Continues. Host according to gallup, more americans than ever before say immigration is the top issue facing this country and we will spend a gross the rest of this program talking about that topic. We are joined by Washington Post immigration reporter were rhea. Ic eddie Maria Sacchetti federal Detention Center for immigrant families and children. Why were you there and what did you see . Guest immigration and Customs Enforcement runs family detention. A lot of what viewers cr Border Patrol jails. You see little girls sleeping on the ground. They have recently crossed the border, jails where nobody is supposed to spend more than a few days. The family Detention Centers are hold very few people right now. They could hold more and the Trump Administration wants to expand them. They opened their doors to the media, they have never had this many cameras before and they let us take our own photos. They want to show people how they want to expand family detention and how comprehensive they think it is and how they should hold people until they can order them deported or release them in the United States. Host where is this facility . Guest this is in dili, texas. You can hold more people in a family detention area than probably the entire town. It is hard to get to. Ac. E. Has said it is not secure facility, not a jail, but advocates disagree. Even if you left, it would be easy for someone to be apprehended. Host what is life like on a daily basis . Guest it was compared to a summer camp. On the surface, you can see it has a lot of camp like qualities. It has an infirmity infirmary, trailers divided into neighborhoods with names like yellow frogmore brown bear. Ice did not allow us to interview the women. It is women and children right now at this facility and they did not allow us to do this, so we arrived early and went to a Greyhound Bus station. They told us the detention was much better than Border Patrol, but they still felt family detention was a jail and that is a place where it can be hard to prepare your asylum claims. You are under constant fear of being taken away, so it is a challenging environment. Host there are people you talk to that had been released, how long did they spend in that facility . Host some had spent 10 days. I met a mother of three who had been there she was still breastfeeding and had been there 20 days and she was released without a tracking device. It is hard to understand exactly how they make all their decisions. Go to a public building and pull the record and explain why people are released of the way they are. I cannot do that with immigration. The Settlement Agreement began in the 1980s as a federal lawsuit against the Trump Administration and there were deep concerns about the way the government was treating unaccompanied minors. Mostly teenagers who had crossed the border by themselves and you cannot just release them into the United States, you have to find them a sponsor and someone to care for them and they are middleaged. Longrunning lawsuit and an agreement between the government and the plaintiff representing minors that set basic standards about how you should treat children, that you should move them from a secure facility like a jail into a non there is no timeframe, but in 2015, a federal judge said based on the governments recommendation that you cannot hold people in a facility that has not been licensed by a state for more than 20 days. Host your latest story talks about the legal battles over this rule change. Guest right. It is a little bit of a tangle to understand because the Trump Administration and past governments, the Obama Administration also had been critical of this 20 day rule. They say detaining families works, that fewer people came after they expanded family detention because they understood they would enforce the rules. The reason a lot of families are coming right now, according to the Trump Administration and Obama Administration is that it are tellingers migrants in Central America it is easy to get into the United States if you travel with a child and most families have been released. They have been released because the initial interview that questions about weather you have to be here and why and weather that person whether that person is credible. They are finding these folks. Ave a credible fear this is a real challenge because the Trump Administration saying people are being released and that is why so many people are coming. There are families across the border in 2016 and you have more than 400,000 this fiscal year. Host california leading the effort, as you note, to block this new trump rule to detain children and immigrant families longer. When will that have its day in court . Guest they have just filed it, but one thing i am watching closely is the actual floor as lawsuit. The settlement led to the basic standards in 1997 and there is another antitrafficking law that protects unaccompanied minors. For children and families, the florez settlement is extremely important. I am very interested in the the trumps after administration released the rule on friday, each side had about a week to submit their briefs to the court about why it should or should not stand, why this should become the law of the land and a federal judge will have to decide. Host can you sum up briefly how many cases and Court Challenges the Trump Administration is facing when it comes to immigration policies and how many are expected to be decided ahead of the 2020 election . Guest that is an excellent question and five years ago i think i would have been able to answer it, but there are so many lawsuits now, it can be dizzying. There is many we are tracking. Host what are the key ones . Guest for me, i am interested in the asylum lawsuits. As the asylumally