Why did Donald Trump reverse himself on Wednesday and call an end to his policy of separating migrant families detained at the southern border? It was clear from the start that the policy was cruel, heartless, and unnecessary. Although there has been a spike in the number of asylum seekers in recent months, the overall number of undocumented immigrants coming into the United States from Mexico and other Latin American countries is significantly lower than it was a decade ago. There is no “crisis” at the southern border, except the humanitarian one of Trump’s own making. Trump’s picture of the United States being swamped—or, in his words, “infested”—by Latino migrants is a fantasy that he concocted to whip up the racial fears and antipathies of his core supporters.

Clearly, Trump didn’t make this U-turn because he had grown tired of fear-mongering and racial incitement, or because he had experienced a crisis of conscience. (It’s far from clear that he’s even capable of such a thing.) He reversed course because he had no choice politically. Although he often adopts the rhetoric and body language of an authoritarian strongman, he’s an elected politician. And in the face of mass outrage, bipartisan opposition, and condemnation from church groups and other civil-society institutions, the child-separation policy was no longer sustainable.

But Trump didn’t reverse the policy of “zero tolerance” that his Administration introduced in May, which obliges immigration agents to arrest and detain anybody who crosses the border outside an official entry point. The Times reported that the new executive order was designed “to get around an existing 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores settlement, that prohibits the federal government from keeping children in immigration detention—even if they are with their parents—for more than 20 days.” If Trump gets his way, families stopped at the border will now be detained indefinitely under the custody of ice. That is precisely the outcome that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit deemed illegal in a 2016 ruling about the Flores settlement.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-a-rogue-president-was-forced-to-back-down-on-family-separation