Ripping children away from their parents is the most cinematically cruel part of the Trump immigration policy, but it is not the most telling part.  The most telling part is what happened to Ludvin Franco. 

Franco was an unauthorized immigrant who had been working in this country for over a decade.  His wife, Anne, is from a Pennsylvania Dutch family that has been in this country for generations.  They were married in 2013 and have three American children, Max, Javier and Valentina. 

In the spring of 2017, Franco got in a minor traffic accident near his Pennsylvania home.  A few weeks later as he was leaving for work, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement swarmed him, took him away and deported him to Guatemala.  He watched the delivery of his third child through the screen of his cellphone, 3,200 miles away. 

This is an example of ICE going after a perfectly productive member of society.  I got the anecdote from a series of reports that Deborah Sontag and Dale Russakoff did for ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer.  They found that 64 percent of the immigrants arrested by ICE in the agency’s Philadelphia region had no prior criminal conviction.