Such boldness doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. To date, no one in the Trump Administration has been held accountable for its family-separation policy, even after evidence has steadily mounted as to its immense human costs and administrative failures. The government’s own data show that it has had no appreciable effect on migration patterns throughout the summer, but the Administration pursued the policy anyway, targeting immigrant families. Zero tolerance was designed for the government to criminally prosecute all migrants who crossed the border illegally, yet, in May, less than a third of those arrested by Border Patrol were referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution, and a significant number of those referrals involved parents who crossed the border with their children. For years, there has been frustration among federal immigration authorities who felt that parents were taking advantage of laxer enforcement at the border when they travelled to the United States with their children. There are certainly flaws in the system, but the zero-tolerance policy was intended to send a message of unprecedented harshness. According to a report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, at Syracuse University, “The Administration has not explained its rationale for prosecuting parents with children when that left so many other adults without children who were not being referred for prosecution.” Michelle Brané, of the Women’s Refugee Commission, told me, “It’s still baffling to me that no one has had to answer for this.”