We are constantly told that immigration policy is about compassion.

Protect the vulnerable. Help people fleeing poverty, violence and instability. Give people a chance at a better life.

Those are worthy goals.

But there is a question that too often gets left out:

What happens when policies designed to protect some people create new dangers for others?

I know what that question looks like because I buried my daughter.

Katie was 20 years old when she was violently killed on the streets of sanctuary Urbana, Illinois, while visiting friends at the University of Illinois.

Katie was vulnerable too.

Her life mattered too.

And that is where this conversation becomes much bigger than immigration policy. It becomes a question about what government owes the people it serves and what happens when an ideology becomes so focused on protecting one group that it loses sight of the human beings who may bear the cost.

Maybe these are blind spots. Maybe they are something worse. But when the harm is known and innocent people continue to bear it, the distinction matters less than the failure itself.

Compassion cannot be selective.

If vulnerability matters when the person in need is an immigrant or foreign national, it must also matter when the person harmed is an American citizen.

A government cannot measure the success of a policy solely by the people it intended to help. It also has to confront those who may be harmed along the way.

That is part of the social contract. Government has many responsibilities, including humanitarian ones. But among those responsibilities is a fundamental duty to protect the people who live under its laws and depend on it for their security.

That is not a declaration that some lives matter more than others. It is a recognition that responsibility has to begin somewhere.

A government can care about suffering beyond its borders without making its own citizens absorb........

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