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[Angrboda]

Congress would have happily given Mr. Trump a deal, allowing him to build his wall in exchange for legal status for “dreamers,” immigrants brought here as children who are American in all but their documents. As he inflames his base on the campaign trail, we’re seeing why the president wouldn’t take yes for an answer.

REPUBLICANS INSIST that, on the immigration debate, Democrats want an issue, not a solution. That seems a better way of characterizing President Trump’s own immigration approach, which he has publicly urged GOP candidates to weaponize in the midterm elections. In response to a caravan of migrants heading northward from Honduras, Mr. Trump threatened to deploy the military, close the southern border, tear up a just-concluded trade deal with Mexico and Canada, and sever aid to impoverished Central American countries.

Even for a president to whom no issue is immune to overreaction, this latest temper-tantrum was an overreach; the last such migrant caravan from Honduras, in April, mostly dissolved before it reached the U.S. border. Still, Mr. Trump is delighted at the chance of deploying this latest migration as a cudgel. “Great Midterm issue for Republicans!” he tweeted Wednesday.

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Family separation 2.0, as conceived by the White House, would present migrant parents with what officials call a “binary choice.” They could remain with their children in detention for months or years — the waiting period reflects the huge backlog in immigration cases — or give them up to the government, which would place them in shelters until other relatives or guardians could seek custody. Aside from the fact that there is nothing approaching the capacity in existing detention centers to absorb even a reduced flow of family migrants, the administration’s blueprint may not be legal. As a deterrent, it is also unlikely to work. Fiscal year 2018’s record number of family members detained along the southwestern border coincided with the uproar over family separations last spring.