The issue of capping the number of detention beds at the border has arisen again, as President Donald Trump has included, as part of his new budget proposal, $2.7 billion for 54,000 detention beds. This is an increase from the 52,000 beds the Trump administration was contentiously proposing funding during the government shutdown at the beginning of 2019.

One more reason the President's budget proposal is a non-starter for House Ds: It requests $2.7 billion for 54,000 detention beds. That's significantly more than what was in the compromise passed after the shutdown, where the number of beds for detained migrants was a big issue.

— Sarah Westwood (@sarahcwestwood) March 11, 2019

The pretzel logic Democrats are using — capping the number of beds available to force ICE to stop detaining immigrants at the border — apparently favors politics over the well-being of the actual people being detained.

According to congressional aides, it’s designed to get ICE to reduce the number of immigrants in detention to 40,520 — the level authorized by Congress last year — by September 30. To give ICE time to meet that goal, though, a congressional aide told Vox that Congress is funding ICE to detain an average of 45,274 immigrants between now and the end of September.

The problem is that ICE reportedly currently holds roughly 49,000 people in detention. February 2019 saw the highest number of illegals cross the border in that month in 12 years, with the number topping out at just over 76,000.

If Democrats don’t want to detain people who cross illegally by literally making it so that there is no funding to provide housing and basic care to them, what exactly do they expect these people to do once they get here?

There are plenty of ways to answer that question, and almost none of them are good.