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In whirlwind created by AG Barr’s decision on asylum-applicant imprisonment, easy to miss report issued by DHS advisory group calling for 1) more detention beds for families and 2) lifting the 20-day cap on detaining kids dhs.gov/sites/default/…
Here’s the key summary language from the Homeland Security Advisory Council report 
HSAC wants “to stem the recycling of children at the border.” Sometimes it’s helpful to stop and think about word choice.
This report repeatedly describes CBP’s current detention facilities as outdated & insufficient, then pivots to calling for newer & more detention sites.
And it again offers family detention as the humanitarian response to family separation...
The problem with pointing out that most asylum applications are denied is that it ignores the narrowness of underlying asylum law. Asylum law has always been limited, but the Trump administration’s border practices & administrative rulings have limited this safe harbor even more.
To describe losing asylum claims as “unmeritorious” makes light of the legal process. Claims aren’t without merit simply because they lose. There are lots of reasons a case might lose, starting with the fact that many people don’t have a lawyer.
To think that the success of every asylum claim can accurately be predicted from the start suggests a misunderstanding of legal representation. Lawyers are advocates not fortune-tellers. We’re charged with gauging how facts map onto law, not with looking into a magic ball.
In footnote 8, the advisory group’s report suggests that Congress overturn the Flores Settlement Agreement legislatively. Absent that, it suggests doing so through a regulatory process that “dispenses with ordinary Notice and Rulemaking."
Most impressively, the report calls for creation “of 3-4 temporary, scalable processing centers” within 250-300 miles of the Southwest border, perhaps in #RGV of South Tx, Yuma, AZ, El Paso, or “immediately available current and excess military bases.”
And in case anyone thought that asylum law was already excessively limited, the report explicitly calls for further narrowing...
