Have you heard of the infamous Milgram experiment?
"Teachers" were asked to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to the "learner" when questions were answered incorrectly [...]
If at any point the innocent teacher hesitated to inflict the shocks, the experimenter would pressure him to proceed. Such demands would take the form of increasingly severe statements, such as "The experiment requires that you continue.” [...]
Milgram was shocked to find those who questioned authority were in the minority. Sixty-five percent (65%) of the teachers were willing to progress to the maximum voltage level.
The experiment was designed to understand how people could follow the Nazis. Americans have long prided themselves in thinking that they would be immune to such pressures, but as the Milgram experiment proved, that isn’t the case. And it wasn’t the case at airports across the country following Bannon’s Muslim ban.
The men and women who reportedly handcuffed small children and the elderly, separated a child from his mother and held others without food for 20 hours, are undoubtedly "ordinary" people.
What I mean by that, is that these are, in normal circumstances, people who likely treat their neighbors and co-workers with kindness and do not intentionally seek to harm others. That is chilling, as it is a reminder that authoritarians have no trouble finding the people they need to carry out their acts of cruelty. They do not need special monsters; they can issue orders to otherwise unexceptional people who will carry them out dutifully.
There's lots of shame to go around—and the people who carried out those unconscionable orders cannot be let off the hook.