Have the establishment news media ever been so disingenuous?  Has the demagoguery ever been more pronounced? Time Magazine's Photoshopped cover of President Trump glaring down at an innocent child he heartlessly separated encapsulates in a single image the media's deceit and politicization of border security law.

With recent history in mind, the narrative that President Trump is separating children from parents because he is racist and mean-spirited is laughable on its face.  Never mind that detained adults cannot be housed with children as a matter of law.  It's common, but hidden knowledge that President Obama also separated children from their parents at the border when his administration chose to enforce the law.  And if I recall, Mr. Obama's administration repeatedly made the dubious claim that it deported more illegal aliens than the previous administration.

We all know of an everyday occurrence in America.  Thousands of U.S. citizen children are separated from their U.S. citizen parents because their parents broke the law.  More people are locked up in the United States, per capita, than any other country in the world.  Approximately 2.4 million people are housed in prisons and jails across the fruited plain.  "As well as another 22,870 immigration detainees housed in local jails under contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)," the Economist noted in 2014.

Of all the incarcerations in the United States, no children are ever housed with adults.

Millions of traumatized, heartbroken, sobbing children have been separated from their parents in America due to no fault of their own.

When a judge sentences an offender parent to prison (and, alas, separates a crying child), no one claims that the judge is racist, heartless, and mean-spirited.  People understand that the judge is just doing his job.

Another arm of the criminal justice system that daily separates U.S. citizen children from U.S. citizen parents is the various Departments of Child Protective Services of the 50 states.

Child Protective Services agents sometimes separate children from their parents arbitrarily and without due process of law.  Oftentimes, the separation is warranted.  In many instances, parents present a real danger to their children.  Sometimes it's questionable.  It happens every day in America.

There is a law that is applied by all 50 states, though its language various from state to state.  In short, it is illegal to contribute to the delinquency of a minor or to act in an intentional or negligent way that renders a minor in need of state protective services.

That is precisely what is happening at our southern border.  Not only are the illegal invaders breaking United States law and trampling U.S. sovereignty, but those who bring children with them are willfully breaking state law.

The illegal invaders, whom the American news media refer to as migrants or immigrants, are knowingly and intentionally putting children in great danger.  It is morally reprehensible to break the law while exercising supervisory responsibility of an innocent child.  A parent who shoplifts with a baby in a stroller.  A person who drives drunk with children in the car.  A foreigner who illegally trespasses across a sovereign border with a child in tow.  All three examples are really, really bad.  And the last has the added bonus of using a child as a political pawn to garner the sympathies of an irrational political party and its dishonest news media.

The question becomes whether illegal aliens who reject our immigration process and sovereignty and break our laws should be favored over U.S. citizens.

U.S. citizens who break our laws and put children in harm's way do not get passes.  Neither do they get a politicized news media to disingenuously advocate on their behalf with a concerted campaign of deceit and gratuitous emotionalism.

Of course, citizen-wrongdoers are of no value to the radical left for political points and open border demagoguery.

Monte Kuligowski is a Virginia attorney.