Comment Political Borders

President Trump has always had an odd idea of what constitutes strength.

- Amy Davidson Sorkin

This was evident again last week, when, a day after U.S. Border Patrol agents fired tear gas at a crowd of Central American migrants, as some tried to rush across the border from Tijuana, he boasted about the incident at a rally. “Frankly, if we didn’t show them strength and a strong border,” he said, “you would have hundreds of thousands of people pouring into our country.” Strength is a display, in other words, meant to demoralize the vulnerable. “We are doing a job,” Trump added. “We’re doing what’s right.”

He was wrong on both counts. It is not a President’s job to try to renounce a law that promises even undocumented people already in this country an opportunity to apply for asylum, as Trump did, until a federal district court temporarily stopped him. And it is not right to approach the issue of immigration, as Trump has done, with an indifference to human tragedy, cavalier threats to use lethal force and to close the border, and a zeal to divide. There are now more than six thousand migrants in encampments in Tijuana—many of them part of a caravan that has travelled from Honduras, and more than a thousand of whom are children—and conditions there are worsening by nearly every measure: sanitation, illness, grief, frustration, and anger. At the San Ysidro crossing, where many of the migrants are hoping to claim asylum, officials are processing fewer than a hundred cases a day.