The questions before the courts are profoundly unresolvable. How much crime must an individual fear to receive asylum? The homicide rate in Guatemala—about 24 per 100,000 people in 2016—was almost five times higher than the United States rate of 5.3 per 100,000 that year. But the German homicide rate in turn is less than 1 per 100,000. Could an American seek asylum in Germany on that basis? You might say: Nobody would want to. But if German wages averaged 10 or 20 times those in the United States, many Americans might change their minds about the urgency of the 5-to-1 violence differential between the two countries.

It is disgusting and wrong to equate human beings with insects and animals, as Trump so disgracefully does. Illegal immigrants are committing no moral wrong. They are doing what we might do in their place—as we, by defending borders, are doing what they would do if they were in ours. Like so many human institutions, borders are both arbitrary and indispensable. Without them, there are no nations. Without nations, there can be no democracy and no liberalism. John Lennon may imagine that without nations there will be only humanity. More likely, without nations there will only be tribes.

Writing in The Atlantic a year ago, my colleague Peter Beinart remarked on the increasingly unanimous opposition among Democrats to any form of immigration enforcement at all. “An undocumented alien is not a criminal,” Senator Kamala Harris protested last year. That view has been turbocharged over the past week. Here’s how the MSNBC host Chris Hayes described his reaction to a first-person account from a woman who had crossed the border illegally with her child, from whom she had then been forcibly separated:

I was thinking to myself, this reads like the literature of a totalitarian government. This reads like a first-person dispatch from an authoritarian state. This reads like something from a sci-fi novel about some dystopic future. One of the themes that emerges in that kind of literature is a kind of bureaucratic state that's faceless and incomprehensible. The idea of these kind of like these men with suits or men in uniform who show up and they wield this completely arbitrary power that can crush someone’s life. That goes back to The Trial of Joseph K. by Kafka, and it’s an emerging theme in a lot of the Soviet literature about the experience of the Soviet state that was just completely arbitrary and capricious. It shows up in 1984, just this idea that you’re living your life, you’re doing something, and then all of a sudden, the state can come in and wrench your life apart, and completely [upend] it. There’s a knock at the door. There’s a call that comes in. There’s a person who gets out of a car and calls your name, and the next thing you know, you’re in handcuffs. That idea of tyranny hanging over people, kind of absurdist tyranny is a really through lining when we think about the kind of societies that we aren’t, non-free societies, societies under the sway of totalitarian regimes, authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, et cetera.

Now notice something: As Hayes elaborates his horror at the separation of mother from child, he seems to arrive at a conclusion that there is something inherently oppressive about any kind of immigration rule at all. The “men in suits or men in uniform” he speaks of do not just “show up.” The border crosser goes to them. She is not just “living her life … and then all of a sudden, the state can come in and wrench your life apart.” She, of her own volition, traveled hundreds of miles to challenge the authority of a foreign state to police its frontiers. When her challenge failed—when she was apprehended and detained—what happened next must have felt harsh and frightening. But dictatorial? Totalitarian? In democracies, too, the wrong side of the law is an inescapably uncomfortable place to find yourself.