I am no longer shocked or appalled at these people. I know already that they're objectively terrible. It's when I hear that rhetoric being echoed by normal people that I get alarmed, when people bristle viscerally and lash back when confronted with scenes like this, that I can stop my reflexive instinct to attack and make a small effort to understand them. Because the pain and fear behind the retort of “I'm sick of hearing about the children, [INSERT RATONALIZATION HERE]” couldn't be more visible. It's guilt. It's the reaction of someone who knows they're wrong, and they can't admit it.

Make no mistake: Our immigration system has been a mess for decades. We ended up with a bunch of in-between legal stopgaps because, honestly, it had become one of those rare situations where the cheaper option, the most humane option and the most politically expedient one were all the same thing. So at the border, undocumented immigrants were handled as an administrative matter rather than a legal one. Because at the end of the day, crossing the border is not a serious crime.

As pointed out by comedian Samantha Bee (and re-iterated by Rolling Stone): “'Trump's anti-immigration henchmen love to point out that they're dealing with a serious crime and that we don't let American criminals hang onto their children in jail.' But unlawful entry, she added, is only a federal misdemeanor, on the same list of infractions as 'using the American flag for advertising purposes, neglecting to answer census questions, taking shellfish from New York harbor channels, detaining a seaman's clothing ... and, I swear to Jesus Christ this is real, misusing 'Smokey Bear.'”

It's sort of the Leviticus of laws. They only pay attention to the parts that justify them being horrible to people. Shellfish is an abomination, folks!

I joke, but it's a serious matter. The crisis at the border, yes, but also this inability of people to concede they're wrong when the truth is so plainly obvious, when the affront to human decency is so plain it can't be ignored. Certainly, that's been a feature of our politics for some time now, especially in conservative politics, where the machismo of never admitting a mistake is commonplace. For fear of echoing RuPaul in this season's Drag Race Reunion, admitting they were wrong would mean deconstructing their belief system. Ru was talking there about religious parents who know their children are gay, and cope with it by never discussing that part of their lives, by pretending it doesn't happen. This is similar. This isn't just admitting you're wrong, this is admitting that an administration you support is downright villainous. Not, “doing terrible things in a misguided attempt to protect the country” bad, which is commonplace, but flat-out evil. And make no mistake: Allowing people – especially people who are already suffering to be harmed just so you can feel better about yourself makes you complicit in that harm in every sense of the word. You have allowed fear into your heart, and actions taken out of fear rarely end well.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, commonly referred to as ICE, was created out of fear. It's a relatively new agency, born in 2003 as a response to sweeping post-9/11 xenophobia. I think there's a sort of person who takes comfort in the theater of militancy, but I'm not one of them. All I can see is the second largest joint task force doesn't spend most of its time cracking down on gang members or terrorists, it spends its time chasing poor people trying to survive in peace. It's one of those things that you have to work to justify. Sometimes, a jackboot by any other name is still a jackboot. Sometimes, you have to admit that the United States is not always the hero in the story.

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