When President Donald Trump referred to some immigrants as animals, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was quick to defend him. If anyone wants to quibble about whether or not we should call those people animals, perhaps the quibble should be whether we call them something worse, Nielsen said .

Now, Nielsen is leaning into enforcing the zero tolerance policy of separating children from their families at the border.

Family separation has been portrayed as a womens issue in the media, with all four living former first ladies opposing it. The administration has deployed Nielson, along with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders , to defend it. Both women appeared at a press briefing on Monday and performed that job with gusto.

Tempting though it is to assume that Nielsen and Sanders must, on some level, oppose this cruel policy , theres no reason to believe they have more empathy by virtue of being women. In fact, its these kinds of assumptions about white womens innocence and outsized empathy that have made them some of white supremacys most effective agents. To be sure, it is men like Trump, former DHS chief John Kelly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House adviser Stephen Miller who are the architects of this policy but it has been left to Nielsen to implement their inhumane plan and to defend it to the public.

White women like Nielsen (and Sanders) have always been part of making white supremacy seem more palatable and less like the brutal, repressive ideology it is. Historical examples abound, from white women who worked alongside male colonizers to the wives of slaveholders who punished the people their husbands owned, to the white women who packed the picnic lunches for and took the photos at the lynchings committed purportedly in their defense. White women have played active roles in advancing and protecting white supremacy.