A month ago, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said that children of parents illegally entering the US would be “put into foster care or whatever.” It’s almost certain he neither knows nor cares what foster care even entails for children who are actual citizens, and the trauma involved. To me, out of all the horrible things said by members of the Trump White House, this is one of the more reprehensible. That someone could be so cavalier in the face of unimaginable suffering is the sign of someone who should be cast out of whatever society he happens to reside in. But ours is one that rewards such inhumanity.

Just what “whatever” referred to remained uninvestigated at the time. But now we know that one of the forms it can take is separating families and putting children in cages.

So Kelly is scum. And so is everyone that does any kind of work for this multifaceted, grotesque leviathan, from administrators in cubicles to the jailers – or to put another way, from those giving orders to those following them:

The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe. They scream “Mami” and “Papá” over and over again, as if those are the only words they know.

The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”

A few weeks ago, Trump correctly pointed out that a viral photo of children in cages was actually taken during the Obama administration. So it’s not like this is exactly new:

The U.S. government operates hundreds of immigration detention centers — generally, extensions to or repurposed prisons — to hold non-citizens in the deportation proceedings. But a policy decision by the Obama administration to put newly arrived Central American refugees on the fast-track for deportation rather than on a path for asylum protection has filled these centers to the brim, creating pressure to deport individuals as quickly as possible and to build even more of these human warehouses. But as more and more refugees arrived with young children in tow, the administration realized that detaining kids in prisons would put them in violation of established legal standards.

So in the summer of 2014 the Obama administration began its program of “family detention” in Artesia, New Mexico. The Department of Homeland Security’s detention and deportation apparatus, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), converted a federal agent training facility into a secured unit to hold, process and deport hundreds of Central American mothers and their children. “Family,” as defined by DHS, did not include fathers, husbands or adult brothers who were forcibly separated from their children, spouses, and sisters and detained in “regular” detention facilities elsewhere. The administration argued that the “camp” was not a “prison,” and, therefore, could be used to confine the otherwise un-confineable children. The government had managed to figure out how to account for their human spillover now that they had run out of detention cells.

They had successfully built “baby jail.

The facility was constructed and operated with no public oversight for several weeks (a black hole period during which an unknown number of families were deported) before a few public-interest immigration lawyers got word of what was going on. The advocates described arriving to a scene of utter despair: refugees caged in trailers, their movement restricted, denied adequate food, and pressured by immigration officials to sign deportation orders even though they had the legal right to seek asylum protection. In a November 2014 statement, DHS maintained that, “ICE ensures that these residential centers operate in an open environment, which includes medical care, play rooms, social workers, educational services, and access to legal counsel.”

The subtext of the DHS statement was that in constructing a facility hours away from the nearest large city, let alone major media market, it was not very feasible for anyone to investigate the validity of their claims or suggest otherwise.

Trump held up a mirror to mainstream liberals – what their reactions were I do not know. This very obviously transcends centrist Republican/Democrat ideologies, and points to something far deeper.

As Crip Dyke noted, this is exactly who we are, and this is who we’ve always been.