Demonstrators rally before marching to the White House in Washington on Thursday as they protest the fatal shooting by an ICE officer of Renee Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis.Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press

Joe Davidson is a retired Washington Post columnist, and a former national and foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant policies are cruel – though sadly, no longer unusual – for a nation that once welcomed the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” His administration is making the Emma Lazarus poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty reek with hypocrisy.

Mr. Trump’s zeal for mass deportation has subjected people to callous detention conditions, as U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE)’s dragnet captures thousands who aren’t the criminals he promised to expel. In many cases, they’re also not migrants or asylum seekers – and in some, including the killing by an ICE officer of Renee Nicole Macklin Good in a residential area in Minneapolis, the consequences of these raids have been deadly.

Despite White House claims that its deportation onslaught targets the “

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