The Trump administration's compassion gap

Then the first lady headed to the border to assess the situation for herself.

"I'd ... like to ask you how I can help to these children to reunite with their families as quickly as possible," she told medical staff at a children's shelter.

On Twitter, Ivanka Trump thanked her father for stopping the practice of separations his own administration had introduced and she called on Congress to find "a lasting solution that is consistent with our shared values."

Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, said Trump understood the importance of horrifying imagery.

"I would imagine that the White House would want Melania to go down there and provide some positive visuals ... to try to make it seem as though they care about the outcome and the welfare of these kids," Anderson told CNN's Jake Tapper.

Yet the visit did seem a little contrived, featuring a facility that looked like a brightly decorated schoolroom that was far more welcoming than cages holding some kids in groups or the ordeal of more than 200 other children who were bused to New York.

Ivanka Trump's tweet, meanwhile, seemed oddly detached -- as if she were just an outside observer rather than a member of the administration that enforced the "zero tolerance" policy that led to the separations.

Efforts to show compassion toward the children might also have come too late to change the narrative.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions protested on Thursday in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network that "the American people don't like the idea that we are separating families. We never really intended to do that."

Earlier, the President confessed at a Cabinet meeting that "it bothered me, as it bothered everybody at this table. We are all bothered by it."

But judging by its own statements, the administration used family separation as leverage to stop more migrants coming over the border and to try to jam Congress into fixing the issue -- in bills that would achieve many of Trump's immigration policy goals.

Earlier in June, White House chief of staff John Kelly said in an NPR interview that family separation was seen as a "tough deterrent" to illegal migration.

And Sessions said on May 9, the day the new policy was publicized: "If you don't want your child to be separated, then don't bring them across the border illegally."

There's not much the administration can do to correct those missteps now.

But a lack of compassion was also evident in its failure so far to tell Americans how it plans to reunite 2,300 children and their parents who were separated after crossing the border before Trump reversed the policy.

Trump has spent the last two years dehumanizing undocumented migrants, and using immigration as a base- cementing strategy.

The danger for him now is that the last few weeks may come to be seen as the moment when the human consequences of his approach became clear -- and rebounded against him.