Who are we?

Immigration officials outdid themselves when they took into custody a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who had just undergone emergency surgery. Is this what President Donald Trump had in mind when he promised that federal enforcement resources would be focused on the “bad hombres”?

Rosa Maria Hernandez, whose developmental delays put her on a mental par with a 4- or 5-year-old, faces deportation in a case that calls into question the judgment — not to mention humanity — of federal agents.

The girl, brought across the Mexican border to Laredo, Texas, when she was 3 months old, was being transferred from a medical center in Laredo to a hospital in Corpus Christi Tuesday when the ambulance was stopped at a Border Patrol interior checkpoint. Agents allowed the girl and the adult cousin who accompanied her to proceed to the hospital for the child’s gallbladder surgery. But several armed Border Patrol agents, according to the girl’s family, were posted outside the operating room and then her hospital room until she was transferred to a federal facility for migrant children.

Let’s hope the public dismay at these events prompts someone in authority to come to their senses. The little girl should be released immediately to family members. Her parents brought her to this country as an infant in search of better treatment for her cerebral palsy. They weren’t with her in the ambulance because they both lack legal status and feared crossing the checkpoint.

Is this really the image the Border Patrol wants for itself ? Is this the image we Americans want for ourselves?