When the Obama administration placed the young children separated from their immigrant parents for unlawfully crossing the border outside “concentration camp” walls, it swiftly turned into an opportunity for human traffickers to get free slaves. That was certainly terrible and unacceptable, and something had to be done.

Children of a very tender age need to be held, comforted and cared for. But if adults in a facility provide them with the human contact they desperately need, they expose themselves to allegations of sexual molestation. At the very least, they commit nonconsensual touching, and America is better than that. Molesting the children of incarcerated immigrant parents is outrageous and unacceptable, and something must be done.

When the Obama administration created a path to citizenship, people from other nations saw the opportunity to get here, any way they could, to give their children a better life. Certainly one can’t blame them for loving their children, for wanting to provide for their future, and America offered them a future they would never find in their home nations. Despite the horrifying and exhausting microaggressions felt by those already here, America is the land of opportunity to immigrants.

So they came. It didn’t matter that they failed to fully appreciate what the law provided. They aren’t immigration law scholars, but desperate parents. If there was a hope, it incentivized them to take grave risks and try to be the ones who made it through. It’s not entirely clear what the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy does differently than prior administrations, but it’s abundantly clear that hatred toward Trump has put it on the radar when no one cared before.

That prior administrations did it doesn’t excuse the current one for perpetuating it, or exacerbating it. The incarceration of any adult crossing the southern border for illegal entry and its concomitant separation of their children is now getting the airing it demands. But calling it indecent and immoral may bring visceral satisfaction, particularly for those looking for another reason to hate Trump, but it fails to do much to address the question. What do we do with the children?

Let’s start with the easy part. The policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border, delivering them into a bureaucratic labyrinth while their fathers and mothers await trial or petition for asylum, is the wickedest thing the Trump administration has done so far — and you can tell exactly how wicked by observing how unwilling White House officials are to defend the policy on the merits.

There can be nothing good to say about harming children. Any children. There may be facile excuses, like it’s not our fault a mother brought her child from Salvador to the United States to engage in an illegal border crossing, but that’s not the child’s fault, and even if it was, we don’t harm children.

The true rationale has been clear from the beginning. Yes, it’s partially a byproduct of the tension between the administration’s desire to hold illegal arrivals while their status is adjudicated and a court ruling that forbids holding children for more than 20 days. But the cruelty of separation was also deliberately chosen, in the hopes of reducing the number of families trying to make a dangerous border crossing by delivering the ones who get here into a child’s nightmare and a parent’s hell.

As a policy matter, the administration wants to send the message to potential border-crossers that this cruelty will be inflicted, so don’t come. And if they do, they brought it on themselves. We send a lot of stupid messages wrapped in adjectives to try to make them appear less awful, but we’re not just trying to keep people from trying to sneak in; we’re doing actual harm to children to prove we mean it.

Honesty is generally too much to expect from this administration, but this is a case where it would be useful for everyone if the Trump White House just admitted that this policy was conceived as a deterrent — traumatizing a certain number of families in the hopes of bringing greater order to the border in the long run.

Is there no line below which this administration will not go? Not if it serves Trump’s goals. But as easy as it is to criticize, it’s hard to arrive at a better way to deal with the problems.

Some of this wider outrage is understandable, but it doesn’t sufficiently reckon with the realities that forced even a liberal White House to run detention centers and pursue deportations. It’s not just domestic politics and the (justifiable) fear of backlash; it’s also that a more generous immigration policy can easily end up requiring more enforcement to prevent a snowballing effect — because migrants are responsive to incentives established by receiving countries, not just conditions at home, and often (just ask Angela Merkel) the more you welcome the more will attempt to come.

We love and welcome immigrants, and need them, until they become a problem, a burden. And then something must be done. It’s logistically untenable to throw open the door so any immigrant riding a unicorn on a rainbow can enter.

So even if you hope to move gradually toward open borders, as much of the Democratic Party seems to want, the slow pursuit of that utopia is still likely to force even Democratic politicians to conduct crackdowns in the year-to-year time being. If ICE were abolished tomorrow, President Kamala Harris would probably end up reinventing it.

When immigrants come, they bring their children with them, which means we still have to deal with that reality. A policy that is based upon the deliberate infliction of cruelty to children is horrendously wicked. But when every option is problematic, even the best-intended policy will do unacceptable harm, and something must be done. But what?

Some harshness, some deterrence, really is unavoidable in any immigration system that doesn’t simply dissolve borders. So policymakers are therefore obliged to choose tolerable cruelties over the intolerable one that we’re witnessing in action right now.

Is there any way to deal with the children that doesn’t evoke cruelty? So which cruelty is more tolerable? Is there any solution that won’t cause the unduly passionate to scream “something must be done”? Can there be any agreement on what cruelty is tolerable, because these are children, not pawns in a tribal chess game?

Update: By editorial, the New York Times emphatically calls for the end of the “immoral” separation of children from parents.

The heartlessness of that is mind-boggling. It seems to elude the administration and its cheerleaders that this is not about crime or security, but about the most elemental human values; that ordering armed border guards to cruelly and needlessly rip children from mothers — in one case, while she was breast-feeding the child — goes against fundamental American values and undercuts its standing in the world.

Their solutions?

• Call Congress. 
• Join protests.
• Donate to legal and humanitarian efforts. 
• Vote. 

Or to put it more succinctly, they’ve got nothing.