The open-borders lobby has a new cause celebre: Their howl that illegal immigrants, traveling in family groups, must never be separated by apprehending lawmen. Unlike the law, families are sacred! Separating families (or what people without documents claim to be families) is now the worst thing possible. Families belong together!  And suddenly these leftists who've never liked family values in the past, are all in for family values. So they've got a whole series of nationwide protests going on, and here in San Diego, the local media, loading up on the sob stories, are reporting it exhaustively. Here is one report from NBC:

Dozens of people demonstrated outside the Otay Mesa Detention Center on Sunday morning in support of detained migrants. 

Demonstrators are speaking out against the separation of migrant children from their parents. Protesters are also calling for improved conditions inside the detention center.

“The medical facilities are inadequate,” Jennye Lopez, a 24-year-old asylum seeker from Honduras, said in Spanish. She recently was released from Otay Mesa after spending six months in custody. 

Yes, dozens. Worth a national story on that one. Meanwhile, here's a positively baroque lefty spin on the same protests from the New York Times in Los Angeles:

LOS ANGELES — Drawing on an American history of cruelty, from the conquest of the Indians to the slave trade to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, activists in this city gathered on Thursday to voice outrage at what they see as the latest affront to American values by the Trump administration: splitting up migrant families at border crossings, and confining children in detention facilities.

“I think we are fighting for the heart and soul of America,” Yolanda Varela Gonzalez, a teacher and activist, told a crowd of several hundred protesters in MacArthur Park, before they marched to an immigrant detention center in downtown Los Angeles.

Such rubbish.

What these protests show is the hypocrisy of the left and its willingness to use even families in its bid to drive a wedge through American law to ensure the end to any meaning to America's borders.

What are these sparse-of-number activists calling for? Apparently, hotel accompaniments, same as for American families traveling on vacation, for people who get caught breaking immigration law. If not that, then comfortable family detention accomodations for such lawbreakers, the kind that cost taxpayer money. Or most likely, a return to catch-and-release policies for illegal immigrants if they travel with children, the better to ensure that they disappear into the country, skipping their court dates, which 90% of them do. As if those breaking America's law have some kind of right to dictate the conditions of their internment. Let's see a common bank robber make the same kinds of demands of the state.

All of these options serve as incentives to emigrate illegally to the U.S. and to encourage more illegal immigration. That's what the real game is about on the left, which is filling America's voter rolls with Democrats, the same kind of people in need of government services who blissfully voted for Hugo Chavez or his surrogates in their home countries, all because of his Democrat-style promises of free stuff. Take a look at Venezuela for a whiff of how well that worked out.

If the left cares as much as it says about family values, and it doesn't, maybe they can apply that "families belong together" slogan to the case of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban refugee boy who was rescued on the high seas after his mother drowned fleeing here, and then taken to his loving family in Florida who cared for him, only to be snatched back by federal goon squads and handed back to his absentee father, who promptly clapped the child into Castroite propaganda indoctrination boarding schools to produce a robotic communist. So much for family values from the left on that one.

What's more, the family claim is a dubious one, given that lawmen are supposed to believe that illegal immigrants traveling without documents really are family because they say so. Numerous cases are out there that these supposed family units traveling illegally together have been child-trafficking units, kept together based on the unverified claims of the lawbreakers.

So what the protestors are calling for is nothing more than a call to make these human smugglers' lives easier.

Yes, families belong together. What's obvious to most Americans on the street, at least in San Diego, is that family separation is entirely preventable if you don't break immigration law. How hard is that to understand? Like your kids? Don't break the law with them, then. Any bank robber can grasp that much. For every illegal immigrant who brings children here with them, (after trusting human smugglers and the dirty, dangerous cartel border culture -- a danger so serious it raises questions their parenting skills) and now howling about being separated from them, it's completely avoidable dilemma.

Unfortunately, it's a harsh, but necessary process, given the huge incentives to emigrate here illegally, along with the cartel financial interest in keeping the family-package smuggling rackets going. Yet for every separation in detention of lawbreakers, a thousand hear about it, and those who think twice about coming here illegally with kids, explore legal routes instead.

The left's protests are disingenuous to say the least, and hypocritical in the main.