No, I did answer your question. The folks entering this country illegally are breaking the law. There are legal processes that have been in place for a while about how to deal with those who attempt to enter this country illegally. Just because other presidents found ways to skirt the law - I think in a prior discussion on this very topic another poster (Finn maybe) lauded Obama for using "proprietorial discretion" - but now the law is being enforced.
OK, said I wouldn't respond to all this, but here I go.
The bottom line is that the entire situation is a
mess. You have immigrants arriving in huge caravans that are meant to overload the border enforcement infrastructure when they arrive. They are processed through as system that, downstream, is a hodgepodge of historically understaffed and under-resourced facilities and governed under a hodgepodge of immigration laws and court rulings that are not complementary. The result is unintended consequences that are not in the best interests of citizens in this country (and make no mistake, immigration laws historically are about benefiting and protecting the country and its citizens). Trump didn't create the issue, nor did he write the laws or policies that are currently being enforced.
As for this nonsense about "Trump separating kids from their parents", that too has been going on for years. In many cases, that was actual policy. To deal with human trafficking, for instance, unaccompanied minors were allowed to stay in the US under US law. Note that they were "unaccompanied" when they arrived, and allowed to stay, which means they were separated before they left. That's still going on today.
You also have a
similar issue - parents seeking entry to join children already in the US.
Human Rights Watch has previously documented the harms caused by the Obama administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement at the border on people seeking to join their US citizen children or other loved ones. The present analysis is based on CBP data Human Rights Watch recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act on the nearly 700,000 adult and child migrants that the CBP apprehended along the US border in fiscal years 2011 and 2012, the most recent data Human Rights Watch obtained.
Human Rights Watch estimates that more than 101,900 of these migrants – about 15 percent – were a parent of a US citizen child. Collectively, these migrants say they are the parents of more than 202,000 American children. Though having a US citizen child does not mean in all cases that a non-citizen has substantial ties to the US, it is an indicator of the strong possibility of such ties.
How did the kids get in country in the first place? They were brought here or arrived here illegally, but the broken and occasionally enforced immigration system left them here and deported their parents. Again, this has been going on for years.
Not to say that this is "right" or that it shouldn't be addressed, but the play the blame game over something that has been going on for years strikes me as disingenuous in the extreme.