Back in February, President Donald Trump tried to use the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA—the Obama-era policy that provided legal protections to people brought to America illegally as children—to strong-arm his immigration agenda through a reluctant Congress. He failed: Congress couldn’t agree on a deal, DACA quietly expired, and Trump’s immigration priorities stayed off the books.

The president appears to have taken a lesson from this: If he couldn’t make Congress act by threatening to end DACA, he’d just need to find a bigger stick. Enter the administration’s new “zero tolerance” immigration policy, with its attendant horrors of ripping apart families at the border, tossing parents in jail and punting their children into overcrowded “shelters.”