It’s long been clear that living with a constant stream of abusive language and ignorant banter has inured American ears to statements that would in past years have been met with outrage. Even so, Donald Trump’s claim that the country is “full,” a position he reiterated on Sunday evening, is the kind of statement that should so raise a cry from every corner that the ringing silence in its wake suggests a nation in a condition for which there is no other term than sin.

America is a nation of immigrants. That is not a static position. That’s not a statement that was made in 1776 and then was quickly followed by a drawing-up of the national gangplank. It’s always been so. It must always be so. Because a nation that is “full,” one that can turn its broad back on asylum-seekers and raise a wall against outsiders, is not the United States of America. It is fundamentally not.

Families seeking asylum aren’t a fringe issue to Trump’s immigration horrors. They are the core issue on which he has built his whole edifice of lies and fear. It was around the policy on applicants for asylum that Trump, and other right-wing sources, deployed the dehumanizing term “catch and release,” applying to people a phrase used to describe the management of fishing stocks. The derided former policy—under which those seeking asylum were detained long enough to collect their information, determine that they were not known to be criminal, and permitted to enter the United States while awaiting a hearing required by both common humanity and international law—was not a perfect policy, but it was infinitely better than what is happening now.

By sabotaging that policy, Trump has created the ongoing horrors of family separation, tent city gulags, children warehoused in decrepit Walmarts, and thousands huddling at the border suffering in plain sight of the media. All that suffering is not by accident. It’s a goal. Every huddled family, every ripped-away child, is both a symbol for Trump’s supporters that they have the “hard man” they want at the helm, and evidence of the kind of “humanitarian crisis” that Trump can namedrop on his way to being ever more inhumane.

All it took to turn a successful, if far from perfect, system into a tumbling horror show was a lie. This lie: “They never show up at the trials. They never come back, they’re never seen again.” That’s Donald Trump speaking about asylum-seekers. In speech after speech, Trump has claimed that “5 percent” or “3 percent” or “2 percent” or simply “none” of asylum-seekers appear when their hearing date swings around. That’s not just a lie; it’s a huge, blatant, glaringly awful lie absolutely denied by every study and Justice Department statistic. Trump has made that lie repeatedly, without being checked. And that basic failure—of the media, of the Congress, of the people—is the real immigration crisis.