Even Trump’s conscience seems to have been shocked, momentarily, by the wrenching news video of a father and his little daughter drowned in the Rio Grande last Sunday. Or so he wants us to believe. The images of Oscar Alberto Martinez holding his 23-month-old Angie Valeria, their bodies face down in the river, forced the nation’s attention to the terrible effects of his administration’s crackdown. Driven away from safer ports of entry, those innocents perished as the father tried to save his child at a dangerous crossing point.
Trump being Trump, he immediately sought to deflect blame onto “the Democrats,” suggesting that his opponents’ humane attitude draws refugees northward at their peril. But by now he knows that his ill-treatment of those migrants has done nothing to dissuade them from fleeing violence and starvation in their home countries — a consequence of U.S. foreign policy that predated Trump but that he has only made worse.