I read it, it says that the things that the Trump admin tried to do to speed things up slowed them down, it also said that so far this year 314,000 families had been caught at the southern border. Pretending the amount of people coming at once isn't contributing greatly to the problem is silly, yes the Trump administration is handling it poorly and yes I know they don't actually care about these people but the system wasn't set up to handle this many cases at once. It doesn't help that Sessions orders made them re-open closed cases but either way they didn't have enough judges to handle what's been coming over. The last thing we can do is just say "hey we can't handle all of you so just go ahead and freely move around our country" we have to have some type of process that is followed.
I also don't get why they aren't applying for asylum in Mexico, I mean I get that it's more dangerous etc but that's mostly in Tijuana and they are there because they are trying to come here and it's a border area. I'm not saying we shouldn't take a good amount but it seems like they all are trying to come here and we can't just take them all in.
Stipulations:
1. Illegal border crossings, by the best measure we can use to estimate them, are on a significant downward trend over the past 20 years.
2. The immigration courts have been backlogged for a while, but actions by the Trump admin have inflammed that backlog tremendously (both on the time to clear metric and in adding cases that previously were or would have been closed).
Now, given those two facts, you've pivoted from "we can't handle the number of people coming over the border" to "the system is overflowed" back to the first. Not because you're evaluating the facts in search of finding out what to believe, but because you're evaluating what you want to believe and are willing to settle for facts that don't actually say what you think they do to support them. The "why don't they apply in Mexico" or "make everyone legal" strawman is just icing on the cake.
Just be honest and say you don't want them coming here. Stop wasting my time and yours trying to argue facts that you're not even using to inform your decision making.
[edit: Oh, and yeah, the really sad part is that the part you started arguing against - decriminalization - is a major reason *why* this is happening. See, when someone comes over the border and presents themselves to Border Patrol, which is how asylum claims are legally supposed to work, the current policy treats them as criminals, which means they're locked up indefinitely, families separated, etc. The end result of most of these crossings in the past has been a $10 fine and deportation, and it processed a lot more smoothly, but now that they're criminals, the amount of case work explodes. Just reversion to what we had before Trump would improve things tremendously, since Congress is chronically incapable of doing anything more complicated than passing resolutions that encourage proper butt wiping]
