The Message

Families torn apart.
A man arrested and deported as he drives his pregnant wife to the the hospital.
Kids in cages.
Girls sexually assaulted by ICE agents.
And...

Susan Ferriss, WaPo:

Tameika Lovell was retrieving luggage at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport when Customs and Border Protection officers detained her for a random search. It was Nov. 27, 2016, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the school counselor from Long Island had just returned from a short Jamaica vacation. Lovell, who is black, had been stopped before, but this time a CBP supervisor began asking questions she hadn’t heard previously.

“Don’t you think you’re spending too much money traveling?” Lovell, 34, recalls a CBP supervisor asking.

What happened next is the subject of a harrowing lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Inside a secure room, Lovell’s litigation alleges, a female CBP officer searched Lovell’s belongings, presumably for illegal drugs, and asked if she was using a tampon or sanitary pad. The question upset her, but Lovell replied “no” and complied when told to remove her shoes, lift her arms and spread her legs.

As a second female officer observed, hand on her firearm, the lawsuit says, the first officer touched Lovell “from head to toe” before ordering her to squat. Lovell was clothed, but the lawsuit claims that the officer squeezed Lovell’s breasts, and, “placed her right hand into [Lovell’s] pants ‘forcibly’ inserting four gloved fingers into plaintiff’s vagina” before parting Lovell’s buttocks “for viewing.”
The Banality of Evil tells us that eventually, abuse of power happens just because people have the power (and understand that having that power lessens the likelihood of being held to account), so the abuse becomes an end in itself.  Torture for the sake of torture. Power is abused simply because people have the power to abuse.

There are reasons for all of this. There's nothing particularly random about it, even if it's more stochastic than scripted.
So at this point, I have to conclude that while plenty of the shitty things happening to immigrants at the hands of ICE and CBP are happening just because people are people and people can get real shitty real fast when unrestrained, I have to remember that the policy behind these shitty occurrences is intended to engender these shitty things in order to send a message that "we'll fuck you up if you come here - don't come here'.

The Daddy State is on the porch, and it's bangin' on the door.