Other moves, just as or more effective, are bureaucratic booby traps laid in arcane procedural byways. A migrant takes an errant step, in compliance with previous rules, and suddenly finds deportation agents knocking at the door.

Take foreign-born victims of human trafficking, many of them coerced into sex work or what amounts to labor slavery. For 20 years, they’ve been eligible for special visas allowing them to remain and work in this country, often in return for agreeing to testify against their traffickers. Then, in 2018, the Trump administration changed the rules. Now unsuccessful applicants are subject to deportation hearings. Applications for the special visas have nose-dived.

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Similarly, tweaks of the technical fine print have been deployed against other crime victims, who previously may have qualified for visas as an incentive for helping law enforcement. Now, as The Post’s Catherine Rampell reported in a recent column, if their application forms contain any blank spaces, visas that once would have been granted are automatically denied. Thus, an applicant who lives in a house might leave blank the field for an apartment number; an applicant with no middle name might leave that field blank. Reasonable? Totally. But also, now, grounds for expulsion.

Or, take the case of unaccompanied migrant minors in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services. For years, they have been provided with services, including counseling by therapists who adhered to their profession’s customary practice of confidentiality. Now, as detailed by The Post’s Hannah Dreier, those assurances of confidentiality are a quaint formality, swapped out for a new regime under which notes taken in therapy are routinely passed along to immigration officials who use them against minors in deportation hearings. Thus has the Trump administration weaponized counseling, transforming therapists into government informers.

The rules changes may seem surreal and nightmarish, the stuff of dystopian fiction. The lives they affect, and potentially ruin, are very real. Government forms have become minefields, intentionally designed to entrap the unsuspecting. Adults who present themselves as a means of emotional support for migrant children are really lying in ambush. And a system designed to extend a helping hand to those in peril has been turned into a latticework of sinister snares.