>you don't know

Neither do you.

Hanlon's razor is a good baseline when you have no information pointing to either option.

But when you have an administration that climbs onto a podium and announces they want to traumatize people, that's a pretty direct admission of malice in my books. You're free to conclude we're just seeing a string of repeated stupidity, but frankly I think it's incredibly naive to still given them the benefit of doubt.