The administration has announced new spending to stem the tide of undocumented children immigrating to the US, fleeing from drug violence in Mexico and Central America. The number of such children coming in over the border has roughly doubled to 50,000 a year. This is an appalling international tragedy and the response has been to trap the children in a hopeless situation. Their home is being destroyed and they have nowhere to go.
Why is this happening? American drug policy makes it very profitable to import and sell drugs in the US. To some degree the demand for these drugs is home-grown, but the profitability creates a large incentive for the smugglers to stimulate this demand. The labor doing the smuggling and distribution are mostly poor and desperate, but the people running the cartels make gigantic profits and the smugglers and distributors are viewed as expendable. When they are caught, they go into the partially private American prison system, which is profitable for the prison operators.
There are numerous competing cartels, and each is vying to control this lucrative market. They are already outlaws, and in many cases they are more powerful than their local police, so much of this competition comes in the form of violence. The region is awash in firearms, virtually all of them smuggled in across the US/Mexico border. The US has attempted to staunch the flow of firearms but they have met intense opposition from the US gun industry and their lobbyist, the NRA. The "fast and furious" program was such an effort.
I see 4 problems here, all created entirely by backwards policy driven by conservatives and their corporate puppeteers:
Drug addiction should be viewed as a mental health problem, not as a crime. Addicts should be kept out of society until their addictions are stabilized, but they should not share housing with murderers and other violent criminals--unless they are also such criminals. Many addicts need long term treatment, but much such treatment can be done as outpatient care for very much lower cost and recidivism than incarceration.
The most popular illegal drug, Marijuana, is substantially less dangerous than many legal drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, and should not be illegal at all, beyond DUI rules and use by children and so forth. Marijuana is only a problem today because it is illegal. Legalizing Pot would substantially reduce all of these other problems, although most of them stem from the more dangerous drugs so it wouldn't cure them.
For-profit prisons should probably be banned. The incentive to wrongly incarcerate and thus steal from the taxpayers is simply too high.
The NRA should probably be banned as a terrorist organization. The gun industry needs lobbyists and firearms hobbyists need a representative, but the NRA has swung so far off the rails that I think there is no saving it. All firearms should be in a national registry and all transfers should be tracked. If you sell a gun to drug runners or their representatives, or put it in a situation where such could happen by accident, you need to go to jail. Because of the history of guns in the founding of our country, we need to be very careful. Any such actions must have careful due diligence, probably involving the court system, especially confiscations.
Finally, is illegal immigration really a problem? Only a little. Most immigrants, legal or not, are willing to work hard, get educated, pay taxes, follow all other laws. There are fewer than 12M illegals, of about 40M total immigrants. Legal immigrants are just as likely to be criminals, take jobs that could go to other people, end up homeless. Illegals are much more likely to be abused by employers, landlords, gangs, etc. They hurt us only in the way that a too-low minimum wage does: it depresses wages for everyone else.
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