Last week saw an illuminating postscript to one of the most shameful moments in U.S. government history. It was newly revealed that the Trump administration's decision to separate thousands of migrant children from their parents at the southern border wasn't the unintended bureaucratic snafu that the White House has claimed but rather a deliberate outcome approved with a show-of-hands vote in a 2018 Situation Room meeting.

Emotionally torturing children and parents as intentional migration deterrence qualifies as pathologically cruel. Under President Donald Trump, it was policy. He has given voters numerous competing outrages to process going into November, but Americans must not allow this one to fall off their election radar screen.

Trump won office in 2016 in part by exaggerating the issue of undocumented immigration and demonizing migrants. His administration exploited xenophobia with a "zero-tolerance" policy approach to border crossings that was completely out of proportion with the actual problem.

The policy is the brainchild of Stephen Miller, Trump's immigration adviser who follows white-nationalist screeds. It called for detaining undocumented migrant families for prosecution rather than issuing summonses, even when the families had small children. As a shocked nation eventually learned, those childre— including babies — were being forcibly separated from their parents for extended periods during the process. In all, more than 4,000 kids were traumatized in this manner, many dumped into a foster system that lost track of them. This because their parents were accused of a misdemeanor.

The administration told various lies throughout the scandal, claiming such separations were routine during previous administrations (they weren't) and underreporting the numbers of kids. As video leaked out showing sobbing children — some made to wait in cage-like chain-link enclosures — the White House tried to portray the separations as an unintended consequence of the enforcement policy.

But as NBC News reported last week, it was more than that. According to sources and documents, Miller demanded in the May 2018 Situation Room meeting to know why the prosecutions of migrants weren't proceeding at the planned pace. He was told that there weren't enough personnel to complete the prosecutions in a timely manner, which would leave children separated for extended periods.

Miller, according to officials, didn't view the child separations as a bug but as a tool to deter more immigration. In fact, they said, he pushed for a plan that would have separated thousands more children, even those whose migrant parents were legally seeking asylum.

"If we don't enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it," Miller reportedly said.

Our country as we know it is, or should be, better than this. Voters can prove on Nov. 3 that America's underlying decency is still there — by showing zero tolerance for an administration that treats caged children as policy tools.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Photo credit: Capri23auto at Pixabay