in five asylum claims were successful even then. That was part of Obama's incredibly punitive policy suite on immigration. But we followed the law. We gave people a chance. We showed some humanity.

Even that is out the window now. Our callousness will not make the border region safer, or stop desperate people from coming. The most dependable effect is that it will get people's blood pumping at a campaign rally. But with all this happening, all around us and under our noses, how much longer can we continue to read ourselves the bedtime stories about America—the Shining City on a Hill, the Nation of Immigrants, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave—before the book starts to crumble in our grasping hands?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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