Let’s open with a joke:

Mr. Bovino said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents were probably more experienced at handling young people than “any domestic law enforcement agency.”

“I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children,” he said. “Not because we want to be, but because we have to be.”

Granted, the punchline is weak and the person delivering it is even weaker, but for ex-Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino — he of the routine violation of court orders and a predilection for Nazi-esque outerwear — to suggest that any part of the anti-migrant hate train is good with children is laughable. That’s some gallows ass humor right there.

Trump didn’t invent separating children from parents when detaining and deporting migrants, but he was the first to turn it into the rule, rather than the tragic exception. His second administration is definitely the one filled with people whose eyes absolutely light up every time they destroy the life of an immigrant.

Here’s what Bovino was defending, while doing his best to talk around the issue. This photo is courtesy of the school that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos attended before being arrested (along with his father) and sent to a detention center more than 1,000 miles away from their home.

That’s a federal officer holding onto the child’s backpack, as if the frightened child might make a run for freedom at any point.

Since that moment went viral, tons of conflicting narratives have been sent out into the public domain. The government has said the usual moronic, hateful stuff about the father being an illegal immigrant who abandoned his child at school when officers closed in on him. The father’s lawyer claims the father has a pending asylum claim, which doesn’t actually make him an illegal immigrant. In fact, it means he can’t be detained or deported until his case is heard.

Stumbling onto the scene following the second execution of a Minneapolis resident in the past three weeks is JD Vance, who was apparently sent out by the president to charm their critics into submission. But being charming or empathetic or otherwise projecting something resembling “normal human being” has never been one of Vance’s skills. So, while he opened up with something approaching respecting the humanity of others — that being that he has a five-year-old of his own — he soon veered in the direction of MAGA incantations to claim the child got everything that was coming to him.

In Minneapolis, Vance sought to appear empathetic toward the child. He declared that he too has a 5-year-old, and said he’d been moved by the story. However, he said he’d done “follow-up research” and discovered that the father was an “illegal alien.”

“Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?” asked Vance, speaking of ICE. He then scoffed: “If the argument is that you can’t arrest people who have violated our laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity.”

“Follow up research” of course means “handed DHS talking points.” And referring to the father as an illegal alien (repeatedly) is just a lie of convenience. And it’s probably not even an intentional lie, as Greg Sargent points out in The New Republic. It’s just Vance’s worldview — one shared by plenty of people in the administration — getting out ahead of his pathetic attempt to calm the Minnesota waters.

But an even more grotesque Trump-Vance stance here is going unnoticed. Vance simply doesn’t think it’s a misnomer to call the father an “illegal alien,” despite his asylum claim. That’s because Vance plainly doesn’t believe those awaiting asylum adjudication are here legitimately at all. He and Trump have adopted the position that legal loopholes allow them to deport asylum-seekers before their claims are heard.

Everyone Trump wants gone can be labeled an illegal immigrant. All federal officers and prosecutors need to do is strip them of their protected status, revoke their visas, void asylum applications, or dismiss pending immigration cases to convert people following legal pathways towards permanent residence into “illegals” who are supposedly “invading” our country.

And it will do this even though there are vulnerable people — children, the elderly, parents with newborns, people who are likely to be tortured or killed if deported to the countries they fled — in the mix. And then they’ll send someone who’s not quite as abrasive as Trump, Noem, Bovino, Bondi, etc. to soft-sell the horrors the administration will continue to inflict on this nation for the rest of whatever. It’s callous, malicious, and above all, evil for its own sake. It does nothing to make America greater or safer. All it does is make it whiter.