Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — The trail doesn’t read press releases about capacity. It reads whether the last family was released.

The encounter numbers aren’t a weather event. They’re what happens when you retire a deterrent and keep a protection statute that can’t finish a case at volume. Humanitarian processing is the name you give that if you don’t want to say the second sentence, which is that people come because the processing is a slow yes.

Deterrent failure is the right heading. Remain in Mexico was ugly and it moved the number. Title 42 is still doing some of that work and it’s a borrowed public-health hook rather than an immigration policy.

I’d want a remain-elsewhere rule written into immigration law and a clock that functions. Real claims can still be heard. Heard doesn’t have to mean released into a school district while the hearing is four years away.

Processing-only is a moral position that other people house, and the housing is why interior cities have started making noise.

Novi, MI Correspondent — Plants understand throughput. Throughput that can’t say no isn’t a system.

The surge is what you get when the valve closes and the intake stays open. Networks text the new rule faster than an agency can stand up a facility.

I’ll fund processing for people who are going to be processed to a finish. I won’t fund processing as a synonym for release, because release is the incentive and the incentive is the graph.

What I’d add is that the legal door barely exists for the people actually coming. Our own industry can’t get the visas it needs and neither can agriculture, and a system with no functioning yes will generate pressure on whatever door is open. That’s not an argument against the valve. It’s an argument that a valve without a door is only half a policy and the half we keep not building is the door.

Orange County, CA Correspondent — Southern California already knows what processing-only does to a service system.

The diagnosis is a deterrent failure and the humanitarian cost is downstream of it. Tools that changed the probability of staying were retired, the statute that takes years was kept, and hotels and non-profits turned out not to be a border.

I’d want the analysis stated honestly in both directions, though. The push factors are real — Central America had two hurricanes in late 2020 on top of the pandemic economy, and pretending the entire graph is a response to an American memo is as incomplete as pretending none of it is.

Both are operating. The part we control is the probability of remaining, and that’s the part that changed.

Bismarck, ND Correspondent — If the last family was released, the next family starts walking. That’s a deterrent failure and tents don’t change it.

Our stake in this is smaller and more specific than the coastal version. We can’t staff a processing plant or a dairy at any wage we’ve tried, and the workforce that does that work here is substantially foreign-born and largely legal.

So I want a functioning legal channel as much as I want the valve. What I don’t want is a system where the only reliable way in is the way that runs through a smuggler.

Wheeling, WV Correspondent — We’re a long way from the river and we still pay pieces of the aftermath when a city becomes a reception desk.

The surge is a deterrent failure. Remain in Mexico was ugly and it worked on the number, and I’d rather argue about whether ugly was justified than pretend the number moved for another reason.

I’d say one thing my side doesn’t say enough. The people walking are responding rationally to an incentive we created. That’s not a moral failing on their part and describing them as an invasion is both wrong and stupid, because it makes it harder to have the argument about the statute.

Fix the statute. Be decent about the people.

Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — Ports know throughput and know a queue that’s actually a door.

The southern queue is being run as a door, which is why it grew after the tools changed. Processing without a remain-elsewhere practice is a door with better lighting.

Florida already sees the interior end of this — school-year arrivals, hospital edges, a political fight that was supposed to stay at the border. A border run as intake becomes a distribution system, and distribution is a choice somebody made without saying so.

Pay in a legal visa where we mean yes and in a rapid no where we mean no.

Long Island, NY Correspondent — I draft procedures that have to finish, and a procedure that can’t finish at the offered volume isn’t a procedure. It’s intake.

The backlog is the mechanism and it’s worth stating precisely. There are well over a million cases pending in the immigration courts and roughly five hundred judges. At that ratio the outcome of a case is substantially determined by the calendar rather than by the merits, and everyone on both sides knows it.

That’s why the deterrent framing is right. When the process takes four years, presence becomes the remedy regardless of the eventual ruling.

The fix I’d prioritize is judges and clerks, because a no delivered in six months is both more humane and more deterrent than a no delivered in five years. Nobody wants to fund that because it isn’t a wall or a welcome, and it’s the only thing that makes either of the other two work.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — I want to speak to a part of this that Americans discuss as though it happens offstage.

The people on that trail are largely from countries in my hemisphere, and several of them are in the condition they’re in partly because of decisions made in Washington over decades. That isn’t a rhetorical point. It’s the recent history of Honduras, Guatemala, and Haiti.

I’m not arguing against enforcement. A country enforces its laws and I said so last year about deportation.

What I’d ask is that the deterrence conversation and the regional conversation stop being conducted in separate rooms by separate people. Deterrence works by making the journey not worth attempting. So does a functioning economy at the origin, and one of those is being pursued with real resources and the other is a paragraph in a strategy document.

You will get the graph you’re getting until one of two things changes, and only one of them is a memo.

Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — If they get in and stay, more come. That isn’t a processing puzzle.

Remain in Mexico. A fast no. A legal door if we mean yes.

Tents without a valve advertise. Rules deter. Then be decent to the smaller line, because a smaller line is the only one you can be decent to.