Trump must now ‘pic’ his battles

IN his spirited defense Tuesday of his immigration policies, President Trump was right about many things, including that America must control its borders and that Democrats have zero interest in stemming illegal crossings.

With immigration bills taking shape in the House, the president insisted, “We have one chance to get it right.”

Yet as he spoke, most of the media continued to exhibit a heightened zeal for the story of children being separated from their parents. The wall-to-wall coverage didn’t vary and wasn’t nuanced — Trump and his team are cruelly breaking up families and terrifying innocent children.

That fixation gives the far-left peanut gallery — the Chelsea Handler types — the license to trot out their ever-ready Hitler/ Nazi comparisons. Even some commentators who usually know better, like retired Gen. Michael Hayden, went down that dark road, revealing more about their own simplistic thinking than the actual policy.

So Trump is not wrong about his opponents, the biased media and the need to control who is coming into the country. But sometimes, being right is not enough. This is one of those times. The situation updates the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, an infinite number of words, even when spoken by the president of the United States, would not be enough to overcome the power of the pictures coming out of Texas immigration facilities.

Photos and videos of children, some crying, some very young, who have been separated from their parents slam the brakes on conversation and thought. Rational arguments about law and policy and history don’t have a chance against the emotional wallop of pictures showing children in chain-link enclosures.

The compelling drama recalls the 2015 heartbreaking photo of a policeman carrying the lifeless body of a 3-year-old Kurdish boy from a beach in Turkey. The Syrian civil war has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions more, but no book of statistics could ever match the power of that single picture to tell the story of the war’s savage brutality.

Thankfully, we are not there yet. There are no reports of dead children in immigration facilities, but any sober discussion of how to fix the border crisis is impossible in this atmosphere, which includes the upcoming midterm elections.

This is an image-driven stampede of public opinion, and there is little chance to convince even the most open-minded Americans that the current situation is good or necessary. For both policy and political reasons, the president should call an immediate time-out on the “zero tolerance” approach Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in May.

Sessions defined the changes as meaning all illegal border crossers would be prosecuted. Whether he knew the implications is unclear, but he damn well should have.

For one thing, it meant that, because children cannot legally be held in adult detention facilities, families would have to be separated.

For another, announcing the policy at a time when there is a surge in the number of people trying to cross the border guaranteed a rapid accumulation of cases and people. In the last six weeks alone, a reported 2,000 children have been put in the custody of federal officials.

Much of the surge has to do with the hideous violence tearing apart Central America, with one study showing that in 2016, 43 of the 50 most violent cities in the world were in Central America. Millions of people born in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are now in the US, with more than half here illegally, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

It is, of course, silly to make important national policies on the basis of photo-driven emotions. But trying to put that emotion back in the bottle is like King Canute trying to order the tides not to flow. It can’t be done.

What can be done is creating a cooling- off period where the president and his team reassess their short-term options while they focus on the bills making their way through the House. The president’s call for a change that would allow families to be held and deported together now must become part of any new framework, and key Senate Republicans say they are in agreement.

Some such facilities were started under former President Barack Obama, but they are unpopular with immigration advocates, who basically want all crossers to be released pending their hearings. But with huge backlogs and no real enforcement against those who skip their hearings, the system has essentially collapsed.

So something must be done, but the current uproar will make any improvements in border security more difficult to achieve. With several Republicans joining Dems in blasting the zero-tolerance policy, the president’s chances of getting tighter screening, including more wall funding, are diminishing by the day.

That will remain true until the images of crying children fade from view.