In July 2018, a group of government officials began to gather each week at the headquarters of Customs and Border Protection, in Washington, DC, to discuss what to do in the aftermath of the president’s failed zero tolerance policy. None of the attendees expressed any contrition. The overall lesson, one said afterward, wasn’t that the administration had gone too far in separating families, but, rather, that “we need to be smarter if we want to implement something on this scale again.”
