Think about the immigration system like a machine.

It's a machine that's been built by many different people over a long period of time.

It's old, it's creaky, but it's ours.

The machine is built to sort people, decide who can come into the country, and then who can stay.

It's got levers, it's got buttons. Pull this one, and the Border Patrol can bounce out someone

who crossed over illegally. Press another one, and an asylum officer, or an ICE agent, might send you

away.

And in many ways, what the current administration has been doing is it's been pulling

all of these different levers at once.

Jonathan Blitzer covers immigration for the New Yorker.

He says for a long time, there's been the problem of the machinery itself, how rusty

it is, how overheated.

You know, there are all of these, there are all of these

different things. And this is a problem that has not been addressed. I mean, this problem obviously

predates Trump, but he's playing on this problem and in many ways making it much worse.

Well, because that's part of the idea, right? The idea is if you make it worse, if you make

asylum look not appealing, maybe people just won't come.

Well, that's certainly the thinking.

And in that, the Trump administration isn't alone in being obsessed with this idea of deterrence.

Deterrence is a nice-sounding way of talking about how the machinery works, sometimes by force,

sometimes by fear, sometimes by detention.

I mean, that has been kind of one of the defining aspects of American immigration policy for a long time,

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