GIVEN ALL THE HUMILIATIONS THAT GO WITH THE JOB...:

Almost immediately after President Trump took office, his administration began weighing what for years had been regarded as the nuclear option in the effort to discourage immigrants from unlawfully entering the United States.

Children would be separated from their parents if the families had been apprehended entering the country illegally, John F. Kelly, then the homeland security secretary, said in March 2017, "in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network." [...]

[F]or George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the idea of crying children torn from their parents' arms was simply too inhumane -- and too politically perilous -- to embrace as policy, and Mr. Trump, though he had made an immigration crackdown one of the central issues of his campaign, succumbed to the same reality, publicly dropping the idea after Mr. Kelly's comments touched off a swift backlash.

But advocates inside the administration, most prominently Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump's senior policy adviser, never gave up on the idea. Last month, facing a sharp uptick in illegal border crossings, Mr. Trump ordered a new effort to criminally prosecute anyone who crossed the border unlawfully -- with few exceptions for parents traveling with their minor children. [...]

[M]r. Miller has expressed none of the president's misgivings. "No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement," he said during an interview in his West Wing office this past week. "It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law."

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