This week, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a new regulation that would allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrant children and their parents indefinitely, upending 20 years of legal precedent. Critics have decried the sadism of such a proposal, but few have acknowledged how multiple Democratic administrations helped pave the way for the Trump administration’s violence and cruelty. Immigration attorney Helen Sklar reminds us that it was President Bill Clinton who first branded immigrants without the necessary documentation an “unlawful presence in the U.S.”

How Bill Clinton Paved the Way for Trump’s War on ImmigrantsTruthdig