George W Bush famously said family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande river. It was his way of answering all those angry questions on the campaign trail about how he would stop “illegal immigrants”.

If moms and dads couldn’t feed their kids in Mexico, he explained, they would try to provide for their families in the United States.

Bush badly misjudged his party, as well as his own powers of persuasion. His efforts at immigration reform died along with his domestic influence. But that wasn’t the end of his party’s long journey away from his values.

Now, under his Republican successor, it is official US policy to deny family values for the undocumented migrants who cross the Rio Grande.

Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security adopted a new policy to start criminal prosecutions of parents crossing the border illegally, and to place their children in protective custody. It wasn’t enough to deported undocumented people. Now the Trump administration would actively break up their families.

This is not just an inhuman policy that violates any meaning of the words “family values”. It’s also recklessly incompetent about children’s safety, since the federal government has lost track of almost 1,500 of children in its supposed custody. For the American Civil Liberties Union, it’s unconstitutional because it denies migrant families due process.

How did we get to the point where the supposed party of family values believes the best way to stop undocumented migration is to break up families?

The answer starts with the demonization of such migrants: they aren’t moms and dads, but criminals. And we all know what kind of criminals Donald Trump has in mind when he talks about undocumented people: the tiny sliver who form part of the brutal MS-13 gang.



For Trump, there is a vast army of MS-13 murderers out there, a force that rivals our own military in size. Otherwise it’s hard to understand the numbers he cited at the top of his infamous discussion about California’s so-called sanctuary laws earlier this month.

“California’s law provides safe harbor to some of the most vicious and violent offenders on Earth, like MS-13 gang members, putting innocent men, women and children at the mercy of these sadistic criminals,” he said. “But we’re moving them out of this country by the thousands. MS-13, we’re grabbing them by the thousands and we’re getting them out.”

By the thousands. Thousands and thousands of gang members getting deported, meaning the gang represents, what, hundreds of thousands of people? The FBI estimated the gang’s numbers between 6,000 and 10,000 in the US.

This worldview is the context for Trump’s deportation policies and his comments just a few minutes later. “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in – and we’re stopping a lot of them – but we’re taking people of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”

Yes, he was talking about gang members. He just happens to believe there are thousands and thousands of them pouring across the border. And it’s so much easier to break up families if you think there are thousands and thousands of animals, not humans, among them. It is a remarkable gang that recruits so many mothers and young children to fill its ranks of murderers.

Trump has demonized migrants as violent criminals from the start of his presidential campaign. We’ve come to expect him to use these neo-Nazi tactics, to re-tweet actual neo-Nazis and to express his sympathies for neo-Nazis screaming for racial purity. As George W Bush never said, this hard bigotry has given us such low expectations.

But it hasn’t yet hardened us to the hollow hypocrisy of those claiming to support family friendly policies within Trump’s own family.

Chief among those is his daughter Ivanka, who styles herself on Twitter as a “wife, mother, sister, daughter” ahead of her job as a presidential adviser. Were it not for her father’s policies and repeated comments, it might be admirable that she has been an advocate for working mothers and paid family leave. We might just appreciate the cuteness of the family photo of her snuggling up to her young son.

Instead, she looks like she is either out of touch with her father’s policies, or out of the loop. There’s little point in advocating for families while your own administration is breaking them up intentionally as some kind of deterrent to immigration. Never mind that none of Ivanka’s policy proposals have made it into reality; she works inside an executive branch that is actively working against what she says she stands for.

Whether she is ineffective or just ignorant, Ivanka’s inability to see outside her soft-focus bubble poses some pretty fundamental questions about her own political aspirations. According to Michael Wolff, Ivanka believes she will be the first woman president. Such delusions are not just a personal affliction, apparently: her own mother thinks she’ll run for president in 15 years or so. She might start laying the groundwork by blocking her own father’s policies separating children from their parents.

In the meantime, her father naturally blames everyone but himself. According to the president, his immigration policies are dictated to him by the all-powerful Democrats who currently control no part of the federal government.

“Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.,” he tweeted on Saturday, ignoring good sense as well as good spelling. He concluded the nonsensical tweet with an all-caps scream: “DEMOCRATS ARE PROTECTING MS-13 THUGS.”

It’s not clear what planet Trump is living on, but it is a terrifyingly confusing one. Democrats are both punishing undocumented families and protecting them. Trump is but a hapless and impotent observer of this nightmare he presides over. For such a good family man, this is something of a stormy scenario. Because when it comes to Trump’s compassion for families, there’s just no there, there.