The Republican Party has lost its mind on immigration

Reuters/Adrees Latif

A four-year-old boy weeps in the arms of a family member as he and others were apprehended by border patrol agents after illegally crossing into the U.S. border from Mexico near McAllen, Texas, U.S., May 2, 2018.

• Immigration is a political issue. Taking children from parents is a human one.
• The Republican Party has lost its mind when it comes to immigration.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California has sponsored a bill that would forbid the separation of parents and children at the border.

The Keep Families Together Act has been cosponsored by many of her Democratic counterparts and Thursday, on Twitter, Feinstein wrote that she and her partners are "continuing to ask Republica senators to join our bill."

I cringed.

For those of us who were proud to identify as conservatives before the most recent presidential election, and who now find ourselves in some strange limbo where we still believe in many of the core beliefs that the conservative movement use to espouse but can no longer support the majority of this current iteration of the Republican Party's policies, there is no issue that provokes more frustration and shame than what is currently going on at the border.

It's no secret that Democrats and Republicans tend to have vastly diverging views on immigration. I was always out of sync with my party on this issue, even before the reign of Donald Trump. As the grandchild of four people who were not born in this country - one of whom was a survivor of the Holocaust, and two of whom fled from Vienna and Berlin and were blessed to find refuge in this country - I take seriously the words "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

It's OK, though, that much of the Republican Party has a less inviting stance on immigration. Reasonable people can disagree about political policy, even when that policy affects the lives of real, breathing people. We have to be tolerant of such disagreement, and its implementation. But there are limits. And what we are seeing on the border right now is not a partisan issue. It's not a political issue. It is an issue of basic humanity.

This administration should hear from the left, and the right, and anyone in between, just how reprehensible this policy is. Republicans who are silent - or worse, support this abhorrent practice - are only serving to illustrate to the rest of the country, and the world, how the party of religiously inspired morality has totally, utterly lost its way.