We’ve been in the middle of this really intense debate over what to do with the borders of our country and how to deal with the questions of: Who gets to come into our country? How do they come in? Where do they go? What happens to them when they get here? And you’ve had these two really interesting extremes that have been battling for the last several decades, frankly. You’ve had a kind of, one extreme, which is in the White House right now: President Trump; Stephen Miller, his top adviser; Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “We don’t want people coming in.” “Don’t you have kids, Mr. President?” And you have the other extreme, where you have people who, you know, argue for much more liberal open borders, be much more opening to refugees, to asylum seekers. What sort of climaxed this week with this family separation crisis is, How do you find a solution that’s in the middle? The executive order essentially says the administration is now going to detain families that come across the border illegally, and they’re seeking legal permission to detain them permanently. If they can’t get that legal permission, which, right now, rests in the hands of a single federal judge in California, how does the administration handle these families? Well, there’s a couple of different solutions that have been out there in the past. The Obama administration used ankle bracelets extensively. They set up these pilot programs where the families would be put in touch, would have to register with a nonprofit organization, with a community-based organization that kept tabs on the families. The rate at which the people who are in those programs actually came back for their court hearings was very, very high, in the 90 percents, which suggested that if you could create some of these programs on a national scale, and really broaden them out, that you could potentially satisfy President Trump’s concerns about these people just melting away into the country and never coming back. So there are two big parts to the president’s executive order: What’s going to happen with people going forward? And then the question that has arisen: What’s going to happen to the people, the children, who have already been separated from their parents over these last several weeks? On that second question, the executive order is actually silent. It says nothing about the existing population of about 2,300 children who have been already separated from their parents. There are huge practical hurdles to bringing all of these people back, the main one of which is that the parents are being held in custody for criminal proceedings. They can either let the families go, using ankle bracelets, using community-based programs — that’s the way that Obama did it, that’s the way that Bush did it, that’s one option. Or, the other option would be to go back to family separation.