Trump’s immigration crackdown reveals how governments test public tolerance for cruelty exercised in the name of order – a lesson with clear echoes in Australia’s own recent history.

The Trump administration has just reached a key moment in an absorbing political question, and political strategists of all kinds will be clamouring for places at the seminar tables where the results are discussed. Just as some doctors argue that awful and unthinkable experiments performed in Nazi concentration camps may nonetheless provide useful new knowledge that can be used without considering its pedigree, they will say the results of the Trump-ICE experiments are simply too important to ignore.

At its heart is an age-old question: how much pain can observers bear to see inflicted on a subject before there is popular revulsion? How much is the answer affected by the apparent plausibility of the suffering, a tendency to obey orders, or by reassurance and reinforcement of the people obeying the orders to pile it on to the victims?

After a popular revolt in Minnesota on the Canadian border, Donald Trump has pulled back numbers of his ICE (Immigration Customs and Enforcement) teams out searching for people living in the US without residence visas. Ostensibly, the ICE teams had been focused on finding such aliens with serious criminal records, but the schemes had been ramped up to the point that even five-year-old Mexicans were being taken into custody and forced, in effect, to prove their citizenship on the spot.

The ICE teams have been wearing masks, stripped of any identification, and, until this week told not to wear body cameras. Politicians and ICE leaders (pretty much the same things) kept reminding the agents that immigration law gave them absolute immunity for any violence they administered while enforcing the law.

Several protesters were shot dead in incidents which the administration insisted involved attempts to kill ICE agents. But examination of digital evidence gathered from mobile telephones by spectators told entirely different stories. Minnesota has been in revolt against the invasion of ICE agents, against their activities, and against their belligerent attitude to protest, or to dispute the extent of their powers and whether they are limited by the Bill of Rights.

Trump has retreated in the face of evidence of a strong popular reaction, and not only in Minnesota, against the brutality and unaccountability of ICE.

He has had similar conflict before, in California and in Chicago, and has stood firm, even bringing in the National Guard to help ICE. State Governors (who control the National Guard in each state until they are “federalised” for war or national action ordered by the Commander in Chief) had taken court action to stop the president sending in National Guard troops from other states. This was ultimately successful, but Trump seemed to revel in the conflict and in the law-and-order crisis he was causing. He has figured that riots in the streets and resistance to apparently lawful activity helps establish his credentials as a man upholding the rule of law against the (Democrat) traitors, hard-left-wing stooges and “liberals”. Such people are, of course, promoting the lawlessness of foreign rapists, drug-dealers, and murderers he alleges represent the overwhelming proportion of........

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