3. Our Immigration System Is Woefully Backlogged

By denouncing Trump’s policy of family separation and demanding that the administration keep families together, the media (along with a large number of lawmakers from both parties) are effectively arguing that families should be released while they await their court hearings or go through the asylum application process.

Whether they realize it or not—and no doubt many in the media and the Democratic Party fully realize it—this amounts to a de facto open borders policy given the state of our immigration system. According to EOIR data, there are more than 652,000 pending immigration cases for 2017 alone. That’s a nearly 100 percent increase from 2012, but not as many as just the first three months of 2018, with 697,777 pending cases.

The Trump administration has tried to tackle the backlog by hiring dozens of immigration judges and sending some to the border. But it’s not clear this has made much difference, or that it has reduced the backlog, as the administration has claimed.