No one is safe. Just this week we learned of Jose Luis Garcia, a grandfather and authorized resident since the 1980s, who was handcuffed and taken by federal immigration officers while he watered his lawn in front of his home in Southern California. We also learned of Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez of Guatemala, who traveled through Mexico and crossed the border into the United States with her 8-year-old son, Anthony, only to be arrested and then separated in the most horrifying of ways: After pleading guilty to unlawful entry, Ms. Ortiz was put on a plane back to Guatemala while her son was transferred to a shelter for migrant children.

If you live in a city like Los Angeles, the odds are that the victims of these policies are your neighbors and co-workers, the classmates of your children and the families who worship with you. You cannot pretend this is not happening here, now, and to people you know.

Some people in the Trump administration have defended the “zero-tolerance” policy — which has separated some 2,000 children from their parents — by pointing to Scripture and blaming their political opponents. Mr. Trump himself is — worse yet — openly using the children’s suffering as a bargaining chip to get funding to build his wall. “The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda,” he tweeted, before demanding that they agree to an immigration bill that pays for the wall. He capped his tweet with a rallying cry apparently aimed at supporters of his immigration policies: “Go for it! WIN!”