You claim that there was no process change in April 2018? That's certainly a new one to me, and frankly I'm not sure how to have a discussion when we disagree on such basic facts. Politifact (sadly the most neutral source on my first search page) quotes:

>Before Trump came into office, families were detained together, sent back immediately or paroled into the country, said Peter Margulies, an immigration law and national security law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law. Now, prosecution is happening across the board and has become the uniform policy.

Were the options to "[detain them] together, [send them] back immediately, or [parole them] into the country" somehow impossible even when this was being done?

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/jun/06...

Yea, same process. You just repeated what I said. What exactly do you think is different?

1. Are you trying to talk about separation instead? Detaining together is because many people weren't prosecuted, so enforcing the law will lead to possible separation. From your own article: "Prosecutions were rare prior to the Trump administration... The fact that previous administrations did not broadly prosecute all illegal entries..."

2. Parole is not related to illegal immigration. It's for humanitarian emergencies and granted in rare cases where family is dying or other extenuating circumstances. It specifically authorizes the person to enter and therefore they are actually allowed to be in the country. An illegal immigrant may be granted parole the same way they may be granted asylum and will no longer have an illegal status for the duration. https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/humanitarian-or-significa...

So parole is one outcome of processing but while they are waiting to be processed it is again only 2 options: detain or deport. And detainment might lead to separation during prosecution. None of this is new, it's just actually being done as the law states.