A bad government gets worse

From The Intercept (Hidden horrors of "zero tolerance"---mass trials and children taken from their parents):

...Another parent who appeared in [Judge Ronald]Morgan’s court was from a Central American country that provides no meaningful protection to women and children who are victims of homicidal domestic violence. She asked for her identity to be concealed, because she fears retaliation by the U.S. government. 

We will call her Delia. Before fleeing her country, she was for years beaten up, cut, assaulted with guns, and threatened with death by her partner. He also threatened to kill their young child. When she hid in another city, he found her and dragged her home.

Delia said she fled her country weeks ago and went on the road to Mexico, eventually crossing the Rio Grande with her child on an inner tube. She saw three Border Patrol agents watching her and floated in their direction, so she could turn herself in.

Delia said that when she arrived later that night at the hielera — the Border Patrol processing office — she told the officers that she and her child needed asylum. She described the beatings and assaults and death threats. “Oh, come on!” she said the officers snickered. “You and everyone else with that old story!”

“You’re going to be deported,” she remembers them telling her. “And your child will stay here.” The next morning, the child was taken. Delia fell on her knees during the removal, wailing and begging not to be separated. Officials looked on indifferently, she said, as her child screamed incessantly.

...It was Thursday, the fourth day of “zero tolerance” in his court, and defendants were telling their stories. 

The judge had just asked Holly D’Andrea, the assistant U.S. attorney handling illegal entry prosecutions that day, if it were true that families were being reunited in detention. D’Andrea sounded uncertain, but answered that she thought it was true.

“Tell you what,” the judge said slowly, with a hard edge in his voice, “if it’s not, then there are a lot of folks that have some answering to do. Because what you’ve done, in effect, by separating these children is you’re putting them in some place without their parents. If you can imagine there’s a hell, that’s probably what it looks like.”

Seconds later, he pronounced a blanket sentence for all of the defendants: no prison, no big fine — merely time served. With that, his court concluded. 

In 46 minutes that morning, 32 people had been convicted, sentenced, and dispatched en masse to ICE detention. “All rise!” said the bailiff, and the judge exited the room. The chained migrants then shuffled and clanked to their fates, without their children.