Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders think like Nazis.

Children are being separated from their parents when attempting to immigrate into the United States through Mexico. That has been the news for the past week or two, and it is appalling. You don’t need to be a “bleeding heart liberal” to actually feel something akin to revulsion. But you do need to be a particular type of human to appear to not feel anything about this.

Today, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, President Trump’s spokeswoman, vehemently defended this policy against probably the most basic question anyone can ask: is it moral? She failed miserably, eliciting anger and indignation from many in the press room. But what shocked me more, as a simple spectator to this whole fiasco, is that she justified the morality — or, say, correctness — of this policy by taking page from Nazi Germany: “It is a moral policy to follow and enforce the law.”

I’ve been on the lookout for articles, twitter posts, or news clips on this phrase. There are a lot of those directed at other aspects of her appearance today. For example, invoking the Bible as a justification for following the law. That’s messed up for reasons that I’m not particularly versed in, but others have covered that pretty well. What interests me is the idea that following the law is, by and of itself, a moral stance.

I’m a lawyer, so I pay attention to these things by default. But I’m also a law geek, and I paid attention in some of the most erudite (a.k.a. impractical) classes while in law school. So when I heard what came out of Mrs. Huckabee’s mouth, I ran to my old jurisprudence coursebook (a.k.a. the theory of law, and yes, I still keep my law school books).

That class was an 8am, middle-of-the-week snoozefest. I love theoretical discussions on the underpinnings of law, but man was that hard to do that early in the day. But I did read, and paid attention sometimes.

One of those occasions was a discussion on Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg Trials. When the Allies won, many asked themselves how a cultured, civilized, and scientific society like Germany could commit the atrocities and barbarities of the Third Reich. The Nuremberg Trials on Nazi judges had that question dead center. I don’t want to attempt to give a history lesson here, so I’ll just refer to the seminal film Judgment at Nuremberg. The film’s plot revolves around the trial of the German judges that applied the laws passed by Hitler’s Nazi government. In particular, the film revolves around a Nazi judge’s conviction of a Jewish man for having sex with a German girl. His crime was violating the racist, eugenics-based laws that the Nazis imposed on the German people.

H.L.A. Hart theorized that these judges had no choice but to follow a properly enacted statute, however they may have felt about it. That’s legal positivism, divorcing law from morality. His adversary in this debate, L. L. Fuller, had a more nuanced view on law and morality (in my opinion, at least). A law has to be faithful to morality, or else it risks losing the very essence that makes it a law.

Judgment at Nuremberg’s emphasis on the consequences of following the law is an important focus. When normal people think about Nazi Germany, we think about the Holocaust, Hitler, and World War II. We usually don’t think about life in Nazi Germany beyond death squads and Nazi salutes. But people lived under severe laws, and they were implemented by civil servants, such as judges and prosecutors and bureaucrats. The system was much like our own; it was the laws that were different. Substance over form, if you will.

“Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions when discussing the policy in question. But no, that’s wrong. In a vacuum, that tidbit sounds nice. But with the benefit of history and the experience of dealing with everyday people, we know that it is not right. For God’s sake, we have a Hollywood movie genre dedicated to future government dystopias! We know that Blade Runner, Children of Men, and Handmaid’s Tale-type governments are bad governments with bad, unjust laws. We see it on TV all the time.

But the idea that a legal process is just or moral merely because it is legal is logically baseless. I don’t think even Hart’s positivism went that far. Seeing the nation’s top lawyer employing this rhetorical device to justify an inhuman government policy is shocking, sad, and disturbing. When I saw our country, which prides itself on the rule of law, debase itself like that, without the smallest hint of self-awareness, or worse yet, with all the intent in the world, I wanted to cry.

This type of rationale opens the door to a future that looks too much like the past. The end of the twentieth century was supposed to usher in a new kind of world; a civilization that would not look towards the past for instructions but that would plow forward on the backs of a Pax Americana and technological development towards a more egalitarian society. That idea has been discarded and left to rot in the cells of our racist penal system, shot dead in our elementary and high schools, drowned in our oil spills, and forgotten in the highest echelons of our government. We look back not in search of lessons learned but in search of follies to repeat. This is not what the greatest country in the world does, and I fear that policies like this one will take us past a rapidly approaching point of no return. Defending the morality of ripping poor, despondent families apart whose only crime is to physically traverse an imaginary line for the chance of a better life, and doing it under the aegis of the law, nullifies the rule of law itself. An unjust law is no law at all, and to the extent this policy is a law (something that itself is doubtful), it is wholly unjust.