Editorial: A shift in the wind on child internment camps

The court of public opinion has ruled on the Trump Administrations policy of separating families at the border and detaining the kids, some of them still in diapers, in locked, chain-link cages set up inside old Walmarts.

These are internment camps: temporary confinements for large groups of people, held without benefit of trial.

Turns out we don’t like it under any circumstances — except, of course, for the dumbest and meanest among us who approve of President Trump’s strongman tactics no matter how many crying children are calling for their mothers.

The situation hit critical mass this week, though anyone who has been paying attention marked the day in May when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced this new policy. And the story itself has been live for weeks, when reports of the camps first surfaced. But this week came footage, firsthand reports, tweetstorms and the sort of social-media argument that even the most repugnant among us have trouble justifying, though somehow they manage.

The ransom note came first. Trump pledged to stop taking babies away from their mothers if only Democrats would do something about immigration. Then came the lie: Why, we’ve been doing this all along! The Clintons did this. Obama did this!

But, of course, they did not. Sessions announced the “Zero Tolerance” policy on May 8, at a press conference on the Mexican border at Tijuana.

“We don’t want to separate families, but we don’t want families to come to the border illegally and attempt to enter into this country improperly,” he said. “The parents are subject to prosecution while children may not be. So, if we do our duty and prosecute those cases, then children inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions.”

Trump pledged on Wednesday afternoon to end the practice — the one he signed off on in May.

This contradicted the first lie: that only the Dems can do anything about it. And the second lie — that this has been going on since the Clinton Administration, lives on among the fathful.

Republicans in the General Assembly have a lot on the line, particularly an election in a few months.

Not Trump, though. He’s safe until 2020, and, probably, another four years after. As of yet, the Dems have no candidates for the next cycle. And as we’ve seen, there’s nothing Trump can do that his followers and sycophants won’t abide.