It’s not easy to wake up in the morning only to confront a reality so warped, so sick, that it makes you question the worth of the work you love and has been your life for so many years. It is sad, even despairing, to find yourself doubting your belief that, despite everything, human nature is fundamentally good, a conviction that has sustained you and made it possible for you to overcome weaknesses and survive obstacles, mistakes and confusions.

Yet, after learning that on top of every other outrage, in this country hundreds of children -- little kids for goodness sake -- have not only been separated from their parents but forced to appear in front of an immigration judge by themselves in a disgusting and twisted mockery of justice, you tell me if it is possible for anybody to feel any different.

“A year-old baby boy in federal custody appeared in immigration court without his parents in Phoenix, briefly played with a ball, drank from a bottle, then cried hysterically as he was about to leave the courtroom, according to the Associated Press.” This is the lead paragraph of a piece by Mary Papenfuss in the Huffington Post. So sad and incredible is the whole thing that the judge, not surprisingly, declared his embarrassment.

“Judge John Richardson said he was ‘embarrassed to ask’ if Johan (the little boy’s name) understood the proceedings, said AP. ‘I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,’ he told Johan’s attorney.”

Yeah, good, but you know what? Judge Richardson and all the other judges that go along with this theater of the absurd need to acknowledge that embarrassment is not enough, pity is not enough. For the sake of the children and their parents, but also for the sake of the very soul of this nation, an immoral and inhumane policy like Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance,” that mercilessly punishes families and tortures children with a sick parody of law, demands unforgiving, uncompromising outrage, it demands standing up and saying, “Enough is enough!”

Even today there are 3,000 children in some sort of government custody without their parents, 100 of them are 5 years old or less. At least 19 parents of these children have already been deported back to Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras, according to Health and Human Services.

And as if to give an even clearer measure of the cruelty Trump and his people are capable of, HHS lawyers have argued that it is not the federal government’s responsibility to reunite children with parents that have been deported. In other words, Trump, Sessions, Miller and the rest of the cabal of racists that hold power over the country, don’t give a damn if the children they ripped from their parents’ arms ever feel their mothers’ kiss and their fathers’ embrace again.

With every new abusive policy, it becomes more and more obvious that the problem with this administration goes well beyond politics into the realm of basic human decency: These are bad people for whom compassion, solidarity or even justice are just meaningless words.

“A year-old baby boy in federal custody appeared in immigration court without his parents in Phoenix, briefly played with a ball, drank from a bottle, then cried hysterically as he was about to leave the courtroom." 

This is what this nation has turned into under Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing policies.

Where is the outrage?