Fifty years of litigation and lobbying are now reaping rewards unforeseen even by the open-borders establishment.

At City Journal Heather MacDonald explains some key points about the immigration debate.

…If an adult crosses the border alone and utters the magic asylum words—a fear of persecution in his home country—he could in theory be held in detention until his asylum claim was adjudicated. If, however, he brings a child with him and makes an asylum pitch, he puts the government to a choice: detain the adult separately until his claim is heard and release the child after 20 days, or release both adult and child together.

The Obama administration usually chose the second option. Word coursed through Mexico and Central America that taking a child across the border was a get-out-of-jail-free card that would exempt its holder from both criminal prosecution and detention. This child-release lever, coupled with Obama’s announcement in 2012 that he would grant amnesty to the so-called Dreamers, meant that Obama soon had his own family border crisis on his hands. In 2014, 70,000 adult-child units and 70,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended illegally crossing into the U.S.

…In 2015, a federal trial judge, Holly Gee, herself appointed by Obama and the very definition of an activist jurist, vastly expanded the scope of the original decree and ordered the administration to release the detained minors. The Department of Homeland Security warned that ending family detention would trigger another border surge. Judge Gee dismissed this concern as “fear-mongering,” according to the Associated Press.

It is to Judge Gee that the Trump administration will now make its appeal to lift the 20-day confinement cap. The chance that she will agree to do so is zero. Unless that ruling is overturned on appeal or Congress changes the relevant law, the administration will have two choices: try to get asylum hearings down to 20 days, or abandon its universal prosecution policy and resume catch-and-release at the border for adults with children.

Streamlining the asylum process would require both narrowing the standard for granting asylum, pursuant to its original intent (something that Sessions has already begun to do), and increasing judicial resources. (Bizarrely, Trump has denounced such an increase in judicial manpower.) Even then, meeting a 20-day limit on asylum detentions will be a stretch. Resuming catch-and-release, of course, would violate one of Trump’s key electoral promises. Fifty years of litigation and lobbying are now reaping rewards unforeseen even by the open-borders establishment. Trump has ducked one showdown, but an even bigger one lies ahead.

…Strangely, after Trump issued his recent executive order, a few media voices tentatively raised the problem of the unintended consequences of purportedly humane rules. CNN anchor John Berman asked Schiff on Thursday morning if exempting illegal aliens with children from detention “incentivized” such illegal crossings. Schiff ducked the query: “Well, it’s not a simple question as whether somebody has a child or not.” But the problem of perverse incentives will not go away. America’s loss of sovereignty over its borders and the incursion of millions of barely literate campesinos and their progeny is the result of years of victim-favoring policies that ignore personal agency and court the consequences.

Read more here.