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I want to say that in HHS facilities -- where the 2,047 kids still are today -- the quality of care that I saw was good. These are trained and licensed childcare professionals. Where I was, they were still kept inside a former WalMart 22 hours a day. But they weren't in cages like the kids at the Border Patrol processing station.

Number one -- no question -- is that the border is a war zone. You should check out this clip of me and Manuel Padilla, the chief of the Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley sector, where more migrants cross and are caught than anywhere. He said MS-13 had surged 300% last year -- but if you dig a little deeper those numbers are 180 of 187,000 people. Yet they based a policy caging babies on those data points.

And, it turns out, the cities along the U.S. side of the Mexican border are some of the safest cities in America. When we went to El Paso, we didn't see the "ground zero" Attorney General Sessions described. Instead we saw hundreds of high school kids who were American citizens crossing back and forth between Juarez and El Paso legally every day.

It has been, historically, but AG Sessions want to change that, which would radically alter the "credible fear" claims people are able to make seeking asylum.

Our failed immigration policy is decades in the making.

Deterrence, which is what zero tolerance is all about, started as an official policy, under Bill Clinton, in 1994. It resulted in apprehensions on the border going down (because of new walls and stepped-up enforcement) but also resulted in more people dying trying to cross in more dangerous places.

And during the Central American migrant crisis of 2014, the Obama administration did start detaining families in cages just like the ones I saw, and should not be excused for doing that.

But systematically ripping children from their parents, caging them, and prosecuting their parents is a policy created and implemented by President Trump.

We asked the administration yesterday if they intend to seek a stay of this ruling -- meaning they wouldn't have to reunite the kids with parents on this timetable -- and they didn't comment. That means they're thinking about challenging the ruling. Maybe because they can't actually reunite kids on the short timetable the court ordered because they don't have a plan. That, and many parents may already be deported.