Here’s a new border analysis at WOLA’s website. In a nutshell:

• The Trump administration, especially Jeff Sessions, is proposing to prosecute and imprison every single person who crosses the U.S.-Mexico border “improperly.”
• This would happen even if the border-crosser is someone seeking asylum. If the asylum-seeker is a parent with a child, they would take the child away from the parent, jail the parent, and send the child to a guardian.
• A law dating back to 1952 allows them to do that. That law has never been fully enforced. Not because it’s cruel, but because of how it would break U.S. institutions.
• It would nearly double the U.S. federal prison population in one stroke.
• It would overwhelm ports of entry, the 45 official crossings along the border.
• It would overwhelm federal courts at the border, which are already at or near capacity.

Read the analysis. It has lots of graphics, unlike this post.