The whole immigration argument basically boils down to two schools of thought.

1) Those who believe that every human born on this planet has a basic right to move to and live in, any country that they want.

2) Those who believe that the people who are currently citizens of countries around the world, have the right to set strict restrictions on who is allowed to move there.

These two schools are fundamentally at odds with each other. Some members of both camps will go to the extreme to enforce their position and demonize anyone in the other camp.

Accepting your dichotomy for the sake of argument, I'm in camp 1, but camp 2 could still be humane and comprehensible. Many countries have strict immigration rules, and while I disagree with that philosophy, it's not necessarily objectionable in the same way.

The Trump administration is not in camp 2.

The Trump administration, as this rule clearly illustrates, is in camp 3: Those who believe that the people who are not currently citizens of your country should never be able to become so, and should be punished for even trying.

The problem is not that the system is "strict" in the sense of holding an incredibly high bar. The problem is that the system is arbitrary - there is no process you can follow that will give you a high degree of confidence that you'll be allowed to enter, or even that a decision _will be made at all_ in a fair manner, no matter who you are (unless you're a personal friend of the administration) - as opposed to you being randomly arrested by ICE halfway through waiting for a decision. And even if there were such a process, you would have no confidence that it wouldn't change retroactively in another week.

It is laughably naive to believe that they are doing this in good faith out of any sense of strictly filtering immigrants. There's exactly one explanation that isn't transparently pretextual, and you and I both know what it is.

This simplification is very small. #2 is almost literally self evidently true.

Most of the disagreement is where a given country should be on the spectrum of zero immigration and fully open immigration.

You can know we have the right to set strict regulations, and also object to driving smart hardworking people away from your country for no reason.

the reality is that there a very wide spectrum of opinions about what immigration policy should like, and really not so many people in the (1) category