bands, the Trump Administration tried to block people seeking asylum if they cross the border illegally. It is challenging because it is legal to seek asylum when you cross the border. Right now we have two different roles depending on where you cross the border. If you cross in texas and new mexico, you can be sent back to your homeland to seek asylum in a third country. If you cross in arizona and california, you can try to seek asylum here. Trackingwsuits, i am daca, temporary protected status, there is a lot of things. It all boils down to who gets to come to the United States and who doesnt and what are the different ways the Trump Administration is trying to stop them . There is a myriad of lawsuits. Host certainly a major issue in campaign 2020. It is why we are talking about it. Maria sacchetti is here to answer your questions about some of these latest developments in the immigration debate. Phone lines, republicans, 2027488001. Democrats, 2027488000. Independents, 2027488002. We will head out to guam first. Bernard, republican, go ahead. Caller hello. Regarding the immigration issue with the u. S. At the southern border that they are having over there, thank god we have the pacific ocean, that is our border wall and we have something similar because we come intoitizens that guam as migrants. The local government has been swamped by these migrants and the u. S. Is supposed to provide assistance to help and that is not happening. Trying to see and equate our problems here with the problems over there. President trump, i cannot vote for him because we are not allowed to vote being a u. S. Territory. I dont know why the americans there cannot see. Host what do you want to take from bernards comments this morning . There are a lot of different opinions in the United States right now about immigration. I think there is a lot of differences about how to resolve them. You are a journalist and i am a journalist and it is important we listen to everyone always, but i also understand asylum is people fleeing for their lives and it is different from someone who wants to come here and work the way youw and are supposed to decide that in this country is an individual basis. You are supposed to hear each person out and understand the dangers they are facing and if they are not credible their case is not legitimate, they get sent home. I have covered stories where people have been deported and murdered and that is real. That is something asylum is supposed to prevent. Host in terms of differences in opinion, is there a wide range of differences in the democratic president ial candidates and their views on various immigration topics . Guest there are often technical theirences and sometimes policies, just like the Obama Administration, their policies do not always line up with what their goals are. The Obama Administration deported far more people on an annual basis then trump has, and yet obama consistently worked to try to legalize the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country. I am very interested to see what democrats will do with the. Etention facilities under obama, they were holding maybe 33,000 people a day. These are single adults for the most part and now they are holding more than 50,000 a day. 1994, they were holding maybe 6000 a day. Immigration detention. These are single adults for the most part and now theyre day. Ng more than 50,000 a 1994, they were holding maybe 6,000 a day. So that detention system has bloomed and unlike and the e and courts system we understand best through law and order ajust court show and just hese court shows, none of that is public record. Its not easy to monitor or not you know, its just easy to monitor this system and understand it. As we try to find the contours of the debate on the democratic side, can you explain section 1325 of the u. S. Code is and why it was written. They can still do that at the border. Maybe not a record of it necessarily. Is still happening. Nd so and not at the scale of the official zero tolerance policy. Have i think people seized on it. A lot of people support that idea and feel people should not the iminalize for crossing border illegally especially if theyre seeking alie lumbar but a lot of other folks say there are more important issues. Bit closer from guam but still out west in utah bill independent. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I always thought reporters were really supposed to ig and give information they normally have. Serve afraid . Bill in utah. Caravans. Ng about qualify for asylum. But to be able to get through a as dangerous as mexico killed, urnalists are migrants are killed. Very high violence rates, often need protection to do that but absolutely i think theres asylum ncern that many claims are not valid, that theyre false. Also great res concern that many asylum concerns are valid and the only to figure that out is to claim. Ach a lot of people who get pushed back into mexico as part of a Trump Administration policy, a folks go home to their country, to them that that those asylum. Do amount of attention reporting on the immigration issue . The caravans were remarkable. Of an, there were thousands people. It was an important new development. I think because it was a way for migrants who otherwise would pay ,000 to 8,000 to travel to a smuggler to travel to the border. To go for very low dos. People in mexico were helping them. They were young people. Old people. Joined one of the caravans as a reporter to kind of embed and it and people were saying otherwise i never would have been able to leave my country. How long were you in the caravan and where did it travel to . We rode do you know those trucks that carry cars . So there were a lot of dangerous right . Ys, so migrants