I thought about my time as a soldier when I heard the Supreme Court's asylum decision this week

I do not believe America's reputation will recover in my lifetime

In peak physical condition, some of us would still collapse after just 12 miles (Getty)

Late Wednesday night, the Supreme Court released an order essentially allowing the Trump administration to bar most Central American migrants from seeking asylum in the United States while the relevant court cases are being considered.

I've been processing this news for the past day or so, and I keep coming back to the same thing. It's all I can think about, really.

When I served in the military, we would often do ruck marches. It’s a staple of Army service, but it’s particularly essential to life in the infantry.

You put on a 35-pound rucksack with full gear and march distances of 12, 15, 18 miles (sometimes more) at a brisk pace. It was a point of pride to do that well a handful of times a year. It's exhausting. It really tests your resilience.

Our feet would be covered with blisters, our muscles would ache, and some among us — soldiers with peak physical conditioning — would pass out from dehydration or exhaustion. You get what I'm saying? Marching just 12 miles with that gear could break you in half.

I say that because the distance between San Pedro Sula, near the northern border of Honduras, and McAllen, Texas, right on the southern border of the United States, is about 1,442 miles.

Even for a physically fit adult fleeing horrific violence and persecution, walking 10 hours a day at a typical pace of 3 miles an hour, it would take 48 days to make that distance on foot.

Now add children. Add people with disabilities. Add those who are pregnant. Factor in weather and food scarcity and water scarcity and a lack of access to necessary medical care.

Factor in vulnerability to violence and discrimination on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, and race, among other things.

Take all of that into account and answer me this: what kind of violence and persecution is so horrific and devastating that it would force vulnerable people to make that trip? So dire that walking by foot up the entire east coast of Mexico is the only option you have left?

The past two years have seen unprecedented attacks by the Trump-Pence administration on vulnerable communities, and among the most vulnerable people in this onslaught have been undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. Children. Babies. In cages.

I search my soul for answers, and at the end of day, I don't understand how the Republican Party and certain justices and the folks in the White House — all of them professed Christians — would so readily toss away the words of Christ and turn away suffering people like trash.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent against the majority's opinion, wrote: “The rule the government promulgated topples decades of settled asylum practices and affects some of the most vulnerable people in the Western hemisphere — without affording the public a chance to weigh in.”

I do not believe America's reputation will recover in my lifetime. We will be known for the blatant, intentional cruelty inflicted on the vulnerable by this White House and the GOP. We will be known as the nation that created suffering just for the sake of its existence.