Trump’s order is beginning of the end to a dark chapter

President Donald Trump’s order on Wednesday to stop separating children from parents who cross illegally into the United States halted a hideous brutality, but it doesn’t end this shameful episode.

The stain on America’s international reputation remains, and ending family separation solves nothing about U.S. immigration policy. The issues are difficult and complicated, and political gamesmanship has stymied a solution for decades.

Immigration policy remains a mess. Still, concern about that paled utterly in comparison to the urgent need to stop an unthinkably cruel practice that has terrorized more than 2,000 children in the past six weeks.

There’s no other word for forcibly grabbing children, most of whom are too young to understand what’s happening, from their mothers or fathers and putting them in crude detention centers with hundreds of equally traumatized strangers.

The psychological damage done to those children is incalculable, and the haphazard way the separation policy was implemented will make the repair harder. Advocates who have been trying to help parents and children in detention say that the government has no plan for separated parents and children to be reunited.

Different laws and agencies deal with adults vs. children. Those in charge of the adults’ fate don’t know anything about what has happened to the children, and vice-versa. The laws that apply to adults could lead to their deportation much faster than for the children; some separated parents and children may never be reunited. That is intolerable. Shame on the president and those in his administration who knowingly chose to inflict such cruelty as a tactic. What they hoped to achieve — whether it was meant to deter people from crossing illegally from Mexico with their children or to force Democrats to agree to more of what the president wants on immigration — doesn’t matter. Neither goal remotely justifies the policy.

And make no mistake, it was a policy choice of the Trump administration to begin prosecuting “100 percent” of unauthorized border crossers under criminal statutes. Trump’s insistence that Democrats are to blame for the separations — because they wouldn’t enable a comprehensive immigration fix by giving in to his every demand – is bogus.

The two sides do share blame for decades of stalemate on immigration policy.

And it’s true that the previous practice of not detaining border crossers who were with children, instead turning them loose and trusting them to appear for court dates to try their cases, led to many illegal immigrants staying in the U.S. without penalty.

The problem is that current laws can’t all be enforced without unacceptable outcomes such as separating families or knowing that many will stay in the U.S. illegally.

Now the Trump administration intends to continue the “100 percent” prosecution of crossers but plans to keep families together. How they will get around a rule that limits detention of children to 20 days and what sort of facilities they’ll be able to provide are unknown.

Perhaps the imminent prospect of large-scale detention cities will bring both sides of Congress to the table at last.

Whatever happens, the immediate priority must be to put those families at the border back together, to end the suffering so callously inflicted and allow healing — of those families and of America’s soul.