The painful truth is, we had an immigration problem during the Obama years, too. Obama forcibly deported a record number of individuals and there was a significant issue with the handling of unaccompanied minors.

President Trump has been petty and vindictive in his handling of immigration policy. He twisted around the previous administration’s policy on asylum-seeking to defend the separation of families, saying it should be a deterrent when he was really just trying to throw some red meat to his base.

The response to Trump’s actions from the left has been to call him out as heartless and cruel. Which is fair enough. Yet at the same time these people pretend that Obama didn’t do many of the same things. And on the Trumpist right the response has been to simultaneously deny that Trump is heartless and cruel and then claim in the same breath that Obama did all of this heartless and cruel stuff first.

Never mind that the real answer is that immigration is a complex problem that warrants a serious bipartisan commitment to working toward solutions like codifying DACA, coming up with common sense policies on visas and legal immigration, and, oh, maybe, ending the war on drugs that has trashed countries like Honduras and El Salvador. Just spitballing here.