“As migrants have sought out increasingly remote routes through the desert, more of them have died. This is a fact not seriously disputed by anyone familiar with the problem, including the Border Patrol. But if we are to look at these deaths as the Pima County pathologists do, as a kind of slow-motion epidemic, we must label the desert a proximate, not an ultimate, cause. There are various ultimate causes, but perhaps the plainest, certainly the most traceable, is federal policy. Confronted with images of holding pens and parentless children, it would be easy to assume the policy began with President Trump, the latest face of a revived — though hardly new — American hostility toward migrants. In fact, it has been in place through four presidential administrations.” NYT Mag: How U.S. Policy Turned the Sonoran Desert Into a Graveyard for Migrants.

+ Trump Cabinet officials voted in 2018 White House meeting to separate migrant children.