For the right, kids are no longer off-limits

AGAINST THE NAUSEATING BACKDROP of human misery and calculating cruelty that comprised the now-notorious 2018 zero tolerance policy more often known as family separation, there was dark comedy in watching “family-loving” conservatives and a growing web of right-wing influencers twist themselves into pretzels defending the barbarism against families being carried out by their new king and his underlings.

The policy—sketched up by the Mozart of xenophobic restrictionism, Stephen Miller; refined by his former boss, Dixie goblin Jeff Sessions; and signed off on by the brutish Donald Trump—referred all border crossers for criminal prosecution under relatively little-used federal statutes. The explicit goal was to dissuade further migration by forcing the separation of parents from children, who couldn’t join them in criminal custody.

As stories poured in of crying infants literally torn from their parents’ arms by jackbooted thugs with American flag patches on their sleeves, the right-wing commentariat and high-level officials who had spent months baying for blood at the border suddenly short-circuited. It was too inhumane, there was too immediate and widespread a backlash, and they were suddenly on their heels, forced to admit that, yes, migrants actually are people, and maybe this policy went too far.

Yet they also couldn’t cede too much ground, or they risked setting the precedent that these migrants’ human rights had to be respected. So they settled on the guilt-deflecting framing of: this is horrible, but these people have brought it on themselves. You made us do this, Republicans mewled. Perhaps most infamously, Sessions quoted the Bible while defending the policy, saying, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.”

It was an absurd and contemptible dodge, which is why it’s especially repellent that I now find myself looking back to this moment wistfully. Things have shifted in the intervening years. The heightened militancy of the extreme right, driven by its conspiratorial agitation during the Covid pandemic and the antidemocratic inflection point of its attempt to negate the 2020 presidential election (a delirium so widely held that it’s practically part of the Republican Party platform at this stage), has driven even mainstream pundits on the right to jettison any semblance of empathy toward immigrants.

That became especially clear earlier this month, as the country was plunged into a baby formula shortage that threatened the health of millions of infants. There were many culprits here: an economic system that allowed a handful of companies to control production of a crucial good; the everyone-for-themselves culture that led people to bulk-buy more formula than they needed as shortages loomed; even Trump himself, whose renegotiated North American trade discouraged importing formula. Yet the reprobates knew instantly who to blame: brown migrant babies, who were daring to drink their formula while in U.S. government custody. The controversy was ignited by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who’s made it a hobby to embarrass himself with ill-advised border enforcement cosplay, and was embraced by the ghouls at Fox News, who pushed the formula issue for days on primetime. “American families, there’s a shortage, but if you’re a migrant, don’t worry, because Uncle Sam has a stash of that,” said host Steve Doocy during a representative segment.

Cadres of sensible moderates went on TV or took to opinion pages to point out that the volume of migrant families and infants in government custody at any given time is so minuscule as to not even remotely impact the ubiquitous shortages—as if that was what this was really about. They treated these recriminations as a simple continuation of the victim-blaming that characterized the right wing’s response to family separation, but that analysis misses something basic: in the right’s telling, children aren’t defenseless victims of their parents’ bad choices or caught in the crossfire of a lawless border or whatever, they are parasites actively consuming what rightfully belongs to U.S. babies, and the government should leave them to die.

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