WHEN I VISITED McALLEN, TEXAS, IN 2018, THE STAND off at the U. S.-Mexico border was starting to feel like DEFCON 1. The Trump administration had imposed a “zero-tolerance policy” and was separating children from their parents. Much of America, and the world, was horrified. And that was kind of the point. The logic of family separation was simple and brutal: Make it terrible to come to this country so that people will stop coming. I saw the human toll of this approach written on the faces of detainees as I peered through the chain-link fences at a Border Patrol processing facility in the Rio Grande Valley. Tough but the policy’s defenders might argue—except the strategy didn’t work. Border “encounters,” in which authorities detain or expel someone arriving at the southern border, rose for much of 2018 and spiked in 2019.
