Trump's border policy: If cruelty isn't the point, what is?

Thanks to a series of news reports over the past few days, we now know that the Trump administration's vicious family separation policy last summer has been followed up by a comparably cruel policy of holding child migrants in detention centers under conditions that resemble torture.

The question is why the United States — one of the richest countries in the world and one that loves to wrap itself in a mythology of moral righteousness — would be acting to produce suffering on such a massive scale.

One option has been proposed by journalist Adam Serwer in one of the most widely