America's immigration inhumanity

How Trump abandoned justice and humanity at America's southern border

People at the Mexican border.
(Image credit: Illustrated | HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

Zero tolerance policies have been spreading throughout America for the past 40 years, wreaking havoc wherever and whenever they've been tried. That's because their fundamental premise is that the cause they aim to advance is so righteous that authorities have impunity to go after minor offenses with maximal force.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the results would be deeply ugly now that the Trump administration has deployed a zero-tolerance policy against the world's most powerless people: fleeing migrants.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.