You needn’t be clairvoyant to foresee that the Trump administration’s policy of confiscating immigrant children as if they were forbidden contraband will one day be remembered as one of the darkest moments in U.S. legal history. It is destined to take its place alongside the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott Decision and the Roosevelt administration’s internment of Japanese-Americans as a signal reminder that even a nation dedicated to liberty and justice for all can lose its way.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ embarrassing attempts to conjure scriptural authority for the government’s practice of separating children from their undocumented parents cannot disguise its intrinsic cruelty. Images like the one reproduced here have already diminished America’s moral stature among freedom-loving peoples around the world, including many who historically regarded the United States as the ultimate defender of human rights.

To be clear, the White House has not explicitly ordered federal border agents to wrest babies from the breasts of mothers seeking asylum in the U.S.

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ insistence that any adult suspected of attempting to enter the country illegally be criminally prosecuted, and dispatched to a federal jail, makes such separations inevitable, because federal law forbids children from accompanying their parents to such facilities.

Reports that parents who present themselves at the border to request asylum are being similarly jailed and separated from their children compound the government’s culpability for what has become a self-inflicted humanitarian crisis.

The Obama administration’s practice of housing undocumented families indefinitely in overcrowded detention facilities was not dramatically more humane, and the federal courts eventually intervened to curtailed it, ordering that most families be released pending deportation hearings. Inevitably, some of those released from detention have opted to go off the government’s radar, swelling the population of undocumented aliens the president likens to a pandemic plague.

But the Trump administration’s draconian solution — the hyper-criminalization of what is, for most, a desperate flight toward physical safety and economic security — has run roughshod over the defenseless immigrant children in its path.

Those responsible for sorting out custody disputes and allegations of parental neglect have recognized for decades that involuntary separation from one’s parents is a traumatic event of seismic proportions. The law generally allows such separations only when they are necessary to assure a child’s well-being.

That’s why family court judges and lawyers have been particularly shocked and sickened by the government’s callous disregard for the best interests of immigrant children.

If another country’s border patrol agents were seizing children from their parents and warehousing them abandoned discount stores, it might suffice to condemn those abuses, demand access for inspectors from the International Red Cross, and call for diplomatic intervention by the U.S. and allies who were proud, in better times, to link arms with us in a humanitarian cause.

But the children in question are being seized by American government employees — fellow citizens paid with our tax dollars, and acting in our name. We are complicit in the cruel policy they are carrying out (and it is a policy, not a law they are constitutionally obliged to enforce),.

Constituents should be especially vigilant about making sure that Republican lawmakers who express their solidarity by appearing with Vice President Mike Pence during his Michigan campaign swing hold the Trump administration accountable for its excesses.

The spectacle of the world’s most prosperous democracy ripping children from their parents arms has appalled compassionate people of every faith, nationality and political stripe. It is time to let them know that Michiganders are no less horrified than they are by what our country’s immigration authorities are doing to children in our name.