The Family Separation Contradiction

President Trump's executive order says not to separate families. He also refuses to hire more judges, but the big problem is that there are not enough resources to house people and to hear all the adult cases in anything remotely like a timely manner, and certainly not quickly enough before the children must be released. There is already a court case on the books saying children cannot be held indefinitely.

Those two things are mutually exclusive.

Customs and Border Protection officials forcefully argued that agents who are apprehending migrant families at the border cannot refer all of the adults for prosecution because the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies do not have the resources to process each case. 

In particular, the border officials expressed concern about the number of prosecutors and judges needed to handle the proceedings, and the lack of space available to detain families while the cases go forward. 

As a result, the officials from Customs and Border Protection told White House and Justice Department officials that they have had to issue fewer prosecution referrals of adults with children despite the president’s “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration.

Either you hire a crapton (to quote my teenage daughter) of judges or you let the families go. That's why CBP is saying it's not possible. Backlog has been a serious problem for many years and arresting more people means it is getting exponentially worse.

Back in 2010 I wrote about how horrible the backlog was at 261,000 cases. Now it is 714,000. The system literally cannot handle the enforcement.