The Making of an Online Moral Crisis

Children as young as 2 have been pulled from their parents and moved to facilities that are, as Laura Bush put it, “eerily reminiscent” of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II. Families are being separated. Kids are sleeping under foil blankets inside cages.

The main reason that this story has received so much attention is simple: It is awful. Of course most of the American voters who were shown images of crying children or who heard audio recordings of them calling out for their parents had an intense negative reaction.

But in today’s splintered and strange media environment, the more difficult question to answer is how so many people did end up seeing these images and hearing these stories. After all, this may now be the most notorious injustice at the American border, but it’s not the first.

“Americans are discovering how our immigration system works, and that is generally a good thing,” the reporter Nick Miroff. “But some of the things that are drawing outrage, like the dog-kennel detention pens at Ursula (McAllen) [the largest Customs and Border Patrol detention center] are not new.”