Such caravans are the result of Congress’ inexcusable failure to fully fund a needed physical barrier and unwillingness to fix outdated laws that act as an enormous magnet for illegal aliens. This crisis won’t be solved until we have comprehensive border security.

This echoes Trump’s rage-tweet to the effect that he will build a “human wall” out of the military to keep out the caravan. The idea that the caravans we’ve seen are the result of the failure to build a “physical barrier” is a wild exaggeration. Many asylum-seeking migrants are coming to the border to turn themselves in, so that they can . . . seek asylum.

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What’s more, as Vox’s Dara Lind recently documented, journalists following the caravan that arrived around the time of the midterm elections (which Trump also hyped before mysteriously dropping the subject) established that asylum-seekers who did try to breach the border were doing so in response to administration policies imposing long wait times on them.

The simple way to understand this is that the lack of a barrier itself is not a draw to asylum-seekers, who generally have tried to enter the asylum system through official channels.

(Nielsen’s claim that current laws are also a draw is based on the idea that asylum-seeking families cannot be held indefinitely, which is a good thing for humanitarian reasons, and that they disappear and don’t show up for hearings. Trump has wildly exaggerated that latter point and, at any rate, there are other solutions to it, such as investments to unclog legal backlogs.)

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But I’m bringing all this up to point out that Democrats now have an opening to cut through all the fog that Trump and his minions have layered over this debate.

On Wednesday morning, members of a congressional conference committee — which is negotiating over a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, in hopes of avoiding another government shutdown in mid-February — are set to receive a briefing from Border Patrol officials.

According to an announcement from the office of Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the appropriations committee chairman who solicited this briefing, it will be conducted by the border agency’s “career professionals.”

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A Democratic aide tells me that Democratic lawmakers see this as grounds for some optimism. Here’s why: It means Republicans on the conference committee are asking for a reality-based assessment of what Customs and Border Protection really says it needs in the way of border barriers.

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The big sticking point right now is whether Trump will accept what emerges from the conference committee. He rages that he won’t tolerate any less than $5.7 billion for his wall, and this has constrained the negotiating room for the GOP’s conference-committee negotiators.

The briefing could help matters, however, by giving Republicans some actual information as to what CBP says it wants or needs in terms of border barriers.

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We already have a sense of what CBP wants. In a briefing to reporters a few weeks ago, CBP officials said they wanted to keep building what’s known as bollard fencing, a type of barrier that is already being constructed. Officials described this as still the best type of fencing for deterring pedestrian crossings, and said they wanted to construct more of it in particular areas, such as dense, high-traffic places. Democrats already agreed to fund construction of this type of fencing last year, and this would just continue that.

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It appears to have been lost on many people, but Democrats have quietly opened the door to accepting more of that type of barrier. On “Fox News Sunday,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.), a member of the conference committee, said that Democrats might be open to “some sort of enhanced barrier.” Though there might still be sticking points about the amounts spent, one can envision a compromise in which Democrats accept some barriers, provided they are in keeping with genuine agency need and are subject to strict congressional oversight, and come with real concessions to Democrats — such as a nixing of any asylum restrictions, and big investments to combat the humanitarian crisis at the border.

The problem is that matters are only made worse when Nielsen says that a “border barrier” is needed to stop the caravans. It may seem like a small thing, but saying this in the singular — when barriers in the plural, targeted by location, are what border officials are really asking for — just adds to the confusion and makes a deal more difficult to reach.

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Wednesday’s briefing provides an opening for Democrats to press career border officials on what, exactly, they say they want, which could be a way to punch through all the rhetorical fog on this issue. They can also get clarity on the administration’s political claims that “a barrier” is needed to stop the caravans. This would also give more space to Republicans in these talks as well.