As pandemic continues, Trump sees opportunity to cut immigration.

The coronavirus crisis has brought out the best in countless Americans, from nurses pulling extra shifts, to grocery clerks keeping everyone fed, to the retired Kansas farmer who, finding himself with a spare N95 mask, mailed it to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

In Washington, President Trump sees the crisis as another opportunity to reduce immigration, starting with a 60-day ban on new green cards.

This so-called “pause” comes on top of the president having already closed our southern border to migrants and having halted the issuance of visas at consulates abroad.

At the same time, he’s deporting so many immigrants who then test positive for coronavirus that Guatemala, for one, is refusing to accept them.

As of Tuesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was reporting that it had tested 705 detainees, of whom 425 were positive for infection. That’s 60%. If the 705 were randomly selected, that rate is so shockingly high as to imply criminal negligence.

It is unconscionable to deport from detention centers that have neglected the health of their prisoners, let alone those who risk spreading coronavirus in poorer countries.

On Thursday, a Miami federal judge said conditions were so bad at three South Florida detention centers that they amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment,” the Miami Herald reported. U.S.

District Judge Marcia Cooke ordered ICE to tell her within three days how it plans to release hundreds of detainees.

A compassionate nation would release on parole — into the care of their friends and families — every detainee not accused of a serious crime who tests negative. COVID-19 is no common cold or ordinary flu, after all. To those whom it sickens, it can be lethal.

Brazenly, ICE asserted to another federal judge Monday that the courts have no authority over its detention practices.

Trump is using the coronavirus crisis to exploit the anti-immigrant views that propelled his election four years ago. Ominously, a current University of Maryland poll showed strong support across the board — even 49 percent among Democrats — for his “temporary” immigration restrictions.

But there is no logic in barring green cards to permanent immigrants while continuing to allow guest worker visas for farm laborers, high-tech workers and others in demand among American industries.

Trump initially suggested a total suspension of green cards, couching it as a means to save jobs for Americans amidst unemployment numbers not seen since the Great Depression.

He backed off slightly after hearing how a guest worker ban would hurt agriculture. Farm labor, often back-breaking, has not appealed to many native-born Americans when jobs are scarce, largely because foodstuffs are grown in rural rather than urban America.

But the president hinted at “additional immigration measures” to come, raising suspicions that he may try to make the 60-day order permanent, effectively rewriting immigration law without the consent of Congress.

In a private call with White House supporters — an audio recording of which was obtained by The Washington Post — Trump’s senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said the suspension is part of a larger strategy to reduce overall immigration.

It’s noteworthy that Trump did not try to couch his latest assault on immigration in terms of pandemic protection, but jobs. But as he ignored repeated warnings about the virus’s spread, so, too, has the president ignored abundant evidence that immigrants, including refugees, have been a source of great strength for our country in every possible respect.

Scientists who fled Hitler were instrumental in the development of the atomic bombs that ended World War II. Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote this week that “more than half of the most highly valued tech companies in the United States were founded by immigrants.”

The founder of Zoom — a lifeline for commerce and politics in the time of coronavirus — “is a Chinese immigrant whose first eight visa applications were denied,” she reported.

The Center for American Progress reported this week that an estimated 131,000 persons in Temporary Protected Status, from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti are filling jobs in such critical occupations as working in hospitals and nursing homes, growing food and stocking groceries. The third greatest number, behind only California and Texas, are some 17,900 in Florida.

There are an estimated 202,500 DACA recipients — the so-called “Dreamers” — in similar occupations.

Yet the Trump administration is in the courts trying to overturn the protection that President Obama gave to the Dreamers and has moved to end the temporary protected status for more than 300,000 Central American refugees.

Sens. Charles Schumer, D-NY, Dick Durbin, D-IL, and Bob Menendez, D-NJ, this week held a news conference in opposition to Trump’s intent to expel those people. Those appearing with them included a Dreamer who is an operating room nurse.

“One in six health care and social service workers are immigrants,” Durbin said.

Imagine where our country would be today without them.