including mothers ith babies piled onto this car carrier and so we were with them we rode that through mexico and so we were that was you know, it was a very because it also shows you the risk that migrants take and the dangers they face i try to be as a eful as me but it was dangerous thing to do and migrants would say, you know, take this risk. You would never risk your baby to do this unless you really had to go. Again thats up to a judge in the United States to decide. Your you ever feel like life was in danger on that journey . Well, i took precautions. Have gone in a different kind of box truck but we were not adequately prepared for that took precautions and made sure we had contact with a car hat was following us, enough water, enough light and air and things like that. But, yeah. Its dangerous. Know. I mean, theres its dangerous for journalists in general in mexico. I think itsalists more than 100 have been killed this year. I mean, im sorry, more than 100 have been killed in the past few year. And 12 this so i mean its a much more angerous for them than it is for me but yeah i think the world all over take risks. Than others. Were taking your questions on washington journal. Ohn in new Mexico Republican here next. Good morning. I would like to discuss the hipocracy of these gigantic companies. All these laws. The drugs are flooding in. Risk. Alking about we have a gang problem in every states. The united we even have a gang problem here in rural america. Eople dying from opoids, illegal drugs. People shot by gang members when they get in the way of a drug deal. In the way of something that just maybe the guy wants a say town your road and you no this is my property. Get off my road. Limited to is not the countries where these people immigrating from. We had a raid in mississippi i believe the state was a couple ago, the news made a big deal out of it. And most of those people go back because they had not yet been adjudicated through the ourt system although they were here illegally. Were a nation of liars. Hypocrites. Thieves. Thats john in new mexico. Implications of those raids at those farms in mississippi. Im actually glad he asked because i go back to it all the time. He last am necessity as its called in 1986 was supposed to fix this problem. About 3 to 5 Million Immigrants here illegally. Reagan signed the bill and it was supposed to hold accountable for having people here illegally and supposed to hold immigrants working here r illegally. And almost immediately and you can see this in the reporting that the nderstood bill failed. There were too many loopholes nd ways to get around it and now you have 11 Million People in the United States without apers and since president reagan, no administration has really solved this issue. So what the Trump Administration trying to do is enforce the or in reverse and advocates and analysts and most nonpart season folks. Folks have rtisan understood behind the scenes it wont be successful and has not been. Deporting 200 to 300,000 people a year. Others come in. System is just not effective. On what the Trump Administration is doing, this is President Trump from last week talking about his Border Security efforts. Being very strong at the border. You see the numbers are way, way down. I want to thank mexico for that. Could make tates your question could make that problem go away very easily if would meet and we could fix the loopholes and asylum which is what youre an extent but o let me just tell you. Very much i have the children on my mind. Greatly. S me people make this horrible 2,000 mile journey. Ne thing that will happen when they realize the borders are losing and the wall is being built, were building tremendous miles of walls right now in locations but it all comes together like a beautiful puzzle. But one thing thats happening you cant get into the United States or when they see if they do get in the united they will be brought back to their country. It wont matter if they get in because were doing that. They wont come and many people many womens and lives will not be destroyed and ruined. Last week at nt the white house. He started there saying numbers are way down and i want to thank that. For explain. So after President Trump hreatened to impose tariffs on mexico, mexico agreed to host ore Asylum Seekers to the United States and to do more subpoena yore enforcement. Their re down at southern border with gat ma la stopping people guatemala. Stopping people on the caravans that have been going on in the interior and theyre also people to some degree at the border. Theyre accepting thousands of their border cities from the United States to await their asylum hearings. So youre basically turning mexico into a bit of a waiting an asylum if i have hearing pending in the United States, hi to wait in mexico wait in mexico for it. Why would someone take years o complete and thousands of dollars when they can just walk in through our southern border asylum. Are shouldnt people fill out the point of impactwork before getting here and is that whats mexico . G in well, so its in central merica generally where some people have tried to fill out the paperwork. Theyve been reflected for visas or are just that. Vailable to do some people dont know how to do it. I think most people its just too bewildering. I know a lot of people do that for sure. Ut its much, much easier to go theres a contact in your neighborhood. Know gler who says i youre afraid or whatever the reason is, youre in debt. Getting threats. Extorted by gang members. Border t you to the safely and if youre traveling with a child ill give you a this nt and it becomes powerful lure. And its powerful for people who dont qualify for acy lumbar. Very you have to be afraid persecution the