Dear editor,

Representative Roger Marshall has an interesting argument to justify tearing children away from their parents.
Marshall says, “At the end of the day, we’re still a country of laws.” This echoes Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions’ “We are a people of compassion and law,” announcing the removal of protections for DACA dreamers. So, how do the Representative and the “brilliant” President he doggedly defends live up to this standard?
The President’s executive order says, “The only legal way to enter this country is at a designated port of entry at an appropriate time.” But, despite many asylum-seeking individuals attempting to enter by Presidentially-prescribed legal means, they have been improperly blocked from entering and turned away by the border patrol.
So, the Prez sets up the “legal” way to enter, and then denies that access.
Asylum seekers, beware!
But, in fairness, some asylum seekers are allowed to enter “legally” at ports of entry. The result? Their arrest.
International law provides that, as long as refugees “present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence,” countries are not permitted to impose penalties on individuals for their illegal entry or presence. This international law is also codified into U.S. law.
So, people flee for their lives, whether from other governments, organized crime or perpetrators of domestic violence. (Witness the Honduran woman whose ex-husband sought her out in Mexico and threatened to send her and her children back to her mother “in pieces.”) Their Hobbesian choice: Get sent back to great trauma or death if turned away, or if let across, get arrested, separated from their families and sent to detention camps lined with concertina wire.
A nation of laws? This President thinks they don’t apply to him. And Republican lawmakers seem unwilling to rein him in or get rid of him.
Our Congressman thus becomes an accomplice to his crimes. “Brilliant.”
And The Donald runs a for-his-profit enterprise that is, by definition, criminal.
Not to mention immoral and unChristian.
Isn’t this the practice for which we must have zero tolerance?

David Norlin
Salina