Also important is that there was a huge spike in women and children or just children crossing the border to escape gang violence, political violence, and starvation that had no family in the United States to place them with resulting in children being detained. Some other context is also needed to remember that when Obama sought funding for the issue Republicans would only approve it if they got to ramrod a lot of other anti-immigrant legislation in with it.
So what Trump is using is indeed the temporary detention facilities at that time that housed the family units that crossed, but this idea that Democrats wanted this even as a temporary solution isn’t accurate even if Obama’s immigration policy was bad.
