It seems that the Republican Party is intent on making cruelty part of its brand: denying free breakfast and lunch to poor children, blocking reproductive health care for women with life-threatening emergencies and, most recently, fighting a plan to allow immigrant families to remain together.

In June, President Joe Biden enacted a program called “Keeping Families Together,” which would provide a path to citizenship for about a half-million undocumented immigrants who are married to American citizens and who have been living in the United States for more than 10 years. Clearly, these are not criminals — not the terrorists, drug traffickers or erstwhile “insane asylum” denizens that former President Donald Trump insists are flooding over the southern border.

Still, Republicans rallied against the program. MAGA-ite Ken Paxton, Texas attorney general, led a group of 16 GOP attorneys general to challenge the program in court, and a federal judge temporarily blocked the program earlier this week, ruling that no more applications can be accepted while a court considers the case. There is no good reason for this conservative resistance.

Hardliners insist that the Biden plan grants “amnesty” to people who came to the country illegally. So what if it does? Supposedly, the Republican Party favors families, so much so that its candidate for vice president, J.D. Vance, is openly hostile to people who don’t bear children. Why don’t these immigrant families count?

U.S. immigration policy provides a path to citizenship for men and women married to Americans, but, under current law, those who enter the country illegally must return to their country of origin and wait for a green card. The immigration process is so clogged that a green card could take years — separating couples from each other and separating children from a parent. What’s the point of that?

For all Trump’s insistence that illegal immigrants bring crime and take “Black jobs,” the simple truth is that the GOP has been taken over by bigots and nativists who fear the loss of white political and cultural hegemony. Demographers have long predicted that white Americans would no longer constitute a solid majority by the year 2040 or so. Again, so what?

The American story is one of continual rebirth and replenishment. Waves of immigrants have come — some voluntarily, some not — and not only has the nation survived, but it has also thrived. In the 1800s, as waves of Europeans, especially Italians and Irish, began to enter these shores, white Protestants predicted awful consequences — crime, squalor, disease and a gradual destruction of the great American experiment. It didn’t happen. In the 1980s and ’90s, Democrats and Republicans were in broad agreement about welcoming undocumented workers who took jobs that Americans didn’t want — on farms, in poultry plants, in carpet mills. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed an immigration reform bill that offered legal status to about 3 million people who had entered the country without papers. Towns such as Dalton, Georgia, which calls itself the “carpet capital,” have been revitalized by these newer citizens.

However, by the time George W. Bush proposed another sweeping immigration reform bill in 2007, his party had soured on the notion of welcoming new citizens who were not white. Since then, conservatives have turned increasingly nativist, and Trump, who came down the golden escalator to denounce Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers, rode that frenzy of bigotry to victory in 2016. He is attempting to repeat that bitter triumph with his claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Indeed, Trump is so fixated on reaping the benefits of fear and white grievance that he directed his lapdogs in Congress to refuse support for a bipartisan approach that would have cracked down on migrants who try to sneak into the country. Among the negotiators was conservative GOP Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who has pointed out repeatedly that the bill would have poured money into border security, but Trump didn’t want a solution to be found because that would have worked against his fear-based campaign. During his tenure, Trump faced harsh criticism for his vicious policy of taking small children from their parents at the border. Now it seems that the practice of separating families is firmly embedded in the Republican platform.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.