It’s no secret that cruelty is the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s immigration policy. Everybody knows it, although there are many – too many -- who shamefully either choose to ignore it or, worse, support it.

What would be aberrant behavior at any other time, under Trump’s regime has become official policy: Children are the main target of this administration’s brutality which has gone as far as ripping babies from their mothers’ arms as a “deterrent” (Trump’s word) for migrants from Central America. Surprisingly only to someone as vulgar and ignorant as Trump and his minions, such inhumane measures have failed miserably. Thousands of people – men, women and children-- from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador keep making the death-defying trek from their countries to the U.S. border and will keep doing so as long as runaway violence, abject poverty and entrenched corruption in their countries, much of it created, abetted or enabled by U.S. policies,  force them to flee to save their lives.

The lack of values, the disrespect for human lives, the perversion of morality of Trump and his administration is nowhere clearer than in the fact that, according to  a Justice Department report made public by Representative Ted Deutch, (D-Fl) in February, and reported by the New York Times, there were 4,500 complaints in four years about the sexual harassment and abuse of immigrant children in U.S custody.

Horrible, of course. But then again, what else can be expected when the person who occupies the White House is a self-confessed sexual harasser of women, whose blatant racism categorized refuge-seeking families as less than human?

"These aren't people. These are animals," Trump said back in May.

At the risk of insulting animals, I would say the only animal here, a particularly brutal and destructive one, lives in the White House. z